Children's Needs – Parenting Capacity - Digital Education Resource ...

Which children are most at risk of significant harm? 89women and children at risk of abuse; a third of women reported experiences ofabuse and threats to themselves or their children during contact.He’s nasty, verbally abusive through the children. He’ll say things to the childrenand they’ll come back and tell me ... even though the contact centre is public, it isnot public enough.(Mother whose children had supported contact with their father, quoted inHumphreys and Stanley 2006, p.144)The following serve as illustrations of more tragic cases.A man who is believed to have smothered his two young daughters while they wereon a weekend custody visit telephoned their mother to say ‘the children have goneto sleep forever’ before killing himself, it emerged last night.(The Guardian, 23 September 2008)A DAD going through a bitter custody battle killed himself and his children aftertelling friends he was barred from seeing them on Father’s Day.(Daily Post, 17 June 2008)The impact of domestic violence on children is aggravated by the followingfactors:severity of the violencechild being directly abused or neglectedcombination with problem drinking, drug misuse, mental illness or learningdisabilitywitnessing the parent’s sexual and physical abusebeing drawn into participating in the abuse of a parentcolluding in the secrecy and concealment of the assaultslack of wider family and community support.(Hamner 1989; Jaffe et al. 1990; Humphreys and Houghton 2008)Children trying to helpChildren may place themselves at risk of suffering significant harm because they areactive participants within their families and may try to intervene in order to improvethe dynamics and protect their parents. Although most parents try to shield theirchildren from the effects of parental mental illness, domestic violence or substancemisuse, unless the children are very young, parents believe that their problems affecttheir children’s behaviour (Cleaver et al. 2007). For example, children may try to