The Hidden Victims of Spousal Abuse

 They are the invisible victims — peering eyes and straining ears — watching and listening in horror to the kicks and punches and shouts. They are the children who witness one parent brutalizing another.
 
Usually it is a father savaging a mother with fists or words or both. Usually it is a mess — loud, ugly and vulgar. Sometimes there is blood. Always there is unfathomable anger.
 
Every year at least 3 to 17 million American children are exposed to this at-home violence, according to Richard Gellis, a University of Rhode Island professor who has spent 25 years researching domestic violence. This sometimes daily shattering of the family order is a betrayal by the very people they depend on for security. Most kids never recover.
 
Last year, 1,421 women died at the hands of their husbands or partners. Gellis says that in three quarters of those cases, a child was watching.
 
Most kids don't have a chance to unravel the complicated trauma resulting from observing violence. Instead they must spend years under the specter of a violent father and demoralized mother.
 
The experts — psychologists, researchers, sociologists and child advocates — fault "the system" for not rescuing these children.
 
There are shelters and programs to protect battered women; the legal system is supposed to chase the battering man. But unless children are themselves abused, they are frequently left to shuffle behind a shell-shocked mother on her road to assistance or simply live amid violence.
 
"When people rush in to help a family caught up in violence, the children are too often forgotten," says Deanne Tilton Durfee, Executive director of the Los Angeles County Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect. There may be action to remove custody of the children from the father, but across the country there will be no special attention to their emotional needs, adds Durfee, who is also chair of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse.
 
In an experimental program to coordinate services for victimized children in Tampa, Florida police are being trained to at least be aware if there are children home when they respond to domestic abuse calls.
 
As part of this project a new question was added to the police incident report: "Is a Child Present?" If that box is checked, several other questions are asked and the information about the children is fed into a computer that draws reports from other agencies that deal with children.
 
About half the children who witness their mother being beaten are also abused themselves, numerous studies confirm. But Gellie says it's actually much worse for the children to watch abuse than to receive it.
 
"The learning experience is stronger," he says. "There are more suicide attempts, more dysfunction in school, more likelihood of violence later in life, more withdrawal. More everything."
 
Witnessing domestic violence affects children of different ages in different ways. The problems can start in the womb.
 
Several studies suggest that mothers who report high levels of stress during pregnancy, such as from violence, tend to have babies who are hyperactive and developmentally delayed. Very young children often have the worst physical reactions. One psychologist recalled treating a toddler who would spontaneously get diarrhea every time his parents started fighting. More typically the younger children exhibit a type of social autism: They speak very little, show self-destructive behavior, cling to their caretakers and suffer short-term depression, sleep disorders and heavy separation anxiety.
 
Older children and teenagers tend to try to get in between their parents in what has been dubbed "the Bill Clinton phenomenon." As a young teen, Clinton reportedly stood up to his mother's second husband several times, but on one pivotal occasion in 1960 grabbed his stepfather by the arm, "Hear me. Never ever touch my mother again."
 
The children who seem to suffer the most are ages 5 to 10, according to most experts. They know what's going on but they're too little and too weak to do anything about it. They experience hopelessness and sometimes thoughts of suicide; they often get headaches and stomachaches; they can become utterly passive and numb, or uncontrollably violent.
 
While these child witnesses have a greater chance of being violent relationships — about 40 percent repeat the behavior of their parents — as many are in danger of becoming numb, desensitized adults who have no relationships at all.
 
At 42, Barbara Corry runs a private consulting company in Alhambra, California, to educate groups about domestic abuse. But telling her life story is her real work. For she provides compelling testimony of the ugly legacy of domestic abuse.
 
"When I came along I was supposed to make things better," she says. "But all my birth did was bring another person into a not good situation."
 
Corry says her father was an alcoholic who would return home from work drunk two and three times a week and scream at her mother. He would charge at her mother. He would charge at her with a fist in her face; yell at her; keep her awake for hours raging that the lettuce on his sandwich was limp or that she hadn't sewn his shirt right. Once or twice he punched her, but mostly he restrained himself physically — which only seemed to increase the intensity of his verbal abuse.
 
"My mother was raised very traditionally, so when she couldn't take it anymore, she went to see the priest," says Corry, referring to a time before she was born and her brother was 7. "The priest told her to pray for my father and try to be a better wife. He instructed her to have another baby to make things better."
 
As Corry got a little older, she would try to intervene between her parents.
 
"My cries and my pleas would distract my father or somehow cut the circuits. But it never stopped him." Corry explains that although she has conquered her compulsive eating problems and made great strides in understanding her family, she has been unable to have a relationship of her own.
 
"I saw that it is possible to devastate a person's personality and spirit," she says, her voice halting and shaky. "You've got to prove to me you're not a (jerk) before I get involved. It's all terror-based."