Domestic Violence and Dads April 28, 2008

Domestic violence changes everything.  For my client who needed shelter, it added yet another wrinkle to the already impossibly difficult shelter seeking process.  Homeless shelters screen for domestic violence in order to protect the other shelter clients.  Therefore, if you’re homeless and you are at risk of harm from a domestic violence perpetrator, the central homelessness agency will tell you that you have to go to a domestic violence shelter.  However, the domestic violence shelter may not have an opening for 30 days, as was the case for my client.  And, unlike other cases, the domestic violence shelters could not ship my client out of county to another domestic violence shelter because that would have triggered CPS to petition to remove the children.  There is just too much risk in this case to upset everything with a move like that.  So CPS says.  The threat of domestic violence in this case was relatively contained, because the perpetrator does not know where my client is.  Our only option was to work the unworkable system.  We got the domestic violence shelter to interview my client and, in turn, assure the central homelessness agency that the threat of domestic violence was not of a nature that would compromise the safety of other shelter inhabitants.  After four days of monkey business, my client finally made it into the shelter system.

Domestic violence throws a real curve ball into almost every aspect of already difficult cases.  But in my experience, the very hardest situation to navigate is when the domestic violence perpetrator is the parent of the children involved.  Both of my current client families fit this profile. 

This is tough from a sheer safety planning standpoint, because family law, particularly custody and visitation laws, were not written to accommodate domestic violence.  In fact, in my jurisdiction, custody and visitation statutes and case law have been interpreted and developed to give parents every possible opportunity to foster a parent/child relationship, even when there has been past abuse by that parent toward the children.  

In this post, I identify abusers as male/fathers.  This is not always the case, of course, but it is true that domestic violence perpetrators are overwhelmingly male, and I have only worked with families where the abuser was male.  In this post, I’m not trying to rule out the reality that some abusers are female.  I’m trying to write sentences that avoid being more about gender neutrality than the point I’m trying to make.

The custody and visitation laws are geared much more toward parental rights than child trauma.  The result is that the laws do a pretty terrible job of providing for safety during visitations when domestic violence perpetrators are the visiting parents.  There can be mandated supervision for visitations, and visitations at neutral locations, and these precautions are better than nothing.  Still, a savvy perpetrator can use visitation to force contact with his former partner, to root out key information the victim has worked hard to keep secret, to intimidate and initiate threats, to scare and abuse children, and to manipulate children into giving up information that compromises the family’s safety.  The laws certainly never anticipated an abusive parent who would use child visitations solely as a tactic to terrorize his/her former partner and children.  And that does happen sometimes.

What the laws do seem to accurately acknowledge, however, is the existence and importance of the intense bond between parents and children, no matter how flawed a parent might be.  This is often a big piece of what makes the visits so traumatizing for the children:  just when things get settled down and they’ve negotiated the separation from the abuser, the visits get them all keyed up again.  Relationships with parents are high stakes.  The fact that a parent is dangerous does not remove the attachment the child has already built with that person.  So the visits continue to happen; the kids get riled up.  And from what I’ve seen, most of the time the kids won’t give up those visits for the world, even if they say they hate their dad.  At least their dad still shows up, however perverse his motives and behavior may be.

Several months ago, I was watching Bill Cosby promote his new book on Meet the Press.  While I expressly decline to endorse Mr. Cosby’s broader agenda, he said something very poignant about fatherless children on that show: 

If you have this generational, fatherless situation, unwed father or whatever, but the male is not there, then it, it registers on another person, on, on the child as abandonment…Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.  And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with. (emphasis added)

Bill Cosby’s observations match my own when it comes to children’s perceptions of their fathers.  Children want their fathers in their lives, and it’s confusing and painful when their fathers are suddenly gone.  Children of domestic violence are often not entirely fatherless; once again domestic violence throws a curve ball.  Often they grow up for a while knowing their fathers.  Then, if their mothers properly protect them, they may be removed from their fathers suddenly.  So they are fatherless, but they had a taste of having a father.  It’s almost worse, except that when they are old enough there is some explanation for why Dad had to leave that may provide comfort.

My current client’s nine-year-old daughter describes herself as a “daddy’s girl,” though she has not seen her father in over a year.  She writes him letters and tries to send them to her aunt, hoping they get to Dad.  She’s talked to him on the phone a few times.  When I asked her what she would change if she could change anything about her family, she said she would see her dad every day.

Another time, I was working with an escaping survivor whose violent boyfriend was locked up.  I brought over the internet jail record, including his mug shot, so we could anticipate his release date and safety plan.  The little kids (under five) saw the picture and started jumping around, all excited.  The mother started crying quietly.  Later on in the case, I saw the mug shot taped up on the three-year-old child’s bedroom wall by his bed.

Children want to have fathers, and even abused mothers want their children to have fathers.  This doesn’t go away, even when the fathers (or the rest of the family) must go away.  It’s a difficult thing when the only workable safety option is in direct conflict with the only possible emotional option.  Most of the time, I’ve got to hand it to these mothers for handling it as well as they do.  They’ll explain that Dad just isn’t safe right now, or Dad is locked up, or we just cannot be with him.  They usually say that Dad still loves the kids.  Sometimes they try to come up with ways to work the supervised visitations or maintain some sort of parent/child communication.  This gets dicey with dangerous individuals, but I understand why mothers go to the lengths they go to.