See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  As the National Children’s Commissioner, Megan Mitchell, reported in 2017, domestic violence – across all cultures – is a significant risk factor for youth suicide.14 In the words of one police officer she consulted, ‘Every child who suicided in the last twelve months came from a domestic violence family.’15 These are the children we think we’re protecting with distractions about budgies and school. The fact is we can’t handle the truth.

  In this chapter, we will hear more testimonies from children – and from adults who grew up with domestic abuse. But before we do, let’s take a look at the inner lives of children who are literally unable to speak for themselves.

  INFANTS

  If it’s hard for us adults to put ourselves in the shoes of children, it’s virtually impossible for us to imagine what it’s like to be a baby. Despite the fact we’ve all been one, infants appear to us like aliens: emotional whirlwinds that shit, piss and scream with abandon, and whose inner worlds seem wholly inscrutable. Do they even have inner lives? Aside from a handful of people on earth who claim they can remember their first few years, most of us have no recollection of being a baby; our lasting memories don’t start being encoded until we’re around three and a half.

  Perhaps that’s why infants are often dismissed as blissfully oblivious, containing only enough consciousness to discern when they are hungry, tired or hurt. New parents who are victims of domestic abuse are sometimes comforted by this notion, relieved that at least their babies are too young to see or understand the violence going on around them.

  But this view of infants, however tenacious, is utterly obsolete. Over the past thirty years, there has been a revolution in the way we understand babies. In her book The Philosophical Baby, Professor Alison Gopnik – a philosopher and child psychologist – refutes the notion that babies are ‘primitive grown-ups gradually attaining our perfection and complexity’. Instead, she says, infants resemble an entirely different form of Homo sapiens, with minds that are ‘equally complex and powerful’.16 This may seem hard to believe: infants can sometimes barely land their eyes on one object before being distracted by something else. But Gopnik shows that while adult attention operates like a ‘spotlight’, babies and young children have ‘lantern consciousness’ – not so good for focusing on a single thing, but marvellous for casting light around and absorbing information from a range of sources simultaneously. What psychologists and neuroscientists have come to understand is that babies ‘not only learn more, but imagine more, care more and experience more than we would ever have thought possible’.17 They can even – at least for a few months – remember specific events. They are not, in other words, oblivious blobs of instinct and emotion.

  Wendy Bunston works with infants exposed to family violence. With her no-nonsense approach and broad Australian accent, Bunston has spent the last twenty-five years preaching the science: that babies are highly attuned to violent environments. Infants don’t just float along blithely, she argues: they are like sensory sponges, soaking up every interaction in a constant effort to learn strategies of adaptation and survival. In a violent home, the abuser is a clear source of threat and danger, but to an infant so may be their abused caregiver: if that caregiver is routinely afraid or unavailable, the child soon learns they will not be able to protect them. In the groups Bunston runs for infants and mothers, she has seen babies reach for facilitators over their mothers, sensing the facilitator is more available to them, and more reliable. Imagine being unable to walk or talk (or even crawl) and knowing that the one person you are utterly dependent on for your survival cannot protect you. That is the terror of a pre-verbal child growing up with domestic abuse.

  When an infant is regularly denied the safety of emotional connection, they enter a heightened survival mode. Their brain is bombarded with chemicals designed to manage fear. Over time, if this continues, the nascent pathways developing in the infant’s brain will begin to reflect the chaos of their environment. As Bunston and Robyn Sketchley write, the fearful infant’s brain ‘will build restricted pathways that serve the purpose of survival’.18 This can put us on a lifelong hair trigger, our brains trained to react to the slightest hint of perceived danger. Here the primitive, fear-processing part of the brain, the amygdala responds to stimuli before the rational parts of our brain have a chance to discern whether the perceived threat is real or not.‡‡

  Because scared infants are physically unable to hide – a skill that older children in abusive households later become expert in – they may have no choice but to hide within themselves. Emma Gierschick, who was abused in pregnancy and during her child’s infancy, gives a compelling portrayal of this state. ‘I have absolutely NO photos of [name redacted] smiling at all in the first twenty months of her life – and I just thought I had an unanimated, quiet, withdrawn child who would look startled, with big wide eyes, most of the time, [and] who didn’t smile. She rarely cried, but also didn’t engage much and certainly never laughed or giggled with happiness or joy.’ Some time after Emma left her violent partner, she realised this behaviour wasn’t ‘normal’. ‘I discovered what a giggly, energetic bundle of mess, noise and mischief I have, who is always very “busy” and loves dancing, singing and laughing. She wakes with a smile on her face now or a giggle.’19

  Social worker Robyn Lamb, who has worked in the Child Protection Unit at Westmead Hospital, Sydney, for more than thirty years, says parents commonly misread their children. Lamb says the kids described by parents as being ‘so good’ for being quiet and not crying when they leave the room are actually her most alarming cases. ‘Because that’s not what a normal child does. A normal child cries, they want someone to come, they want attention, they don’t like being left alone,’ she tells me, as we tour the children’s unit. ‘But these kids learn I don’t get responded to if I cry, or I get responded to with violence.’

  AS THE CHILD GROWS

  As children seek to protect themselves in a violent home, they become behavioural detectives. ‘Children in an abusive environment develop extraordinary abilities to scan for warning signs of attack,’ writes Judith Herman. ‘They become minutely attuned to their abusers’ inner states. They learn to recognize subtle changes in facial expression, voice, and body language as signals of anger, sexual arousal, intoxication, or dissociation.’20

  ‘Finley’ is nine years old (‘going on forty-one’, says his mum) and a keen gamer. He lived with his father’s violence until his parents separated a year ago. Finley says that when his dad lived with them, he learned to read his face like ‘an algorithm’: ‘There’d be an expression of dead silence,’ he says matter-of-factly, ‘and then he’d go off.’ Finley had to rely on this algorithm because the rules his father applied were petty and arbitrary, and enforced at a moment’s notice. ‘It was really random. If the sky wasn’t blue enough, he’d get angry … [The rules would] be valid for ten seconds, and you’d be abiding by them, but then the new rule would state that you’re doing something wrong, just so he could get mad at you.’

  When he was ‘bored’, Finley’s father would devise new ways to terrorise his children. Once, he smashed a plate in the face of Finley’s little brother, landing him in Emergency. One particular favourite was a threat to take Finley to the doctors, where he said Finley would have hot pipes stuck up his nose. One day, with no explanation, Finley’s father stopped talking to the family. He stonewalled his wife and children for two whole years, menacing the house with his silent, brooding presence. Over time, Finley became so hypersensitive to the quality of his father’s presence, he could feel when he’d arrived home before he heard him.

  ‘Michele’, now fifty-four, says she too spent her childhood on high alert. ‘I have no memory at all of ever feeling safe at home,’ she says. ‘Ever. When my father was in the house, there was this constant state of hyper-vigilance, trying to work out what he was going to do and when he was going to do it.’ Her childhood was ‘Dickensian’ in its unrelenting misery; all of her conscious memories are of vio
lence, or the threat of it. ‘One of Dad’s favourite tantrums was to hurl his plate of food at my mother if he felt it wasn’t good enough,’ she remembers. ‘One morning I happened to be standing behind my mother when the plate was sent flying through the air. Mum ducked, and the plate broke across my back. I panicked and bolted out the back door. I got to the end of the block before my dad caught me. Picking me up, he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you. I was aiming for your mother.”’ Michele was eight years old.

  As we sit together on her sofa, one particularly vivid memory surfaces. Michele and her siblings were sitting in the living room watching television one night, while her mum and dad screamed at each other behind the closed kitchen door. After a while, she and her brother went into the kitchen to intervene. They found their dad sitting on their mother’s head, ‘bouncing up and down’. ‘My brother and I were just going, “Get off, get off, you’re gonna kill her!” And he was laughing. He had his golf shoes on, and he had just been kicking her, kicking her, kicking her in the legs. Her legs were like jelly. She had blood all over her legs.’ Michele’s father got up, walked into the lounge room and sat next to his children as though nothing had happened. ‘We just sat there pretending it wasn’t going on. It’s like you’re complicit.’

  In a home that never felt safe, Michele could discern the precise quality of footfall that foretold escalating danger, and learned how to read her father’s expressions like tea leaves. ‘I could literally tell by my father’s face whether he was going to be beating my mother up that night.’

  This kind of hypervigilance is something we usually associate with combat veterans – as a hallmark of post-traumatic stress. It’s a habit acquired both in training and in combat zones, where soldiers must be alert to everything from a sudden acrid smell to a person who looks like they don’t belong. Every time a potential threat arises, a survival response triggers in the brain, motivating the soldier to act defensively – a reaction that can be the difference between living and dying. Having worked in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, I have a real problem with journalists describing a scene in an Australian suburb as being ‘like a warzone’. But in the case of children experiencing domestic abuse, this comparison isn’t just warranted – it’s empirical. Children raised amid domestic abuse exhibit the same hypervigilance as veterans exposed to combat.

  This astonishing connection was made in 2011, by a team led by Professor Eamon McCrory at University College London.21 For many years, brain scans conducted on combat veterans had shown heightened responses to potential threats in two areas of the brain: the anterior insula (the part that processes emotional and physical pain) and the amygdala (the tiny almond-shaped part that mediates our fear responses). The UCL researchers conducted brain scans on forty-three children – twenty who’d grown up with domestic abuse and twenty-three who hadn’t – while showing them a series of angry faces. As the children looked at these faces, researchers watched their brains process the memories and emotions associated with them. The researchers saw a familiar response: the brains of abused children lit up in the exact same places as the combat veterans’ brains had. Here, the authors concluded, was ‘hard evidence’ that domestic abuse conditions children to be hyperaware of potential threats.

  While hypervigilance may serve both soldiers and children well in a high-threat environment, it can be exhausting in everyday life and highly distressing. Like combat veterans, child victims of domestic abuse also report recurring nightmares and flashbacks. In Finley’s most vivid dream, he stands frozen to the spot as he watches his family home burn down in front of him. Twelve-year-old ‘Harley’ has regular waking flashbacks of his dad’s violence. Sometimes they happen at school, other times at home – he can never be sure when they’ll come. In these flashbacks, he sees his father pushing his mum down the stairs and hitting and kicking her. Then he sees what his mum looks like afterwards. ‘It feels like it’s happening at that moment,’ he says quietly. ‘It makes me feel really upset and … defenceless.’

  Trapped in an atmosphere of ever-present threat and fear, children living with violence become masters of the strategic art of survival. ‘Anna’ was still in nappies when she learned it was futile for her to try to protect her mother. ‘I remember getting out of bed, and because I’d never experienced violence before, I said “Stop!” And my dad turned around and belted me. I flew and hit the door. My mum came and put me back to bed, and I didn’t understand what was going on. After that I knew to stay out of the way as much as possible.’ From when she was little, Anna, now thirty-four, knew she had to find a way to survive at home until she was old enough to survive on her own. For Anna, surviving meant literally treating her father as an enemy combatant. ‘It’s funny,’ she says, ‘because Dad fed me all those books on the art of war, and I took it to heart. Trying to survive that household, it was war. I used everything that I could.’ As Anna became a teenager, she assumed the role of daddy’s little helper, running regular missions to her father’s bar fridge in order to get him drunk, so he would fall asleep faster. When he was asleep, she would sneak out the window, run into the city, fake her way into nightclubs and have sex with men three times her age. ‘I was sleeping with adults by the time I was fourteen.’ Like so many kids who grow up with violence, Anna mapped the house for all the best places to hide. ‘I found hidey-holes on the top of the garage, in the bottom of the linen closet, in a side closet near the dryer, and a crawlspace under the house. The yelling would start, and I would hide. But I would also hide as practice. It was a deadly serious game. Because if you were found … you didn’t know what was coming. So my sister and I would play it as though our lives depended on it.’

  Surviving a violent home isn’t just about protecting the body – it’s also about protecting the mind. Renowned child-trauma clinician Bruce Perry says children often report going to a ‘different place’, imagining themselves as superheroes, or standing outside the experience as though they’re watching a movie they’ve been cast in.22 ‘Will’ is nine years old, and the eldest of four. Like Finley, his parents separated around a year ago, and now he and his siblings are court-ordered to stay with their dad every second weekend. When his dad flies into a rage, Will tries to pretend he’s somewhere else. ‘It’s hard to start thinking and to start believing that you’re in another spot when something really bad has just happened. But it happens. I guess I can say I have an active imagination,’ he says with a smile. In his bedroom, Will tries to think about ‘everything that’s good’. ‘Sometimes I go into my bedroom and get a sheet of blue paper and pretend I [am] at the beach, or at Wet’n’Wild.’ Will’s younger brother, ‘Adrian’, is six, and is ‘all about violence’. Adrian has been diagnosed with several behavioural issues and regularly attacks Will and his two sisters, ‘Anwen’ and ‘Ivy’. Because Adrian is the hardest to control, he bears the brunt of his father’s rage. Adrian comes up with his own scenarios to pretend the experience away. ‘When our brother learned the word “guard”, he called our dad the prison guard,’ says Will, laughing. ‘He was like, “We gotta break out of prison! We’re not bad guys, the prison guard has picked the wrong people!” I have an overactive imagination like him, so I’m like, “Yeah, we gotta break out of prison!”’

  For some children, the need to change their reality – or outright deny it – becomes so powerful that it leads to them to dissociate. As a very young child, survivor and now advocate Olga Trujillo experienced some of the worst domestic violence I’ve ever heard described. When she was three, she burst into her parents’ bedroom to find her father about to rape her mother. When she grabbed his arm and tried to pull him off, her father hit her across the face and said he would teach her what happened to little girls who didn’t respect their fathers. Right there, in front of her mother, he pinned three-year-old Olga to the floor and raped her. Olga looked over in panic as her mother half-heartedly told him to stop, and then ‘went blank’. ‘She had gone away in her head,’ writes Olga, in her bl
istering memoir The Sum of My Parts. Olga then felt her own mind get ‘fuzzier and fuzzier’ until her panic subsided, she went still, and then felt herself leave her body.23 ‘It was a very strange sensation to me,’ she writes, ‘almost like splitting into two little girls. My hands felt weird, and I noticed that I had more fingers than I should. Each hand split and formed into two separate hands. While I could still feel the pain Popi was inflicting, it was fading and becoming more distant. At last, I split off my mind and floated up to the ceiling, where I watched in safety.’ Throughout her childhood, Olga was raped and beaten repeatedly by her father. Before she turned ten, he pimped her out to his friends – with her mother’s cooperation – supposedly for money to pay the rent, which he then spent on himself. Olga describes dissociation as a ‘superpower’, and it is commonly referred to as a highly effective survival technique that ‘allows an individual enduring hopeless circumstances to preserve some areas of healthy functioning’.24 Dissociating, says Olga, helps the child keep trauma at a distance, until it’s safe enough for them to confront what they’ve experienced.

  Children unable to escape their reality through fantasy or dissociation must find other ways to make sense of it. Some may be quite clear in blaming their abusive parent (or both parents); others may join the abusive parent in blaming the victim (as abusers often encourage their children to do). Commonly, however, children will make excuses for their parents, and blame themselves. These children search themselves for what they’ve done to make their parents fight, and may even become convinced that their very birth was a curse and the cause of every bad thing that happens to the family.