by Jess Hill
‘I used to think, how have I caused this, what have I done wrong?’ says Finley. Rescinding blame has been an essential – and hard-won – part of Finley’s recovery. ‘Now, I know that it’s completely not my fault,’ he says. ‘I don’t need anyone to tell me.’ But in Judith Herman’s compelling interpretation, his instinct to assume blame was not just childish and wrongheaded – it was a key flank in his psychic defence. As Herman explains, the abused child:
must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear … Inevitably the child concludes that her innate badness is the cause. The child seizes upon this explanation early and clings to it tenaciously, for it enables her to preserve a sense of meaning, hope, and power. If she is bad, then her parents are good. If she is bad, then she can try to be good. If, somehow, she has brought this fate upon herself, then somehow she has the power to change it. If she has driven her parents to mistreat her, then, if only she tries hard enough, she may some day earn their forgiveness and finally win the protection and care she so desperately needs.25
In believing themselves to be at fault, children actually create what they need in an otherwise helpless situation: a sense of agency.
Sometimes assuming blame is not something the child does themselves – it is foisted on them by their family. When Michele first contacted me, she introduced her story with some trepidation, explaining that while her mother was a victim of her father’s abuse, she was also incredibly cruel towards her. ‘My teenage years are just a mess of memories of Dad beating up Mum; of Dad screaming at me; of Mum screaming that it was my fault, and of knowing – deep in my bones – how wrong it all was.’
Michele’s mother would beat her children with the handle of a feather duster using such force that their legs would be covered in bruises. When Michele’s father was home, her mother – ‘who didn’t have an ounce of assertiveness in her’ – insisted on the children’s absolute obedience to him, and punished Michele if she ever talked back. But when he wasn’t home, she would draw her children into rituals of resistance, doing things that would have greatly angered her husband had he been home to see them. A favourite transgression was to smoke cigarettes – something Michele’s father despised – and to make her kids smoke too. ‘I got my first cigarette from my mother when I was ten years old,’ says Michele.
After her father was violent, which was often, Michele’s mother would not only rouse on her daughter for having a temper just like her father’s, but she would deny the assault had occurred. ‘You know when people talk about gaslighting?’ says Michele. ‘Mum’s a master of gaslighting. Something that literally just happened, she would tell you it didn’t happen.’ To maintain her grip on reality, Michele became an obsessive journaller. To this day, she second-guesses whether things that happen right in front of her have actually happened.
When Michele was seventeen, her father – after years of her mother promising he never would – brutally attacked her for the first time. ‘I was 158 centimetres and weighed 47 kilograms – my dad was 2 metres tall and possibly twice my weight. Standing over the top of me, he brought the full power of his height and weight into a punch.’ As she tried to escape, he punched Michele repeatedly in the stomach until she let go of the door handle and collapsed onto the floor. ‘I sat there cowering, in total shock that I was now his punching bag. As verbally abusive as he had been towards me, I never thought he would ever beat me up.’ In the hallway, her mother stood and watched. ‘I just thought, fuck. I have memories of myself as a five- or six-year-old standing between you and Dad to stop him from hitting you, and you just stood there and watched that happen.’ The next day Michele was so devastated she couldn’t get out of bed. Around midday her mother walked into her room and told her to ‘stop being such a drama queen’ and come downstairs – she was hurting her father’s feelings. ‘She made me get out of bed, sit at the kitchen table and drink a cup of coffee with him. My dad cracked jokes and I had to pretend all was okay with the world.’ That’s when Michele realised that what her mother had said her whole life was not true. ‘Her narrative had always been that she stayed with him because of us. But in that moment at the kitchen table, I realised, “You are not with this man because of your children. You’re here for you.”’
THE CHILD REACTS
Most mothers do try their best to protect their children – but that doesn’t necessarily stop them becoming a target of their child’s violence. This is especially common after the abuser has left and the mother is trying to rebuild a stable life with her children. For some families, leaving the abuser can be the end of one ordeal and the beginning of another.
For the first few years after ‘Liz’ left her abusive husband, her family home was safe. There were, however, a couple of incidents that made her nervous. On one occasion, one of her sons, ‘Blake’, went through the rubbish to find a receipt of what she’d spent and quizzed her on it – a repeat of his father’s behaviour. Then, a couple of weeks later, Blake ‘had a go at his younger sister – held her up by her neck against the wall,’ says Liz. ‘But he was still pretty normal with me, and he was getting good results at school. There was no build-up, no nasty talk.’ Then one night, after Liz asked Blake twice to do the washing up, he punched her in the face with brutal force. ‘It came from nowhere,’ she says. Liz felt she had no choice but to call the police. ‘They turned up within ten minutes. He was taken out straight away and put in the paddy wagon. The punch had split right through my face. The police said, “I can see the inside of your mouth from the side of your face – that was one hell of a punch.” I’ve got permanent scarring from it, and it’s still numb.’ In the aftermath of the attack, Blake showed no remorse. ‘He turned around to the lawyer and said, “Oh well, I could have hit her harder.” I think he thought he’d get away with it.’ Liz says friends and teachers judged her harshly for calling the police. ‘I had people turn to me saying, “How could you call the police on your son?” “Poor Blake,” they said, “he’ll have a criminal record.” One of them – a teacher, in fact – said, “You should have punched him back.” But it wouldn’t have done him any favours to not get the police involved. What if he did that to his girlfriend?’
Mark Murdoch, assistant commissioner in the NSW Police, says that child-to-parent abuse is the state’s fastest-growing category of domestic abuse. Primarily, these kids are aged ten to sixteen. ‘Now, some fourteen-and sixteen-year-old boys are bigger than their parents, and a lot, lot stronger and bigger than their mothers. Unfortunately, a lot of these kids come from broken homes; Mum’s doing her best to control these kids but they’re standing over her, they’re stealing money from her, so Mum’s frightened, she’s intimidated, and these kids are saying, “You don’t do this, I’ll flog the living daylights out of you,” which on occasions they do. And so the parents, particularly the mothers, they come to us and say, “I need an AVO to protect myself from my kids.”’
Eddie Gallagher is a child counsellor who has specialised in child-to-parent abuse since the 1990s, when it was virtually unmentionable. He’s worked with almost 500 families. ‘Some violent children come from loving homes,’ he says, ‘and have well-adjusted siblings who love their parents. But the most common pattern is a boy abusing a sole mother post-domestic-violence.’*** This pattern accounts for half of the families he’s seen, and 70 per cent of the violent children have been boys. Apart from the gender element, there’s little rhyme or reason to why some children imitate the behaviour of their abusive parent and others don’t. ‘Within the same family … you can have three kids who have all seen Dad be violent towards Mum. One kid is very responsible; you could say they’ve been “parentified” – they’re caring, responsible and protective towards Mum and the other brothers and sisters. You’ve got another kid who is anxious and withdrawn, and then a third kid who’s angry, lashing out and showing behaviour very similar to Dad. Kids with different personalities can have very different responses to the same exposur
e.’
It can be just as difficult, says Gallagher, to predict whether a child in a domestic abuse setting will identify and ally himself – sometimes herself – with the father:
Some of the worst and most impossible boys to work with are 100 per cent on Dad’s side, and excuse Dad’s violence, and might even say they hate their mum and want to go and live with Dad. And they often do go and live with the dad when they’re in their teenage years. Then there’s the absolute opposite extreme – I see lots of kids who will tell me that their father’s a shit, they don’t want anything to do with him, men should never hit women, Dad’s a scumbag – and yet they’re still copying his behaviour. The outlook’s a lot better for them, and it’s much easier to work with them in counselling, as you can imagine, but they can still be copying his behaviour.
Gallagher has worked with violent kids as young as six, and says it can be difficult to tell whether a violent and reactive phase that starts when the child is as young as three will simply fade out, or become an ongoing pattern of behaviour. ‘What I think is really significant and underestimated is the continued influence that some of these guys have, even without a lot of contact,’ he says. ‘Kids who are exposed to their father putting their mother down or being verbally abusive – that can have an enormous impact, even without direct exposure to the violence. They don’t have to see Dad hit Mum for them to end up being violent towards their mother, because a big part of it is losing respect.’ A child who has grown up seeing his or her mum constantly belittled and in a ‘weaker’ position can thus have an implicitly derogatory view of her. Attachment to the perpetrator is also a pretty good survival mechanism – if you side with him against your mother, you are less likely to be victimised.
There is much to say about child-to-parent abuse, especially about the children who retaliate after years of abuse, or in self-defence. In these cases, the abusive parent may get police involved and, based on a single incident, succeed in taking out an intervention order against the child who has long been the victim of their violence. In the most tragic cases, the victimised child ends up killing their abuser. In Perth in September 2016, a seventeen-year-old boy stabbed his violent stepfather to death, after he saw him strangling his seven-year-old sister. The night of the killing, the stepfather was drunk and had already twice tried to choke his fifteen-year-old brother, who has cerebral palsy. When the boy saw him strangling his little sister, he ran into his bedroom, grabbed his ‘Bear Grylls’ knife and ran at him, stabbing him in the chest twenty-five times. When he stopped, he cried out in horror, ‘Oh my god, what have I done, I’m sorry.’ He was given a three-year suspended sentence.26
THE CHILD IN LOVE
While boys are more likely to adopt the behaviour of the abusive parent (usually the father), girls are more likely to internalise the narrative of the victim – even when it’s their mother who was violent. ‘Every night, he would get home from work and she would just start yelling at him about whatever,’ says eighteen-year-old ‘Frankie’, describing the violence her mother inflicted on her father. ‘Dad doesn’t really fight back – if he’s getting yelled at about stuff he doesn’t care about, he ignores it. And because Mum realised that yelling wasn’t getting her anywhere, she started hitting him and stuff. She never used weapons on him, like the stuff she used on my brother and I, but she would just hit him. I think she tried to burn him at one stage, too, because she was cooking dinner and the oven was on, and she grabbed his arm and put it on the oven.’
Frankie’s father left two years later, and though he brought up the abuse in the custody dispute that followed, care of Frankie and her brother was granted to her mother. Frankie didn’t hear from him for years. In the meantime, her mother found two new targets for her abuse. ‘The first week (after the separation) was really bad, because she no longer had him to hurt. She was obviously upset too, because she’d just lost her husband.’ Frankie says she was violently abused by her mother at least once a week. ‘She would choke me a lot, so there’d be times when I couldn’t breathe. I’m trying to tell her that I couldn’t breathe, and she still wouldn’t stop.’ One afternoon, Frankie came home from school to find her mother holding a knife to her brother’s throat. ‘He grabbed it and threw it across the room, and she just kept punching him and shit. I was like probably only about ten, just watching it like, what the fuck? – I didn’t know what to do. I was scared, and I didn’t want my brother to get hurt, but, like, if I stepped in, she’d hurt me.’
When she was in Year 9, Frankie got together with her first boyfriend. He was in the year above her. ‘I dealt with a lot of depression, so I pushed him away a lot. So he thought I didn’t love him. He didn’t like that. He would hit me and push me against walls and stuff. It was my first relationship. I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing!’ After three months, Frankie put her foot down and broke up with him. A year later, she got together with another guy – this time from another school. She lost her virginity to him when he raped her. ‘Then he got his friend to do the same thing to me. Two guys in one week. It was my first sexual experience. After that, I didn’t want to date at all.’
About a month before we spoke, the ex-boyfriend who raped her turned up out of the blue and accosted Frankie at work. ‘He cornered me and started talking to me. Then he somehow got my phone number – he must have got it from a mutual friend or something – so I got home to all these text messages from him.’ In his messages, he said he liked how nervous and anxious she had looked. In fact, he thought it was funny. ‘What really got to me was his last message: I hope when your boyfriend fucks you, you think of me. That’s what kind of tipped me over.’
Days later, Frankie tried to kill herself. Recovering in hospital, she spent a lot of time piecing together the events of her life, trying to figure out how they had brought her to this point. Something dawned on her. ‘I was drawn to guys that were similar to Mum,’ she says. ‘The way that some of the guys treated me was the way my mum would treat my dad. That was a big insight for me.’
This kind of insight has the potential to change a young person’s trajectory. Eddie Gallagher’s experience makes him wary of drawing any straight line from family history to a child growing up to become either a victim or an abuser. ‘It’s a dangerous assumption, and it’s not true,’ he says. ‘I ran men’s groups for over twenty years, and I met close to a thousand abusive men over that time. A fair number of them grew up in violent homes; probably half were exposed to domestic abuse or had been abused themselves. But a lot of them hadn’t.’
Joe, now in his thirties, feared for a long time that he would end up like his violent father. ‘When I eventually realised I was my own person, thanks largely to my mum and some amazing friends, it was a huge relief,’ he says. ‘I’ve been with my partner for ten years now, and it’s proven to me that I’m the antithesis of my father. Every couple has to work on their relationship and I’m not saying ours is perfect by any means, but we’re honest, open, we communicate our feelings – something I didn’t do a lot for the first twenty years of my life – and now we have a two-year-old daughter. She’s the best – attitude, cheeky – I love her. Having a kid is something I would never have considered if I thought I would be like my father.’
It’s a fear that still haunts nine-year-old Finley. ‘It’s actually a nightmare, almost,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I’ll think I’m just like my dad. The way I act, I have to be careful – if I’m gonna say something mean or critique someone, I’ll have to say it in a nice way, not just snap at them … I don’t want to become like my dad. I want to have a happy relationship with anyone that I am with.’
Two years after I first interviewed Frankie, I got back in touch with her to see how she was doing. She was in a newish relationship with a man twenty-eight years older, and they were running a photography business together. ‘This guy has been through a lot of bad things in life, and he convinced me I needed to move in with him,’ she told me over email. ‘Stupid me, thinking I could “fix”
someone, went along with it. He made me feel like I had no other option.’ Once Frankie said yes to moving in, ‘everything else became harder and harder to say no to.’ That’s when he turned. ‘He never physically abused me, but he did emotionally and that hurts just as much.’ Frankie had been trying to leave him for a month, but every time she tried he would threaten to kill himself. Her therapist had helped her to understand that if he harmed himself, that wouldn’t be her fault, but she still felt a kind of guilt that made her too frightened to leave. ‘The reason I’m telling you this story,’ she wrote, ‘is because I feel it all relates back to my childhood and the love, or lack of love, I saw around me. Normal scares me because it’s something I’m not used to and it all feels false. I feel like I deserve these bad situations and blame myself for putting [myself] in them.’ Frankie was candid: her need to black out what was happening had become so strong, she was dosing herself with a varying cocktail of cocaine, weed, MDMA and prescription meds virtually every day, ‘just to cope’. That was alarming to hear. But what she wrote next was worse: ‘After I send you this email, I’m going to delete it, as the guy goes through my phone and I don’t want him finding this.’
THE CHILD RUNS AWAY
When Carly ran away from her father in 2016, she joined 34,000 other children who had become officially homeless that year after experiencing domestic and family violence.27 That figure doesn’t count the kids who remain invisible to services: the ones who couch-surf, seek shelter in churches and sleep under bridges. National statistics compiled by Yfoundations, the peak body of youth homelessness services in New South Wales, show that more than half of young people who seek help from homeless services have experienced domestic abuse.28 It’s the single biggest reason children flee their homes.