Living with domestic abuse in a climate of uncertainty and fear can affect children in many different ways as they grow up. Despite your best efforts to shield and protect your children from the domestic abuse that is going on at home, in the vast majority of cases, children of all ages will witness the abuse and be aware of it and effected by it.
Witnessing domestic abuse can mean:
- actually seeing the abuse by being in the same room or possibly trying to intervene in it, or forced to take part in it.
- hearing the violence and abuse.
- observing the aftermath of the abuse (bruises, blood, broken furniture, torn clothes etc.).
Further, children who are growing up in families with domestic abuse are more likely to be being physically or sexually abused directly by the perpetrator as well.