Children are not footnotes to adult violence. They experience coercive control in their own right and our practice must respond accordingly.

In a world that still does not afford children the same rights, authority, credibility and understanding as adults, it is perhaps unsurprising that discussions of coercive control have largely centred adult experiences.

Awareness of coercive control is growing, including through moves in some states and territories to criminalise it. Yet as this conversation grows, we need to reflect on whose experiences remain out of the frame.

Too often, children are spoken about only in the context of one adult’s behaviour towards another. They are described as being exposed to violence, affected by it or used as “tools” within it. This positions children as footnotes to adult violence rather than being impacted directly by it.

Children do not simply witness coercive control. They experience it in their own right.

We write from knowledge that cannot be divided into neat categories. Between us, and within each of us, sit lived expertise, practice wisdom, and years of listening to children and families. Among the expertise we bring is the experience of having been the child inside this world:

I know what it is to have adults notice the ways I survived before they understood what I was surviving.

This knowledge brings us to the same conclusion. Coercive control not only shapes what happens around a child, but also influences what the child comes to believe about themselves, the people they love and the world they live in.

A prism of distortion

Children’s experiences of themselves and the world are inextricably linked to and shaped by the relationships around them. Coercive control distorts a child’s world and the meaning they make of it.

Compared with adults, children have fewer opportunities to leave, independently seek support, connect with other perspectives or test the version of reality they are being presented with. Because of this, children are deeply affected when they are forced to live in relational environments that repeatedly harm and violate them.

Coercive control distorts a child’s world and the meaning they make of it. It creates a prism through which children are forced to look through. Sometimes the prism has existed for as long as the child can remember. There is no alternative frame against which they can test it. This becomes the way through which truth and reality are understood.

Over time, coercive control can shape how a child answers questions about themselves and the world:

• Who is safe?
• Who is dangerous?
• Who is responsible for what is happening?
• What is love – and is this what it is supposed to feel like?
• Whose version of events is allowed to count as the truth?

For children and young people, coercive control can become a prism of distortion: a world where fear, loyalty, blame, love and survival are bent so slowly and so repeatedly that the child is left trying to make sense of what is real, while the person causing harm insists they are the only one telling the truth.

A protective parent may be painted as dangerous, selfish or unstable. For some children, there may be no protective relationship at all. The person using violence may present themselves as the only person who truly understands or cares for the child. Harm may be denied, minimised or blamed on somebody else – including the child.

Think about how confusing that can be. Not only to be frightened, but to have a distorted version of reality imposed upon you. Where the safe people are painted as dangerous, while the person, or people, causing harm claim to be acting out of love.

The narrowing of a child’s world

Coercive control moves through the whole ecology of a child’s life.

It changes the emotional weather of a home and the meaning of what it is to be safe – to feel safe. A child may monitor the mood of the person using violence before deciding whether it is safe to speak, move, ask for something or take up space.

Their ability to freely be who they are in their own home is narrowed.

They may not be able to run, dance, play, sing or make noise. Opportunities for fun and connection may be dominated and contorted by the agenda of the person using violence. Birthdays, outings and ordinary moments of childhood can become organised around avoiding a reaction and keeping one person’s needs at the centre.

This narrowing is often accompanied by isolation. A child may be stopped from seeing friends, family, trusted adults or pets, or from participating in extra curricula activities. The freedom of children and any protective parent to enjoy relationships, community and life beyond the home can be steadily taken away.

Coercively controlled relationships demand constraint from children.

This manipulation and restriction can continue after separation. Financial support may be withheld, contact arrangements sabotaged. Schools, services and courts may become sites through which control continues. Things children need, hope for and enjoy can be weaponised.

When coercion feels like containment and care

Coercion can feel like care and safety because control, attention and seeming acts of endearment can sit alongside it.

Gifts, special treatment or apparent protection may feel containing for a child. Within this experience of distortion, care and harm have been made difficult to separate.

A child may love, miss or defend the person using violence. They may also fear them. These realities can exist together.

This form of emotional confusion is like living within a knot that is impossible to untangle.

To survive, a child is required to adapt. They may stand up to the person using violence, protect somebody they love or quietly hold onto a different version of what happened. At other times, they may be so fearful that silence is their only option.

They may comply, withdraw, appear to side with the person using violence or believe the violence happened because of something they did. The burden of assuming responsibility for violence used against them can bring shame and profound distress.

A child’s adaptation may not make sense to us from the outside. It may look like anger, watchfulness, avoidance, loyalty, inconsistency or an unwillingness to speak.

However this response, while seemingly difficult to understand, does not exclude the idea that it derives from harm.

What this asks of practice

Children need alternative resources offered to them in the context of safe relationships.

This means creating enough trust and safety for the child to explore what they noticed, believed, feared and understood in their own time.

We need to listen for the small, seemingly insignificant moments when a child indicates some disbelief about the intentions of the person using violence. When they do not entirely trust what has been said, when they remember something differently. It is when they form a view of themselves, another person they love or their world that is not completely aligned with what has been forced upon them.

These are small acts of resistance.

The more we notice and honour these, the more we can support a child to separate themselves from the interpretive frame the person using violence has set for them.

We cannot ask children to resist the power that accompanies coercive control. That responsibility can never sit with them. But perhaps we can help them hold onto a view of themselves, the people they love and their world that has not been entirely authored by the person causing harm.

For practitioners, this means wondering with children:

• What became smaller in this child’s world?
• What were they no longer free to say, do or enjoy?
• What did they learn about themselves and the people they love?
• What did they do to survive, preserve a relationship or protect somebody else?
• What strengths did they hold onto about themselves that resisted the messages of violence?

For practitioners working primarily with adults, it also means keeping each child in view. We need to ask how coercive control is shaping their relationships, routines, freedoms and understandings, rather than allowing children to become background figures within an adult assessment.

Each child’s experience is unique – even within sibling groups. Children may be assigned different roles, given different versions of events or subjected to different combinations of affection, punishment, responsibility and blame.

One child cannot speak for another.

Making space with and for children means seeking to understand the unique, complex and nuanced ways each child has experienced these acts of violation and been forced to make sense of their world.

Recognition must not be our only response

Children need practitioners willing to look beyond the most visible incident and towards the web of control surrounding their relationships, choices and everyday lives.

They need adults who do not interpret silence as an absence of fear, affection as an absence of harm, or behaviour without first seeking to understand the relational environment in which it developed.

They need safety, and relationships through which they can begin to discover what safety feels like.

They need alternative resources for understanding themselves and their world.

And they need a community willing to look the risk they face squarely in the eye.

Children are not footnotes to an adult’s experience or use of coercive control. They are living inside a world it has tried to construct for them.

Our work is not to ask them to find their own way out.

It is to enter their world with care, listen for what has been difficult to share and widen what coercive control has narrowed. It is to stand alongside children as they reclaim the right to understand themselves. To connect to the people they love and a world beyond the reality imposed upon them.

Because no child should be forced to experience their childhood through a prism of distortion.