Children Often Unintended Victims Of Abuse

Editor's Note: This is the fourth of a six-part series.

She could tell that the little boy sitting on the couch was unusually quiet and withdrawn for a 5-year-old, but she didn't realize just how afraid he was until he dropped his cup.

As the cup hit the floor and the milk spilled, he looked up at her with such stark terror on his face that she realized he expected swift and severe punishment for dropping it.

"Kids have to learn not to live in fear. They learn it's OK to drop things - no one will hurt you," said Jeannie Campbell, executive director of the Beaman Home, Kosciusko County's only women's shelter.

For children who come to the Beaman Home from families that regularly experience some kind of domestic violence, that kind of learning doesn't come easily. The kids often don't know any other way of life.

Many children begin life as victims of domestic violence - recent statistics hold that 15 to 25 percent of pregnant women are battered.

Experts believe that between 3.3 million and 10 million children in the United States will witness domestic violence in one year. Those children suffer from stress-related illnesses, such as headaches and ulcers; experience developmental delays in school; have poor concentration and poor social skills; and risk repeating the abuse/victim cycle.

According to child psychology experts, abuse affects children even if they are not the targets. Living in a home where one parent abuses the other teaches a child that love is painful: If they love someone, that someone will hurt them.

It also teaches them that it's OK to hit someone if you're angry, or, conversely, that if you're smaller and weaker, you're destined to be a victim.

Kids from violent homes don't need to be abused themselves to be victims of domestic violence.

Campbell tells the story of the batterer who told her his kids didn't know about the violence in his family - he always made sure they were in their rooms with the doors shut before he hit his wife.

"Did he think they didn't hear it? Did he think they didn't feel the floor shake when he threw their mother against a wall?" she said.

To keep kids from growing up thinking violence is normal, and to break the cycle of violence, the Beaman Home refers children of its clients to the Bowen Center for counseling.

The danger, Campbell said, is that the battering spouse will begin to abuse the children, or that the children will try to protect their mother.

By the same token, she said, a 12-year-old boy who protects his mother will by age 15, if no action is taken, become a carbon copy of his father - his role model.

"The kids grow up to be abusers or victims, and they expect life to be like that. They don't understand what's different or unusual about abuse," said Becky Moreno, victim's assistant for the city of Warsaw.

"Anyone with kids is affected by domestic violence, whether they know it or not," Moreno said. Kids from abusive homes are more aggressive and more violent than other kids, and that can affect any child they come into contact with at school, at church or on the street.

Often small children will act like surrogate parents when their mothers bring them to the Beaman Home, Campbell said. "They don't want to be separated from their mothers, even for a minute, even in a place that's safe," she said.

Signs that a child is living in a violent home include lack of trust and hope, sadness, withdrawal, anxiety and fear, aggressiveness, extreme anger, low self-esteem and lack of self-respect, frequent illnesses, problems with eating and sleeping, defensiveness, denial, lack of communication skills, and selecting unhealthy peer influence as a substitute for family influences.

The following are statistics from March of Dimes And the FBI:

• 87% of domestic violence cases are witnessed by kids.

• 62% of sons over age 14 who are injured in domestic violence are hurt trying to protect their mothers during abusive incidents.

• 63% of males between the ages of 11 and 20 who are serving time for homicide have killed their mother's abuser.

• 75% of kids over age 15 who witnessed violence between their parents tried to run away from home at least twice during the previous year.