Skafida

This monograph explores the lives of mothers and children living with domestic violence and abuse.

This title initially focuses on issues around methods, measurement and reflexive accounts of researching domestic abuse through survey data. Our knowledge and understanding of domestic violence and abuse experiences across the population are only as good as the data we collect. The book examines legacy surveys which still influence today’s data landscape globally, it critically examines the data currently being collected in the UK context, and queries who is missing in the survey data we collect. It also engages with important questions around how can we talk about perpetrators of violence and abuse when we mostly have data on victims. The book then takes a deep-dive into what a cohort study tells us about social inequalities in mothers’ experiences of domestic abuse, focusing on how overlapping aspects of poverty and disadvantage place mothers and children in vulnerable situations. Domestic abuse experiences have obvious repercussions for mothers, while there are also repercussions for children, which this book explores, by looking at children’s physical chastisement and children’s social and emotional development in the context of living with parental domestic violence and abuse.

Ending with a discussion around what appropriate policy responses need to consider, both in terms of services targeted directly at domestic violence and abuse victims, survivors and perpetrators, as well as broader policy responses which could seek to address the high levels of poverty and inequality which families, and particularly women and children, face in the UK. It will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working within social policy, social work, domestic violence and sociology, and those using quantitative methodological approaches in this space.

Valeria Skafida, PhD, is an applied social researcher whose work and interests straddle the disciplines of social policy, sociology and public health.