Domestic Violence and Its Impact on Children’s Development

Children are living in most homes where there is domestic violence. ‘Research on children who witness family violence is a special case of counting the hard-to-count and measuring the hard-to measure...’ (Fantuzzo, Boruch, Beriana, Atkins & Marcus, 1997; p.121), so it is impossible to be definitive about the number of families affected. However, several studies have found that 85-90% of the time when a violent incident took place in a domestic situation, children were present and children were also abused during the violent incident in about 50% of those cases (Queensland Domestic Taskforce, 1998; Cleaver et al, 1999, cited in Fleischer, 2000).