Centering Domestic Violence Survivors' Experience of Child Welfare As Knowledge: A Case for Abolition

Background and Purpose: Although adults who have experienced domestic violence (DV) are often caught in the child welfare (CW) system, their perspectives on how that system has engaged (and often blamed) them and their children is not centered in the policies and practices that gravely impact and often disrupt their lives. Listening to and lifting up adult DV survivors’ experiences is fundamental to how social work contributes to changing how families are supported when DV is occurring. This study’s purpose was to understand the DV survivors’ lived experience with their CW caseworkers.

Methods: After giving their consent to participate in the study and following predefined safety planning protocols, 31 women who identified as having experienced DV and CW involvement were interviewed by two former DV trained advocates and current researchers. Interviews were conducted via Zoom and lasted between 30-90 minutes. Using an iterative multiple researcher approach, a codebook was co-developed and informed by the research questions and interviewer input. Coding was completed by three researchers in Dedoose. Then, using thematic analysis, including case by case comparison, findings were developed and reviewed by the research team. One of four main findings, DV most prominently influences survivors’ child welfare experience, is explored in detail.

Results: The relationship between adult survivor participants and person that used violence against them surfaced as the most profound influences in their experience within the CW system. All participants described this influence in some fashion. Although this finding’s prominence may be unsurprising given the participants were DV survivors, it is noteworthy that this occurred even though interview questions did not in any way contain inquiries into their experiences with DV or the relationship with the person that used violence. This organic emergence speaks directly to the insidious influence of the DV relationship, and particularly the role played by the person that uses violence on the adult survivors’ experiences, not excluding their CW experience. This dynamic comes with the direst outcomes –surveillance of their parenting and the possible (or eventual) removal of their children. Three clusters of influence were described by participants: (1) being a DV survivor means being at risk of losing children, (2) PUV harms DV survivor within CW, and (3) CW can’t really do anything to change PUV or help her.

Conclusions and Implications: DV survivors consistently shared how systems become an extension of violence and harm that they experience. Centering the lived experience/expertise of adult DV survivors in research uplifts their experience as knowledge, or to go further, as evidence on which policies and practices must be grounded. The results of this study expand on the upswell of narratives from community organizations and national leaders identifying that when faced with the ill-suited and harmful CW system for DV survivors and their families, we can use an abolitionist approach to imagine new ways of supporting families and repairing harm.