Conclusion

Violence against children in the “home” is a frequent and serious issue that affects children and adult survivors to the core of their being, placing many on a long and complicated route to navigate a range of social, emotional, and often economic challenges in life.

is both reflective and constitutive of normative constructions of home, childhood, and adulthood that are related to the dominance of adult perspectives and the marginalization of children’s lives, emotions, and understandings as seemingly less relevant and revealing about key geographies and societal phenomena.

Yet, as this chapter has shown, the issue warrants attention from the two disci­plines precisely because it unsettles so many assumptions about the sanctity of home, the peacefulness of modern, western childhood, and the protective, benevo­lent construction of intergenerational relations in western societies. It is also, and more importantly, warranted because of the contributions that the two disciplines could make to enhancing understanding of the intersecting power relations, uneven topographies and emotional geographies that surround, evolve from, sanction, make possible, or challenge child abuse. These contributions might include a closer focus on the personal geographies and everyday social relations of abused children and adult survivors, with a view to adding insight to existing research on therapeutic support and societal interventions. They might also extend to consideration of the intersections between different forms and spaces of violence and how these are negotiated by children and adult survivors.

While it is important to reflect on children’s agencies in such research and to ensure that their voices and the voices of adult survivors can be heard without causing further violations, the issue of child abuse also shows that “agency” needs to be conceptualized very carefully in order not to overlook the constraints imposed and reinforced through violence. Wilson’s (2015) description of children’s sociospatial practices as ways of getting by in challenging circumstances captures this more adequately than some assertions of children’s resilience do. The issue of agency and victimhood is further complicated by the fact that children also act violently in certain circumstances and can become perpetrators of serious abuse, such as sexual violence against siblings. Although this chapter has not considered this issue in depth, as it has focused on the more pronounced issue of children’s abuse by adults, it emphasizes the need for more complex conceptualizations of children’s subjectivities, practices, and geographies than those that furnish myths of modern childhood, family, and home.