Introduction

While home as a site shaped by gendered, economic, and imperialist power relations has come under significant scrutiny in geographical and sociological scholarship of late (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Brickell 2012), the myth of the enchanted childhood home has received remarkably little critical attention.

Through contemplations of such simple childhood pleasures as a near-spiritual appreciation of colour and an acute awareness of moving within, and being attuned to, the medium that is a house, the notion that home is aligned absolutely with humanness of both our senses and our emotions are achieved. If anything, this book is an attempt to engage with a continuum of cultural geography that is home, senses, emotions. Moreover, it aims to bring about, once again, those intense childhood moments of awe and wonder... In Returning Home - Reconnecting with our Childhoods (2011), Jerry M. Burger insists that the main reason why people wish to return to the homes of their childhood, ‘is to establish a psychological link with their past and the person they once were’ (Burger 2011: 13). Burger explains that such a desire to return is a result of a growing sense of loss or crisis in their lives, as many of his respondents verbally expressed anxieties over ‘their childhoods slipping away from them’,...

There is little recognition in these portrayals of the fact that for many children home is, at minimum, a site of discipline and control and at worst, a site of terror and traumatization to which one might not wish to return as an adult (cf. Gilbert et al. 2009; McKie 2005; Wells and Montgomery 2014; Willis et al. 2015; Wilson 2015). As D’Andrea et al. (2012) explain, around one-third of children experience physical abuse worldwide, while one in four girls and one in five boys are estimated to experience sexual abuse (also see Pain 1997; Willis et al. 2015). In the United States, around 3.5 million cases of child abuse are reported each year, with one million cases confirmed as substantiated (see van der Kolk et al. 2005 and Katz and Barnetz 2014; Gilbert et al. 2009).

The silencing of this issue and of other problematic aspects of privacy and home for children is deeply troubling for several reasons. Thus, it is constitutive for many ideologies that rest upon assumptions about the need for and normality of secure and nonconflictual homes, such as nationalism and patriarchal gender ideologies. In as far as these normalizations are attached to assignations of moral superiority and civilizational advancement to western societies (see Ray 2011), they have also underpinned, and continue to underpin, imperialist policies such as cross-country adoption (see Cheney and Rotabi in this volume ► Chap. 6, “Addicted to Orphans: How the Global Orphan Industrial Complex Jeopardizes Local Child Protection Systems”), and even western military humanitarianism carried out in the name of responsibilities to protect vulnerable others, in other places (Fluri 2011).

Quite apart from these conceptual concerns, however, the myths constructed around childhood and home are most devastating for abused children and survivors of abuse themselves. Idealized narratives shield the home from critical scrutiny and contribute in this way to producing and upholding conditions that place children at increased risk of interpersonal, domestic abuse. If the primary focus of adult narratives and of research rests on the home as (ideally) a place of sanctuary, shelter, peace, and care, and if violence in the home is only problematized when it concerns adults, then abused children and survivors face an uphill struggle to make their voices heard and to call for the kinds of knowledge that are required to challenge and change the sociospatial power relations that enable and are manifested in domestic violence against children.

One of many difficulties that arise from this and to which the chapter returns in its conclusion, is where this leaves geographers and other social scientists in terms of conceptualizing home and childhood environments. Can notions of home as a nurturing space be redeemed for a critical geography of childhood? Are such constructions too essentialist and exclusionary to provide a roadmap for improving the conditions in which children grow up or are they nonetheless a desirable ideal? Notions of what a “normal,” “healthy” childhood and childhood environment ought to be also underpin by much psychological research and thinking about therapeutic interventions. One of the risks arising from this is that abused children (and perpe­trators) are pathologized because of the less-than-ideal circumstances in which they have grown up (cf. D’Andrea et al. 2012).

The argument advanced in this chapter is that researchers have to walk a fine line between identifying abuse against certain criteria that enable the recognition, dis­closure, and tackling of abuse, while at the same time recognizing the diversity of experiences, the coping capacities of abused children and survivors, and steering clear of unreflective idealizations of certain environments and spatial practices. Geographers’ main contribution to this may be to develop proposals for a wider range of sociospatial constellations, practices, and relations to contest violence against children and to respond sensitively to the many risks that arise from it. Trauma research has shown, for instance, that the mobility and instability which children often experience as a result of disclosure and investigation can be both necessary for their protection and (re)traumatizing. At the same time, (re)attachment to trustworthy adults and strong social support can help on the (long) road to (partial) recovery (Foster and Hagedorn 2014; Swanston et al.

The chapter begins with a review of recent scholarship on the home, the family, and “intimate war” (Pain 2015) and a discussion of existing work on the scale, forms, impacts, and spatialities of child abuse. It first considers how conceptualizations of home, privacy, family, gender, and childhood contribute to the normalization and legitimization of generational power relations that place children at risk of maltreat­ment and abuse. It then draws on research in developmental psychology, anthropol­ogy, sociology, and geography to discuss different definitions of child abuse, its impacts on children and adult survivors, the question of children’s resilience and the place of children, and adult survivors’ accounts of abuse for understanding its spatialities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the contributions that geographical research may make to interdisciplinary debates on the issue.

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