Unhomely Homes and the Disenchantment of Childhood
As a key site of social reproduction, the home is a central space for understanding the social positioning of children in western societies and the embodied, everyday sociospatial relations through which subjectivities are forged (cf.
Christensen et al. 2000; Hockey and James 1993). It has also, for some time, occupied a central place in geographical scholarship, inspired especially by humanist phenomenological and existentialist philosophies, which foregrounded its importance as a key site of human experience and senses of self (cf. Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). For many authors in this tradition, it signifies far more than simply a built structure or a household. Instead, it is the connection between material and imaginative aspects of “home” together with practices of making home (“dwelling”) that are seen to give it its particular significance and meaning (cf. Blunt and Dowling 2006; Holloway and Hubbard 2001; Valentine 2001).As numerous critical scholars have pointed out, however, home is far from a universal concept. Its contemporary meanings in western contexts, its material constructions, and its uses emerged and changed significantly in the course of industrialization, which led to a stronger separation between work and home and between private and public spaces. As many feminist scholars have remarked, this was linked closely to changing conceptions of gender, especially the rise of middleclass ideals of femininity and domesticity (Rose 1993; Valentine 2001).
Despite this historical specificity, universalizing ideal notions underpin many descriptions and theorizations of home. Thus, home tends to be seen as a place that lends a “sense of comfort” and belonging (Easthorpe 2004: 136, cited in Holloway and Hubbard 2001). The privacy that home is frequently associated with and that tends to be seen as a precondition for its functioning as a site of refuge, shelter, and individuality has, however, “permitted a range of more negative experiences of home to pass often unnoticed” (Holloway and Hubbard 2001: 90).
Inspired largely by feminist and postcolonial theory, critical scholars have, over the last two decades, moved towards more complex and ambiguous conceptualizations of home, challenging especially the assumed divisions between private and public space and examining the genealogies of this division, i.e., its historical specificity. This has led to calls for greater attention to home as a site of tension and contestation and for home to be understood as entangled with wider relations of power that stretch across different scales and domains (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Brickell 2012; Rose 1993; Valentine 2001). For Short (1999: x), home is thus,where space becomes place, and where family relations and gendered and class identities are negotiated, contested, and transformed. The home is an active moment in both time and space in the creation of individual identity, social relations, and collective meaning. The home is an important site of ideological meanings,... a nodal point for a whole series of polarities... a place rife with ambiguities... [and] a place of paradoxes.
The relations of power and the identities that have received most attention in critical geographical work on the home have been those of class, race, gender, and sexuality, with current research shedding light particularly on the extent and impact of intimate partner violence and its connections to other forms of violence (cf. Pain 2015; Tyner 2012; Valentine 2001). Alongside numerous other feminist scholars, Valentine (2001:80) has thus criticized the ways in which privacy acts like a veil to hide abusive domestic relations. She points out that for many women, home is the context of “the most frightening violence of all” (Wilson 1983, cited in Valentine 2001: 80, also see Cream 1993; Pain 1997, 2015).
That much of this violence and abuse is already experienced in childhood has, however, received remarkably little attention in geography and sociology (cf. Willis et al. 2015). Willis et al. (2015: 2) have thus pointed out that child sexual abuse “is a ‘present absence’ in human geography” and that this absence “can be identified in the body of human geography literature.” Given the scale and serious consequences of the issue, this absence is truly startling.
Katz and Barnetz (2014: 1033) point out that in the USA, approximately 3.5 million investigations or assessments are conducted every year in response to reports of suspected child maltreatment (also see van der Kolk et al. 2005; Gilbert et al. 2009), with figures being similarly high in the UK, Canada, and Australia (Lamb et al. 2011). Such figures are refracted by gender differences, with childhood abuse constituting the most frequent cause of traumatization for women (van der Kolk et al. 2005: 389):
More than twice as many women report histories of childhood sexual abuse than of (adult) rape, which occurs in approximately 10% of the general population [...]. In the United States, 61% of all rapes occur before victims reach age 18; 29% of forcible rapes occur before the age of 11 [...], usually by family members.
Disabled children are also at greatest risk of maltreatment, as explained by Gilbert et al. (2009: 71):
A record-linkage study in the USA showed a cumulative prevalence of any maltreatment in 9% of non-disabled children and in 31% of disabled children. The overall prevalence of any recorded disability was 8%, but a quarter of all maltreated children had a disability.
Yet, while childhood researchers in sociology and geography recognize the centrality of home and family as key experiential and social sites through which children in western society develop their earliest senses of self (Hockey and James 1993; Holt et al. 2013; Christensen et al. 2000; Hopkins 2013; Wilson 2015, Wilson et al. 2012), the family is rarely conceptualized in these disciplinary debates as a violent social institutions (cf. Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998; McKie 2005). Given that generational and gender relations are negotiated within families in ways that can and do give rise to conflict, however, the “family” and its separation from public life via its placement in the home requires much more explaining and critical scrutiny. It cannot simply be taken for granted, as Harker (2010 and this volume) and McKie (2005) have argued.
Further, the extent to which modern constructions of childhood and the sanctioning of generational power relations in the name of socializing the child within family contexts contribute to the silencing, denial, and legitimization of violence against children in the home warrants much greater attention. Violence against children and its acceptance, silencing, or contestation are strongly related to changing social norms, such as those concerning the disciplining of children, and to perceptions of children as either little “angels” or “devils” (Jenks 2005). It is not just destructive, as Wells and Montgomery (2014) explain, but also constitutes a way of enrolling the violated in the social:In other words, violence is motivated and to undo violence the place to start is not necessarily with the harm itself, important as that is, but with the motivation or intention that lies beneath acts of violence..., the intention of everyday violence against children is not to ‘unmake the world’ but to make it by incorporating the child into it in specific ways. (Wells and Montgomery 2014: 11
Through violence, Wells and Montgomery argue, social recognition is conveyed and the abused child is given a position within the social. This applies most obviously to violence that is legitimized as a tool for disciplining and “reigning in” “the precocious child, the child criminal, the teenage mother” who “do not fit within the norm of the nuclear family, and “who do not conform to the ‘facts’ of childhood” (Wyness 2000: 28). The moral exclusions which such discourses of deviance, discipline, and punishment construct, set “parameters around social relations” that rationalize and excuse the “harm inflicted on those outside the scope of justice” (Tyner 2012: 10, Opotow 2001).
Notwithstanding children’s agencies in negotiating their place within the social and their relationships with others, Wells and Montgomery’s (2014) arguments above show the need to keep in focus the particular dependencies of children and the vulnerabilities that are reinforced if not solely produced by them (also see Katz and Barnetz 2014; Wyness 2000).
One of those dependencies consists of the fact that, in western societies, children who are abused in the home often have few other places to go, and perpetrators of domestic violence (against children and inmate partners) frequently use and increase this dependency by reinforcing home boundaries and isolating those they are abusing from others (including friends) and the “outside world.” As Katz and Barnetz (2014: 1038) note:Children need their parents to survive, i.e., to receive food, shelter and cloth, even during and after abuse. Therefore, they likely know that fighting with the abusive parent or attempting to run away may place their survival at risk... Another explanation is that these children have no place to go or are not strong enough to resist the parent.
Stanko (2003: 10) likewise draws attention to the restrictions placed on children’s ability to alter their home environments:
Children cannot alter their environments and homes easily. Children may experience frightening abuse at home and realise that other children do not suffer the way they do. Some children clearly know that in their home violence is rife but have little understanding about how to challenge these conditions of their personal lives. It is within these environments that young people learn that there are different rules for the use of violence in different settings.
The social marginalization of children and their normative placement in the home further heighten the risks they are exposed to as, in addition to isolation in the home, their voices are rarely heard and their experiences may be doubted by others in nondomestic contexts, such as in schools, communities, or extended families, where children may turn for support and/or where the need for intervention might otherwise be spotted.
While social constructions of home, family, and childhood can contribute to the silencing and sanctioning of child abuse, at the same time, it is important to recognize that they also constitute a resource for challenging it.
Thus, concerns about children’s vulnerabilities and dependencies underpin many critiques of corporal punishment and harsh disciplining. The difficulty that arises from this, however, is that discussions of children’s vulnerabilities and dependencies, while raising much needed attention to the relationship between generational power and child abuse, can unwittingly reconstruct universal images of childhood that retain little sense of the ways in which children live with and within contexts of abuse and of their diverse experiences and understandings. A similar tension between needing to name, recognize, and understand the positioning of children within family contexts and the impacts of child abuse, while steering clear from problematic universalizations and stigmatizations that constitute violations in and of themselves, is noticeable in current epidemiological and psychological research on the developmental consequences of childhood traumatization. It is to these that the chapter now turns in order to give an insight into existing research and understanding of the impacts of domestic violence and other forms of child maltreatment in the home.3