The effects of exposure to violence
When her husband was shouting and calling Irina to account for the rotten tomatoes, Maria stood up. She got between her parents and started screaming. Her mother thought of telling her that it was nothing serious, just adult play. “Seeing me calm, she calmed down too.” That’s how the conflict ended that night. But it remains a memory that Irina revisits when she thinks about the tense environment in which Maria grew up.
A year later, after her husband gave her first slap, Irina decided to leave. Fear never left her. She didn’t call the police, because she feared that “by the time the police came, I wouldn’t be [alive] anymore.” But she planned her packing and left in the dark at 3a.m. with the baby in her arms. For a while they stayed with her mother. But for a few months the man wouldn’t leave them alone and would yell at their door at night. After Irina got a restraining order in court, things calmed down and a divorce followed.
In a family, violence is not something that happens once or ends overnight. Victims try to leave abusive
In early childhood, from 0 to 6 years old, children are aware of everything that happens around them, especially in their relationships with the most important adults in their lives: their parents.
Diana Vasile, a psychotherapist and president of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Trauma, explains: “The child’s psychological system registers every trace of tension precisely in order to try to resolve it. It happens as early as in the womb, when we move to find a more comfortable position in the mother’s womb. Babies cry to find solutions when they want to eat, fall asleep or be changed.”
When toddlers hear screaming around them, see tension on their parents’ faces, they learn to live in constant fear. This constant fear produces changes in the parts of the brain that are involved in processing it. American psychiatrist
Young children don’t have many solutions to cope with traumatic experiences, says Vasile. They can hide, they can get between parents, they can scream. But the level of helplessness and mental tension is profoundly felt in their bodies and “these experiences set the ground for the reorientation of the self-regulatory mechanisms that help us maintain our physical and mental health. And that’s when we go into emergency mechanisms. To stop feeling that mental tension, we numb ourselves, we disconnect
problems are caused by the parental tension she witnessed when she was so young. Sometimes, she answered herself, thinking that Maria had just turned two when they ran away from home, so maybe she didn’t realise what was going on.
Stuck with divorce and custody proceedings, Irina couldn’t find time to talk to anyone about it. Then came the pandemic, at an overwhelming pace for a single mother. Around the same time, her mother, who was still helping her with Maria, became ill with cancer. She was on cytostatic and now she needed her daughter’s help.
Irina worked from home as an engineer for an automotive company, and Maria had started online school. Like any child in the pandemic, stuck in the house, she was always asking her mother for something. With endless online meetings and times when she needed to concentrate, Irina couldn’t always cope with the unstoppable “mummy, mummy, mummy”. One day, when her strength was gone, she locked Maria in her bedroom. The little girl banged her hands and feet on the door and screamed. “I was talking to her and she was screaming and couldn’t hear what I was saying.”
way, Pop adds, the chances increase that these children will offer or accept such love. “These are behaviours picked up by learning, by modelling, from the adults around them.”
Two years ago, HHC also had a support programme for 41 child witnesses in three cities. Interventions focused on removing the abuser by finding alternative accommodation for mothers and children and covering rent and monthly needs.
Such NGO programs are drops in the ocean and do not reach all children. Pop says the state should provide long-term therapeutic support, ideally through the already existing circuit of family doctors. An emotional health problem such as domestic violence should be addressed through a family health programme.