Building a better life — but not overnight

children. Moreover, these figures are much lower than the reality on the ground, as they only count reported cases. The National Agency for Equal Opportunities, the authority dealing with domestic violence, claims that between 2017 and 2021, 51,575 children, victims of domestic violence, received various social services in public institutions all over the country. (However, this statistic includes directly abused children, not just witnesses, as the authorities do not collect data separately.)

So we are certainly talking about tens of thousands of children; maybe even hundreds of thousands.

The country’s Agencies for Social Welfare and Child Protection, often bureaucratic and unreformed institutions, offer counselling services more to child witnesses whose mothers have taken refuge in shelters for victims. They have no systemic plans for long-term psychological support for those exposed to violence in families.

In addition, children in Romania are not allowed to undergo psychotherapy unless both parents give written consent if they have joint custody. And children exposed to domestic violence are not exempt from the rule, even if one of the parents who must give consent was the perpetrator.

“In theory, support programmes for child witnesses are a priority,” says Camelia Proca, director of A.L.E.G, which for four years has run a national network of support for survivors of violence. “In practice, we rarely work with them in psychological intervention, and the way we work differs from one county to another. There are social agencies where even in emergency shelters children do not receive therapy or other specialised interventions to help them process the violence they have witnessed or learn healthy coping mechanisms.”

Proca says there is a need for training in domestic violence for public service psychologists, right out of college, and further specialization. This is because “we are talking about services that should be free and accessible to any child in need, no matter where they live in Romania”.

The need for information that Proca speaks of reminds me of Elena, a 6-year-old girl, and her 8-year-old brother Ionu, who, in January 2021, saw their father stick a knife in their mother’s leg at a playground in Alexandria, a city in the south of Romania.

The little girl saw the blood flowing, cried, and waited for the ambulance. She felt fear for months, especially on the rare times her mother left the house alone. She still feels fear now, two years after the incident, not separated from her mother. She tells her a vehement “no” every time the woman, who also grew up in violence, tries to persuade her to play again at the scene of the incident.

Elena has twice been to counselling at the social public agency in her town. The mother, who accompanied her, says that the counsellors explained to the child that the father did not want to hurt her as well. Her brother, who witnessed the same incident, has been living with the abuser-father ever since, and neither justice nor social assistance could prevent this situation, even though it goes against the principles of healthy intervention, which states that children should not be left in the care of abusive parents.

I was reminded of the fear in this little girl’s eyes when I interviewed Monica, a 22-year-old girl who at the age of 5 had a similar experience to Elena’s. She saw her mother being abused and the police detaining her father. It happened in the early 2000s in Alcalá de Henares, a town near Madrid. They couldn’t make ends meet living in a village in the south of Romania, where the mother was a teacher and the father had lost his job, so they went to Spain to build a better life.

But the good life didn’t happen overnight. On the contrary, in the evenings the flat was filled with the father’s anger, swearing and hitting the mother. “The circus was starting,” Monica recalls. The mother called the police several times, and the father received two restraining orders and twice spent a night in custody.

One night, when she heard a loud noise, as if something had fallen, Monica came out of the room and saw her father trying to strangle her mother. “It was the most painful moment,” she says.

The second memory dates back to a day of trying to run away — the days where her mother tried to leave him. The father had been fired from work and was drunk, “in a pretty critical

When the father raised his hand to hit one of the children, the mother didn’t give him another chance. After her parents’ divorce, the fear she felt every time they met drove Monica away from him. She often refused to talk to him on the phone, but the phone kept ringing. Sometimes at night, waking them up, more often than not with a ruckus. In these conversations, the father would reproach Monica that the two of them, the children, were not his and he would curse the mother. At about 15, after one such Christmas phone call, she wrote how she felt in the form of a letter, addressed to her future children:

“I imagine myself 20 years from now at this exact moment, feeling anything but what I feel now. I hope that none of my actions will be too much regretted then, and I also hope that the beautiful picture I now have in my mind will be true - a beautiful and warm family where the parents are both normal. I’m finding it harder and harder to stand my father and he seems to intentionally ruin these moments. It’s painful how now I feel nothing but an idiotic combination of anger and disgust taken to the level of carelessness as a means of hiding it.”

A few hours after writing this in her diary, Monica covered it with a clear Christmas-themed wrap. She was ashamed of what she had written, ashamed of the anger she felt toward her father.

Today, she lives in Bucharest, works for an NGO and is in a relationship. She likes to dig through family stories in conversations with her mother. Therapy has been a goal on her list for several years and she hopes to find the courage to start it soon.

Looking back, Monica says that as a child, she would have needed a specialized person to help her deal with “the anger, the anxiety, and especially the responsibility I took on myself, voluntarily or involuntarily — to be a support for my mother, to be a parent to my brother, to take care of the feelings and quirks of the family on my father’s side.”

Socaciu is a public defender in cases of gender violence in the Madrid community and defends victims and perpetrators whenever necessary. 90% of domestic violence cases in the Madrid community, she says, happen in Romanian immigrant families. On average, every day there are five such cases of violence.

For Romania, Spain is a model country in the fight against gender violence. Just as it has special courts for such cases, it also has specialized gender violence counsellors in public social services, who provide longterm psychological support for child witnesses and their mothers. Here, domestic violence cases go ahead in court, even if victims withdraw their complaints; perpetrators get restraining orders that can last up to two years; some of these cases are monitored by electronic bracelets, and perpetrators are arrested and sentenced much more quickly.

Spain recently amended an article in its Civil Code that excludes the obligation for both parents to give their consent to psychological counselling for children who have experienced domestic violence, as witnesses or direct victims.

Diana Díaz, a psychologist at Spain’s Anar Foundation, which helps children at risk of abuse, says the change has had another positive effect. Judges specializing in gender violence have realized how important psychological counselling is for child witnesses and have started requiring