Beyond Voice: Conceptualizing Children’s Agency in Domestic Violence Research Through a Dialogical Lens

Abstract

Children who live in households where domestic violence is occurring have been variously described in the literature over time as silent witnesses, witnesses, a cohort who is “exposed” to the violence, and more recently, as individual victim survivors and active agents in their own right, each with their own lived experience of violence. Research methodologies in this arena have shifted from adult-focused measurements of the impacts of domestic violence on children to more qualitative attempts to understand the experience from the child’s perspective. In doing so, there have been notions of giving “voice to the voiceless” and doing no further harm through a desire to protect children from ex..