History of Services for Children who are Exposed to Violence

Until recently, most efforts to understand violence and its impact have focused on the direct victims and perpetrators of violence. Beginning in the late 1980's, however, a new body of research and practice developed, which focused on children who are bystanders to violence. It is now well established that these children, although not physically injured, may suffer lasting psychological harm. Often, their symptoms closely resemble those seen in the direct victims of violence.

The response to children exposed to violence has developed in two different arenas. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, community-based programs for battered women formed throughout the United States. Although the first priority of these programs was to provide resources and safety for adult victims, a few programs began to provide services to children. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence formed a Child Advocacy Task Force in 1982, which provided a means for networking and information sharing among shelter-based advocates for children. However, little public attention was brought to the issue at first. Innovative projects such as the AWAKE Project at Children's Hospital in Boston began to address the overlap of child abuse and domestic violence. In 1990, Peter Jaffe and colleagues published Children of Battered Women, describing both research and clinical experience on the range of difficulties faced by child witnesses to domestic violence.

Around the same time, researchers and activists around the country began to document the experiences of children exposed to chronic community violence in urban neighborhoods. Groundbreaking work was published in the late eighties and early nineties by James Garbarino and colleagues in Chicago, and Robert Pynoos and Spencer Eth in California, among others. In 1992, the Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center began to provide specialized mental health services to young children who had witnessed either domestic or community violence.