Statistics

National Data on Intimate Partner Violence

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How Domestic Violence Affects Children


From 2001 to 2005, children under age 12 were living in 38% of households with a female IPV victim and 21% of households with a male victim.38


Studies find a 30% – 60% overlap between child maltreatment and IPV.39


Children exposed to IPV experience problems like those of children who have been abused.

  • Some experience trauma-related anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.
  • Others engage in fighting, bullying, lying, cheating, and disobedience.
  • They are more likely than other children to have difficulty in relationships with others, and poor school performance.
  • They learn attitudes leading to violent behavior, and are more likely to engage in violence in the community.40
  • Pre-school children suffered more often from bed-wetting, nightmares, post-traumatic stress symptoms, allergies, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, headaches and flu.41
  • Adolescents were more likely to attempt suicide, abuse drugs or alcohol, run away from home, engage in delinquent behavior or prostitution, and commit sexual assault crimes.42

An abusive man’s relationship to a child affects the child’s well-being directly, not just by way of its negative impact on the mother.43


Violence by a father or stepfather had a greater impact on a child than violence by a partner of the mother who played a minimal role in the child’s life.44


The effects of IPV may be buffered by the presence of protective adults within the family and outside it, especially the child’s mother, and by the child’s own ways of coping.45


Next: Intimate Partner Violence in the Criminal Courts



  1. Catalano et al, (2009). op.cit.

  2. Edleson, J. L. (1999a). The overlap between child maltreatment and woman battering. Violence Against Women, 5(2), 134-154.

  3. Edelson, J.L. (2006). Emerging Responses to Children Exposed to Domestic Violence (Summarizes many years of research.), VAWNET, National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women.
  4. Graham-Bermann, S.A. & Seng, J. (2005). Violence exposure and traumatic stress symptoms as additional predictors of health problems in high-risk children. Journal of Pediatrics. 146(3):309-10.
  5. Research summarized in Wolfe, D.A. et al. (1995). Strategies to address violence in the lives of high risk youth. In Peled, E., Jaffe, P.G., & Edleson, J.L., (Eds.) Ending the Cycle of Violence: Community Responses to Children of Battered Women. New York: Sage Publications.

  6. Sullivan, C.M., et al (2000). How children's adjustment is affected by their relationships to their mothers' abusers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 15 (6), 587-602, summarizing research that largely looks at how the impact of domestic violence on the mother’s mental health affects the children.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Edelson, J.L., (2006). Op.cit.