ABSTRACT
Concern over violence in residential care for children during the last 30 years has surfaced as the subject of media attention mainly in relation to individual and/or institutional physical and sexual abuse of residents by their adult supposed ‘carers’. Examples include the Staffordshire ‘pindown’ regime, in which children were routinely humiliated by staff (Levy and Kahan 1991), and more recently the North Wales judicial inquiry, which investigated over 250 reports against staff in residential children’s homes from as far back as the 1970s, confirming widespread physical and sexual abuse (Waterhouse 2000). However, while accounts of (institutional) adult-child abuse often reach the headlines and shape our perception of violence as something that adults do to children, recent research into children in residential care indicates that young people may be significantly more at risk of physical and sexual violence from other residents than from staff. This is possibly due to the fact that UK children’s homes now frequently accommodate children of varying ages with very challenging behaviour and diverse and conflicting needs (ibid.) – a finding that resonates with recent research, which argues that abuse outside the home most commonly involves boyfriends and fellow pupils rather than adults (Cawson et al. 2000). However, given the possible effect that this may have upon the climate of violence between children, and a number of reminders within wider studies of children in residential care, which state that bullying and peer violence are a common feature of residential life (Sinclair and Gibbs 19981), children’s experience of peer violence has received little attention and even less understanding (Barter 1997) – an absence and imbalance that our research has aimed to redress.
