ABSTRACT
While the impact of exposure to domestic violence on children has been researched extensively since the early 1980s, the literatures on this subject continue to talk past one another in ways that are unhelpful. Much feminist commentary engages only with the early incarnations of psychological research, critiquing it for its gender blindness, methodological flaws, and determinism (Mullender, 1996). These shortcomings were certainly evident in some of the early psychological literature that took inspiration from Bandura’s (1971) social learning theory, but they are less true of later psychological research, much of which uses models of ‘transgenerational transmission’ that are alive to contingency and cautious about conflating correlation with cause (Black et al., 2009). Meanwhile, feminist approaches have evolved too. Conceptual frameworks that once elided the experiences of women and children are increasingly superseded by research that explores children’s agency in its own right (Alderson et al., 2013).
