Angel was about five or six years old when she first saw her dad hit her mom. She remembers seeing her mother’s face covered in blood after it collided with the side of their motorhome. She could hear the screams and cries of herself and her little sister.
This was the first time she remembers witnessing a violent interaction between her parents, but it certainly was not the last. Angel, now 27, and her two younger siblings grew up in a household that was often a battleground in which their father emotionally and physically abused their mother. Angel and her siblings are considered secondary survivors – or secondary victims – of domestic abuse.
Secondary survivors are individuals who experience trauma without being the direct target or recipient of abuse. Typically – and as in the case of Angel – secondary survivors of domestic violence are children who grow up in a household in which one parent is abusive toward the other. According to the National Center Against Domestic Violence, one in 15 children are exposed to intimate partner violence each year, 90% of whom are eyewitnesses to violence.
Leise Gergely is a resource advocate at My Sister’s Place, a D.C.-based organization that provides resources to survivors of domestic violence and their children. She has worked with secondary victims throughout her career.
“A survivor or victim – someone who’s experienced violence – isn’t just a single entity…They have people who are close to them,” she said in an interview over Zoom. Those who are close to the primary survivor often experience secondary trauma, often struggling to process what their loved one experienced.
Gergely said her clients’ children are often confused or unaware of the severity of their environment, yet still impacted by the violence in their home. Many children are caught in an internal conflict due to loving their parents while also witnessing the violence one inflicts on the other.
“It was so confusing with my dad because…when he was good, he was so good, and he was so fun to be around and so great,” Angel recalled in an interview. “But then when he was bad, it was really really bad.”
As the oldest of three, Angel remembers gathering up her siblings in their room and holding them when there was a blow-up or fight between her parents in another room. She tried to protect them as much as she could, which could be stressful at times.
For Angel and her siblings, this dynamic was normal. It was not until college when she began going to therapy and gradually educating herself with books and college seminars on the complexities of relationships that Angel realized what her mom had experienced was abuse. What she and her siblings witnessed was abuse.
“We very much knew that there [were] things going on, but it was almost normalized. Like, this is how relationships are and everybody fights – like, that’s what happens when you love somebody,” she said.
Who is a secondary survivor?
Many secondary survivors are children, but any close friend or relative of a victim can experience secondary trauma. The ways in which children react to this abuse, however, are drastically different from adults.
“Many adults who know somebody who’s experiencing domestic violence are more likely to blame the survivor themself,” said Gergely.
Adults are often unable to wrap their minds around why a victim does not just leave their abusive partner, which leads them to project frustration, anger and blame onto the victim.
“We see people who get to the point where they’re beyond wanting to help…and they’re no longer a resource for someone because [the abuse] has gone on for so long or it’s complicated their lives so much that they have set that boundary hard and fast,” said Kylie Hogan, director of the crisis intervention team at DC SAFE.
Children, on the other hand, often follow one of two extremes: self-blame and mimicking. Kids blame themselves more than adult secondary survivors, often feeling guilty and wondering if there was something they could have done to save their parent from experiencing abuse.
“I would just love to give my younger self compassion because there was a lot of self-blame growing up,” Angel said.
While some children act older than their age and step up to help their household, others regress because of the disruption in their lives. These children tend to feel and act younger than their age, Hogan explained in an interview.
“You might see kids that are three or four [years old] that you would expect to be potty trained, but aren’t yet because the chaos in the household is almost inhibiting their development,” she said.
Other kids, especially really young children, mimic the behavior they see. “One of the survivors that I’m working with is having a really difficult time because her young children saw their father be physically violent with her so they try to be [violent] too sometimes,” Gergely said.
Despite these extreme responses to trauma, there are limited resources available to address the specific needs of secondary survivors. This is largely due to a general lack of funding and education for victim services.
“If you think about the fact that providing services for victims as a whole is not something that has been a priority, it’s not surprising that [secondary survivors] fall into that same category,” Hogan said.
Some organizations in D.C. do offer family-oriented programs to help children who witness or experience abuse in their homes. House of Ruth, for example, has a Child Development Center that offers intergenerational therapy. This program works with children and their abused parent in order to resolve the child’s secondary trauma from its core.
“If [the parent] can’t help their children, then what we see – and have seen – are those children end up in similar situations…It’s a repeating cycle [and] that’s why I’m so intent on making sure that we address that generational trauma,” said Sandra Jackson, House of Ruth’s president.
Despite this center, Jackson knows most organizations do not have the bandwidth to provide such robust treatment for children, let alone adult secondary survivors.
“It’s very expensive to do what we do and there’s only so much money out there…if we didn’t raise our funding ourselves to some degree, we would not be able to do the amount of work that we do,” Jackson said.
COVID-19 exasperating issues at home
The COVID-19 pandemic was especially impactful for victims of domestic abuse. According to a study by the Council on Criminal Justice, domestic violence incidents in the U.S. increased by 8.1% following the pandemic’s lockdown orders. The pandemic also exacerbated pre-existing housing issues, especially in Washington, D.C., which uniquely impacted victims of domestic abuse. For example, DC SAFE reported such a dramatic increase in calls for domestic violence services that they decided to build a new shelter that will double its old shelter’s capacity.
Dr. Tifphane Riley has over 20 years of experience in the social services field and is now Deputy Chief of Programs at Sasha Bruce, an organization that provides services to youth in D.C. to find safe homes and strengthen family relationships. In addition to an increase in requests for services, she said the pandemic caused more children to recognize how their social environment impacted their mood.
The pandemic was especially hard for children with unstable homes who lost most of their social and extracurricular opportunities due to lockdown orders.
“[Kids] never realized how draining dinner time was, because they had been so busy with sports teams and clubs,” Riley said, discussing how the pandemic changed family dynamics.
Whereas before the pandemic, kids’ time and thoughts were preoccupied with school, sports or social activities, the pandemic woke many children up to the abuse that had been surrounding them.
“They were thrown into these conversations that they didn’t want to be a part of. They were there to bear witness to the arguing of their parents. They were there to, essentially, be someone who was gaslit about feeling uncomfortable about all the yelling, whereas typically they wouldn’t have even been home to hear some of that,” she said.
Aftermath
After moving from home and attending college, Angel now advocates for other survivors in her career. She creates and conducts training for people who are working with survivors and helps victims find resources at an organization in Maryland.
She said that she does not come into a lot of contact with other secondary survivors in her work and reported a gap in services that specifically treat the needs of secondary survivors, consistent with what other sources reported.
“There needs to be more resources out there,” she said.
Growing up, Angel was so focused on keeping herself and her siblings safe that she never really processed what she was going through. Now, as adults, she and her sister talk about their childhood, trying to piece together their experiences. It is validating in a way, she explained, to share similar memories with her sister.
“No child should have to be shielding their sibling from fights at home and nobody should have to go through this growing up. It was really hard,” she said.
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