Helping heal young minds
Of all the toy kitchen utensils on the table, the 4-year-old boy picked up the knife.
“This is like the knife in my dream,’ he told the University of California therapist. She was working with the child and his mother to help him stop biting and hitting his playmates and erupting into tantrums at the slightest frustration. She knew about the violence in the boy’s home but didn’t know about the knife.
When the boy was 3, his mother explained to the therapist, she had threatened the boy’s abusive father with a knife. The father was now out of their lives, and the mother thought the toddler was too young to have understood what had happened. So they had never talked about it.
The mother told her son that she was very angry at his father and apologized for what she did.
“But you get very angry at me, Mommy,’ the boy said.
He is one of the hidden victims of domestic violence, children whose brain function and behavior are profoundly affected by the violence they have witnessed. These victims are finding increasing support from the San Francisco district attorney and the California attorney general. And San Francisco is one of a growing number of police departments across the country that requires officers to include in domestic violence reports the names, ages and demeanor of any children present in the home.
But too often the lack of knowledge and understanding from law enforcement and the legal system is staggering, says Dr. Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who heads the Child Trauma Academy in Houston. He tells the story of police and paramedics responding to a home where a man had shot his wife. The woman’s children had stood by, stunned and splattered with their mother’s blood.
“What about the kids?’ the trauma counselor was asked.
“They’ll be OK,’ he said. “Kids are resilient.’
Researchers like Perry know that witnessing violence — particularly at home — actually changes the brains of young children. The neural systems that determine social interaction are laid down early in life, when the brain is most malleable; 90 percent of the core brain structures are organized by age 3.
If children learn from experience that their parents and their home aren’t safe, how can anyone or any place be safe? They perceive threats where there are none. They lash out at playmates. They lack the capability to bond with others. Their brain stems — which regulate fundamental functions like heart rate, body temperature, the fight-or-flight instinct — stay in a perpetual low-level state of alarm.
“There’s so much more we could be doing,’ said San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who has made domestic violence a key focus of her office. “But funding is a big problem.’
She said she wants to hire a psychologist to work with victims and with the deputy district attorneys so they are better equipped to address the complex problems of children in domestic violence cases.
“Abuse gets transmitted from one generation to the next,’ said Dr. Alicia Lieberman, director of San Francisco General’s Child Trauma Research Project. If we don’t treat these damaged children when they are young, Lieberman said, we are likely to see them in juvenile hall and then prison. They are likely to be abusers themselves as parents, thus perpetuating the cycle.
The boy with the knife dream spent 18 months in therapy with his mother at San Francisco General’s Child Trauma Research Project. He is 8 now and no longer lashing out. He is doing well in school. Until we can figure out how to rid the world of men who beat their wives, and women who beat their husbands, we have to figure out how to heal the children who watch it all.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].