How Do Men in Treatment for Intimate Partner Violence Experience Parenting their Young Child? A Descriptive Phenomenolog
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
How Do Men in Treatment for Intimate Partner Violence Experience Parenting their Young Child? A Descriptive Phenomenological Analysis Henning Mohaupt 1,2,3
&
Fanny Duckert 1,2 & Ingunn Rangul Askeland 3
# The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Men who use intimate partner violence (IPV) often have challenges as caregivers such as poor understanding of children’s needs and emotions. There is little knowledge regarding their everyday-life experiences of being a parent. We interviewed 14 men in therapy for intimate partner violence on how they experienced their relationship to one of their children (mean age 4,5 years). We performed a descriptive phenomenological analysis. Informants seldom explored their children’s experience. They found that their fathering was influenced by past relationships and negative expectations for the future. The informants’ bodily experience of emotional arousal was described as difficult to control and understand and was a limited source for meaning making in the fatherchild relationship. The experience of being a good father was connected to presence and control of the child’s behavior. Informants felt that what they experienced as good parenting lacked others’ recognition. Interventions for partner-abusive men should address their fathering and focus on fathers’ life-experience and context as influencing their fathering. Therapeutic interventions should strengthen partner-abusive fathers’ awareness of and meaning making from their emotional arousal. Where safety permits, dyadic interventions aiming at re-establishing the child’s experience of safety in the father-child relationship should be considered by therapy providers as a complement to established interventions with partner-abusive men. Keywords Father-child relations . Intimate partner violence . Parenting representations . Phenomenology
Many men who seek help for their use of intimate partner violence (IPV) are fathers and have regular contact with their children (Askeland and Heir 2014). This has been a source for concern, for several reasons: fathers may use child contact to keep up dominance and control over the children’s mother (Bancroft et al. 2011). Coercive control of family members infringes children’s social life, development of a sense of self as social agents, and effectively teaches them that sharing thoughts and feelings of their own may be dangerous (Katz 2016). Living with IPV puts children at risk for physical and emotional abuse and correlates with negative mental health outcomes in children and adolescents (Lanius et al. 2013). * Henning Mohaupt [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
2
Alcohol and Drug Research Western Norway (KORFOR), Stavanger University Hospital, Stavanger, Norway
3
Alternative to Violence, Lilletorget 1, 0184 Oslo, Norway
Children are vulnerable for the effects of witnessing partner abuse as they often are exposed to multiple relational trauma (Stover et al. 2017), since male-to-female IPV correlates with fathers’ me
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