Children exposed to their parent or carer’s experience of domestic violence
Children can be exposed to family violence within their home or in the community. Childhood exposure to violence can have a range of physical, emotional and social consequences, which may be long-lasting and may also increase the risk of the child experiencing or using family, domestic, or sexual violence in the future. Data on children exposed to their parent or carer’s experience of partner violence is available from the ABS Personal Safety Survey (PSS). This data is collected through parent or carer reports of a child hearing or seeing the violence.
The visualisation below shows the estimate and proportion of people, aged 18 and over, whose violence by a partner, since age 15, was ever heard or seen by children in their care. Around 2 in 3 women who had children in their care when they experienced previous partner violence, reported that the children had seen or heard the violence.
Partner violence seen or heard by children in care, by sex of parent/carer, 2016
Children exposed to their parent of carer's experience of domestic violence (42KB XLSX)Notes
- Data are based on adults who experienced partner violence and had children in their care at the time of the violence.
- The PSS defines a current partner as a person who, at the time of the survey, was living with the respondent in a marriage or de-facto relationship, and a previous partner as a person who lived with the respondent at some point in a marriage or de facto relationship, but who was no longer living with the respondent at the time of the survey.
The PSS collects information from women and men aged 18 years and over.
Survey data, obtained from a sample of the population, is subject to sampling error. Where estimates are subject to a level of sampling error too high for general use, they are not included in visualisations, but are included in data tables, with caveats.
The observed value of a rate may vary due to chance even where there is no variation in the underlying value of the rate. The margin of error is the largest possible difference (due to sampling error) that could exist between the estimate and what would have been produced had all persons been included in the survey. Confidence intervals – constructed by taking the estimate plus or minus the MoE – can be used to provide an approximate indication of the true differences between rates. If the confidence intervals do not overlap, the difference can be said to be statistically significant. However, statistically significant differences are not necessarily the same as differences considered to be of practical importance. Small differences that have practical importance may be found to be not statistically significant as they are below the threshold the significance test can reliably detect.
For more information see Methods, Glossary and Data sources.
Sources
ABS 2016 Personal Safety Survey
Next expected: 2022