Vicarious violence: because ignorance prevents children from being adequately protected

In the night between Thursday 11 and Friday 12 May, 5-year-old Chloé was killed by her father, in a pre-existing context of domestic violence. A week before her, her mother had petitioned the Nanterre family court, which finally issued a protective order hours before the murder, preventing the man from contacting his ex-girlfriend and transferring the parental authority exclusively to the mother.

In a series of tweets about the case, the Collectif Enfantiste recalled that “ children are direct victims, objects of torture in domestic violence “. Chloe’s infanticide even stems from a specific type of violence, little known yet widespread: the ” vicarious violence “. What exactly is it? Illumination.

What is vicarious violence?

In an Instagram post dated May 16, 2023, We All and the Collectif Enfantiste define them thus: “ Indirect violence is the use of children as an object of pressure, blackmail and/or torture in order to possess the victim and to exert violence on her through children. This violence often occurs during separations or after separations because the children then become the only link between the abuser and his victim.And”.

The child then becomes a tool to perpetuate the cycle of domestic violence. This can take various forms: psychological, physical, sexual violence (such as incest), abandonment, infanticide.

Where does this term come from?

This term comes from the Spanish: vacant violence “. We owe it to the Argentine psychologist Sonia Vaccaro, who has been studying this type of violence in Spain since 2012. On the other side of the Pyrenees, the word is therefore already part of the official vocabulary. It was incorporated in 2017 into the State Pact Against Violence In 2021, when a double infanticide shocked the country, the Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez, as well as his government, used it in various official speeches, underlining its inclusion in a continuum of violence: “ Vicarious violence is a male violence doubly savage and inhuman, as it seeks to cause pain not only to the woman, but also to her children “.

Are we talking about “vicarious violence” in France?

In France, the term is not officially recognized, like our colleagues from TV5 World :

The vicarious trauma is used in the case of a trauma that affects care, rescue, listening, intervention or witness personnel (social workers, humanitarians, journalists, first responders, etc.) who, all day long, are confronted with the suffering of others and have developed an empathy for them. Confronting the victims’ traumatic experience can have cumulative effects and manifest as depression. In the statistics of the French Ministry of the Interior, gender-based violence by proxy, which affects children in order to inflict extreme psychological harm on the mother, is found under the name ” infanticide in the context of a couple conflict without any member of the couple being the victim“.

TV5 Monde, “Vicarious” violence: making children suffer to reach their mothers. 05 JUL. 2021

According to We All and the Collectif Enfantiste, this lack of recognition stems from the fact that ” being the child the direct victim, our institutions do not make the connection with domestic violence and deny violence against children by accusing parents of exercising parental conflict “. This misconception creates terrible loopholes in the protection of children.

Is there any data on the subject?

According to the Ministry of the Interior, 14 minor children died in 2021 at the hands of one of the parents in a context of violence within the couple. Furthermore, an estimated 398,310 children in France are co-victims of domestic violence. Finally, according to UNICEF, one in four children under 5 now lives with a mother who is a victim of intimate partner violence.

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