Children the victims as fatal pressures mount

This week a two-year-old girl was stabbed by her father, becoming the 20th child to die at the hands of a parent in the past 20 months. Another father was sentenced for head-butting his infant, causing 85 per cent brain damage.

We're too shocked to be shocked - and shock brings denial about the true extent of social breakdown.

"It's very dangerous to be a child here in Ireland - which flies in the face of how we see ourselves," says Owen Keenan, chief executive of Barnardo's.

Family breakdown, violence in the media and parents' inability to control their anger are a potent mix.

There are many people who, due to upbringing and, sometimes, psychiatric problems, cannot control their impulses, says Dr Paul McQuaid, a child psychiatrist.

Other psychiatrists and psychologists agree that hurt, confusion and lack of control are explosive, especially when alcohol and drug abuse are thrown into the mixture.

Prof Patricia Casey of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mater Hospital says: "Temporary relationships are breeding instability and insecurity. So children don't have role models of emotionally stable parenting relationships or behaviour from which they can learn."

But while these theories are new, children being killed and injured in family violence is not new.

We have a long history of refusing to face the reality of family violence.

In the 1970s, Dr McQuaid and colleagues were so concerned that children were dying at the hands of their parents that they wrote a letter to The Irish Times.

They had evidence that young children were being killed, but the deaths were not being recorded as homicides in coroners' reports.

Their letter got not one whisper of reaction.

Privately, many professionals disbelieved the allegation.

"There was a level of denial," says Dr McQuaid. "Up to the early 1980s, Irish society was coming out of the Victorian age. It was compartmentalised and stratified all sorts of things, including death by violence. Killing children wasn't something that happened in civilised society. Like suicide was until recently, the killing of children was hidden in the statistics."

The statistics are chilling.

In 1970, four children died from assault and 59 children under the age of one died from accidents, poisoning and violence.

A total of 106 children under five died, 49 aged five to nine and 52 aged 10-14 died in this way.

These were the official verdicts but within these statistics, further homicides may have been concealed.

Since then, the deaths of children dying from "accidents" - which are directly related to poverty and single motherhood - have declined dramatically as in the rest of the rich countries of the Western world.

But with the new century, the homicide epidemic is exposing our continued reluctance to face the fact that family life has, with the new century, become more dangerous than ever before.

"The degree of cover-up by both men and women who are treated violently is considerable because there are insufficient mechanisms in society to help people," says Marie Murray, director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.

Help brings disclosure. Last year, the Donegal Women's Refuge stated that they were seeing women in their 40s, who for 20 years had been abused by their partners but had felt they had no right to complain.

Two years ago, an education programme on abuse for Accident and Emergency staff resulted in a threefold increase in the rate of detected family violence.

When the Adapt refuge in Tralee, Co. Kerry, ran an information campaign, the number of women suffering from violence in the home who came to them for help, increased from 82 to 450 in one year.

Anger moves in families from generation to generation, detonating like a grenade of repressed anguish when relationships fracture.

Says McQuaid: "It's always gone on in certain parts of society, where violence is used as a way of communicating and settling disputes. Violence is a short-circuiting of the thinking/behavioural cycle.

"Its a bit like a thunderstorm - violence relieves the tension, but it may cause more thunder. A child is crying, or a baby is fretful, and the parent suffers a sudden loss of control, resulting in an attack."

In McQuaid's view, we need to help people, from their earliest years, to cope with anger.

Murray agrees: "We have to accept that there are people with serious individual psychopathology, poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance and morbid jealousy who are subject to explosive outbursts based on minimal or no provocation. We need resources to treat these people."

Dr McQuaid believes that in self-help programmes, both members of a couple should be involved in learning to control anger, since one may act in a way which provokes the other.

"Men are innately more aggressive, so when their role is challenged, unless they have good skills they may resort to violence. Men are getting a rough time in the courts and many feel very angry," says Prof Casey.

Murray agrees that the "archaic and adversarial" legal system must be changed, but she also warns: "We must not make this a gender issue, or a war of semantics and statistics - it's about families.

Violence in the home, whatever its cause, is a serious assault on family life for all family members, whether they be perpetrators, participants or witnesses.

It is not just a couple's problem and needs intervention at the widest level."

Families in the midst of breakdown need to be supported by a multidisciplinary professional team to assess individual and family needs, before they are legally ratified, she believes.

"In a Utopia, we would have education and preventive services.

"Any time a family member called garda∅ for help due to violence, there would be mandated attendance for family therapy to explore the extent of the problem."

The children with broken bones, adolescents who have to run away, elderly abused wives with bruised faces, men silenced by shame - these are the people afraid to look for help as long as we deny the reality of anger, family breakdown and alcohol and drug abuse.