The key findings that emerge from this study are presented as the following themes: Direct and indirect experiences of FV, Roles played by participants during violent incidents, Differential experience, engagement and role of participants’ siblings, Accessing supports during FV, and The impact of FV on children.

 

Direct and Indirect Experiences of Family Violence

We use the terms direct and indirect to describe different types of violence experienced by participants. Direct violence connotes violence that participants were subjected to in their childhood, and indirect violence connotes participants witnessing violence directed toward their mothers. The findings revealed that while some participants experienced direct violence from either or both parents, others experienced indirect violence, their mothers being the target of direct violence.

Participants experienced many forms of direct violence: verbal, physical, psychological, sexual, and religious. The following excerpts describe acts of violence participants experienced and their impact on them.

Adriana recounted how acts of direct violence, in the form of verbal abuse, emerged:

It would happen mainly when there [was] something . . . I have done something that they might not have approved of, and thus they would react to my actions with, you know, physically beating me and then my father would go on to blame my mother for my actions, and thus they would start an argument because of me. . . . I come from a very conservative family . . . and they would use a lot of things like “you will burn in hell” and that sort of thing to sort of scare me into, you know, obeying what they believed was acceptable into their culture; everything in my life was controlled.

Adriana experienced verbal abuse when she acted in ways her parents felt were contrary to their religion. Her mother was the source of much of the verbal abuse:

She said that I was the child of the devil and that my head was being controlled with demons, and that would be used a lot . . . beating me and my mother brutalizing me emotionally with words such as, you know, “I hope you burn in hell.” It’s very important to understand that in that family’s cultural set[ting], it’s like the use of fear technique was very much used in things like, “I hope you burn in hell, I don’t understand why God even created you; you are a disgrace to us” . . . in this scenario, it’s mostly the use of religion, you know, the comparison between the disobedient child and demons, and saying that demons are controlling my head and that sort of thing.

Adriana’s father stalked her and even controlled her while she was living away from home, attending school:

I was constantly [terrified that my father would find me]. . . . There was one incident that . . . happened. . . . I was getting off the school bus, and I was walking home, and then obviously he had found out from somewhere that I was taking this school bus. . . . Anyways he was hiding in a bush. I did not see him, I put on my headphones, and I was walking home, and then all of a sudden, I start hearing my friend calling my name and shouting, and then I take off my headphones, and I look back and I [saw] my dad running towards me and my friend [was] running after him trying to . . . stop him. And then I just start[ed] running, I [froze] for a second, I think, because I just panic[ed], and then he catches up to me, and then he starts holding me and pulling me and saying let’s go home. . . . They took away my phone, they took away my case, they took away everything, and they took away my passport.

The psychological violence transitioned into physical violence on another occasion when both parents attacked Adriana in her new home:

There was one time in December 2018 . . . I opened the door [to my room] . . . and [my parents] grabbed me, and then they start[ed] . . . dragging me from the seventh floor to the first floor. I tried to run, but I couldn’t. I was wearing a necklace . . . around my neck, so my mother starts pulling the necklace around my neck, almost choked me, and I realized, you know what, they’re not gonna let me go. I’m not gonna be able to escape because two of them are pulling me and dragging me, so I just didn’t move, I just played dead, you know, and I started screaming, I started screaming, “Help, help, call the police” and my neighbours were obviously all very, you know shocked . . . my neighbours gathered around us, you know Chinese people, they gathered around us, and obviously none of them understood, you know, the swearing was in Arabic, you know, so none of them understood what was going on so I was always screaming in Chinese, you know, “Call the police, call the police,” and one of them finally, I’ll never forget this, one of them, you know, held my father’s arm as he was, you know, hitting me, and told him, you know, “You can’t do this.” . . . And for a while, for about a month after that or two weeks, I was living at different people’s houses because I was too scared to go back to my place. I would eventually, after a month, find a new place to live, and I would go back and sleep at night to my old place just in case anyone was watching the place. So I would pack all my things, empty the place, and return the keys to the landlord, and go to [a] new place.

Adriana’s narrative provides a glimpse into the severe physical, emotional, verbal, and religious abuse and coercive control she experienced from her parents. The father exercised his influence and power in many ways to control and abuse Adriana, and her mother colluded with him. Her mother desperately tried to convince Adriana to change her path, citing religious teachings and expressing fear of the eventual damnation of Adriana’s eternal soul.

Maya shared her experiences of both direct and indirect violence:

They [parents] came to Canada when they were like teenagers . . . that’s how they met, then they got together so for them it was like a choice to get married, rather than they were compelled to. My mom’s family didn’t want her to get married, and my dad’s family didn’t want him to get married . . . there were like multiple issues. So mostly, it was caste issues, and then it was financial issues. . . . Both of them graduated high school, but neither of them went to college or post-secondary . . . there were still arguments because of things like caste. . . . My dad would hit my mom, right, so hitting, using like whatever he had in his hands, kicking her. . . . I remember seeing him jump on her . . . so I stopped him, and I pushed him off . . . sometimes, like when there was a fight, he would be escorted off by officers. And, or, like, I think only once he actually got arrested, but then other times he would just leave.

Maya’s excerpt reveals several factors contributing to a strained relationship between her parents. First, they were from different castes. Second, the excerpt highlights the struggle of new immigrants caught between attaining a higher level of education and earning income for survival.

In addition to witnessing violence, Maya talked about her experience of being abused by her mother. Recalling her situation, she said,

I didn’t like my mom, either, growing up, I guess, because she would say emotionally manipulative things like, Oh, “if I didn’t have you guys, and you know I’d be free.” All this stuff, which I remember vividly, and she still says stuff like that nowadays. . . whatever abuse she got from my dad, she would just throw it back at us. So she was physically and emotionally abusive, and then it just got worse in high school . . . because that’s when the gambling happened . . . it made it worse because she would leave me alone to watch my siblings, so I had to like, leave school; I couldn’t hang out with friends or anything, or I couldn’t do extracurriculars. . . . I don’t remember there being a key . . . so I would have to go through the window first . . . then open the door so then when my siblings came home . . . I had to learn how to start cooking [and] things like laundry and cleaning the house so it looks proper.

The above excerpt highlights the physical and emotional abuse Maya experienced at the hands of her mother, the downloading of the responsibility of looking after her siblings and its impact on her academics. It also reveals the pattern of abuse as a transfer of abuse.

Chiairo watched her stepfather abuse her mother physically and emotionally. In addition, his controlling and abusive behaviour also jeopardized Chiairo’s safety:

I think probably the most obvious way early on to notice was, was that he was very controlling. . . . He didn’t like when my, my mom, you know, left the house without him, knowing where and who she was with, and didn’t want her to drive. . . . At one point, he really got upset when, when she wanted to go anywhere by herself, or when my mom spent time with friends, he would get upset . . . a lot of isolating behaviour. . . . When he was upset, he would act in ways that sometimes jeopardized our lives . . . he would drive, really, really dangerously. About a decade into their relationship . . . my mom finally told me that he sometimes hit her and grabbed [her]. My elder sister once witnessed him dragging her out of a room.

This excerpt illustrates aspects of Chiairo’s stepfather’s coercive and emotional control by isolating her mother and family members from their networks, his physical abuse, and his reckless behaviour to instill fear in family members. Chiairo’s mother kept the physical abuse a secret for a long time until Chiairo was older.

In addition to the impact of interpersonal violence, Chiairo’s story offers a glimpse of how racism played a role in family violence:

I think part of the reason that I was so adamant about no one knowing that he [stepfather] existed, let alone what was happening . . . my mom’s husband . . . was White . . . and I think race also played . . . a role . . . in that relationship of control and violence. He did say a number of racist things throughout our lives . . . comments about . . . the way my grandparents spoke, or comments about family members, and like the observance of certain cultural traditions, or comments [about] my mom’s friends or relationships within the community. . . . I think part of it was born out of like this feeling of exclusion . . . he sensed a sense of community and connection there, he wanted to isolate her from it, and so he was like incredibly critical of a number of people in the community and some of that was under-handed comments about people’s . . . education . . . and intelligence.

Viktor is the eldest of three siblings. His mother escaped from their home with three children when he was very young. As a child, Viktor witnessed verbal and physical violence directed toward his mother and sometimes toward himself and his siblings. Talking about the violence, Viktor said,

I feel that [FV] always causes a sense of unease because you never know when the next event is gonna blow up. You feel like it’s sort of like a time bomb or like it’s only a matter of fact, the next incident occurs. . . . I forget exactly when we actually left, like the exact year, but [I remember the violence] . . . it would be arguments and physical. It was not uncommon for him to get physical at all, be it on either my mother or any of me and my siblings. . . . Those arguments and fights and all that stuff have stemmed from other things that weren’t really related to us usually, but it did spread to us as well, and as a child, it did change our sort of mindset to be like I don’t want to get punished.

Viktor’s experience captures a child’s emotions and fears when navigating an abusive environment. He talked about his feelings of uncertainty, of always feeling uneasy and on edge, of never really knowing when the next incident would occur. Viktor’s story draws attention to the harm caused to children who live in constant fear in an abusive home; it highlights how fear and abuse rob children of their childhood.

Jasmine recounted that while growing up, there were often verbal arguments between her parents. Their frustration and anger were not only directed toward each other but also at Jasmine:

Once we came to Canada, we were in close quarters, I also have a younger brother, and we lived in a small apartment, the four of us together, and I remember that’s when it became extremely difficult because I would see them fighting and everything . . . mostly petty arguments. Sometimes it would get very loud. I would say verbally violent. . . . I remember before we came to Canada . . . I remember my dad’s side of the family. They were very controlling of my mother. . . . My father also had a habit of trying to buy our love, you know. If he would really attack my character or make me feel terrible, I remember one day, both my mom and my dad were scolding me so much about my grades that I was literally covering my face in a corner in the fetal position, just crying, asking them to stop like I was begging them to just stop.

Many of the participants in this study witnessed severe violence between their parents. In every case, the father directed this violence toward the mother. Two participants, Abi and Sandiran, interviewed individually, are siblings, with Abi three years older. After having a very rocky relationship while growing up, they have realized the reason and are now rebuilding it. Interestingly, even though they witnessed the same violence, their perspectives differ. As indicated in the excerpt below, while Abi shares her mother’s response to the abuse by her husband, in Sandiran’s narrative, this information is missing. Abi recounts witnessing the violence:

My father has an illness . . . because of his illness, he kind of . . . took out his [fears] . . . on my mom. And my mom didn’t have anybody. . . . She was also angry at my father for not doing his role as a husband and father, so there was tension in that sense, so my father was angry with my mother for something, and my mother was angry with my father. . . . I think what happened was upon arriving in Canada . . . his illness either got worse or was to the point where it was identifiable. I think in Sri Lanka, maybe he already had the illness, but he was able to suppress it, and he was able to go on being pretty functional. But upon arriving in Canada, and I guess with the different stressors, he ended up, he ended up not doing as well.

Abi’s experience shows how her father’s battle with a mental illness strained his relationship with his wife and children. Abi’s parents’ relationship seems stressful because her father did not fulfill his family role. Abi speculated that her father’s illness became identifiable upon their arrival and settlement in Canada as different stressors were introduced in his life. Abi hinted at the settlement challenges experienced by racialized immigrants in this country, which her father could not manage, exacerbating his mental illness.

While Abi shed light on the causes of FV, Sandiran provided a graphic picture of the nature of the violence in their home:

My dad has paranoid schizophrenia . . . because of the traumas he’d gone through during the war and how that affected his life. That’s why he would go to beat my mother, and so we would have to kind of, like, pull him out. Like, harm him in some ways so that he could stop harming my mother. . . . My dad also has another co-morbidity that’s related to his schizophrenia, and he was at least a very, very heavy alcoholic, and we took his alcohol away from him because we had no other option. He also became violent because he didn’t have access to money. . . . [My mom] would sleep in our bedroom because at night my dad would come in to beat her . . . taking my mom’s head and slamming it. . . . I’m sure I had a heightened sense of stress, and I think I’m bringing in my medical background here and a heightened sense of a heightened level of cortisol . . . it was just normalized over the course of our lives.

The above excerpts highlight the importance of support for people who have experienced war trauma and new immigrants who have settled in Canada. Sandiran’s reference to the normalization of violence, when it occurred regularly at home, signals the importance of preventive services for immigrants from war-affected regions. Sandiran’s description also highlights the significance of taking proactive steps to minimize and respond to the physical violence of her father.

Maria shared her experience witnessing physical, verbal, and financial abuse towards her mother while growing up. Maria was very aware that her father was violent towards her mother:

He used to beat her [or] hit her. . . . For the verbal abuse, he used a lot of bad words—cursing, yelling, degrading who she was as a woman. Financially, he was never a good provider . . . and if it wasn’t for her having a place [that she rented], she wouldn’t have had an income.

Maria’s father’s violence had a negative impact on multiple aspects of her life. She witnessed her father degrading and disrespecting her mother and abusing her verbally, physically, and financially. Like other participants’ fathers, Maria’s father left it to Maria’s mother to provide for the family.

Samantha’s mother escaped from Pakistan with Samantha as an infant and sought refuge in Ontario. However, the mother returned to Pakistan when Samantha was five years old and escaped again three years later when their domestic situation did not improve. Samantha recollected witnessing violence while they were in Pakistan:

My mother, she tried to again and again to go back and live with my father [because of financial and cultural pressures], but she was unable to . . . establish [a] relationship with him . . . or the brief amount of time that we lived with my father, there was always a lot of financial, physical, emotional abuse. . . . The yelling and fighting would start in the morning . . . because my father was very short-tempered. . . . I think the physical [abuse] . . . when I would see it happen was difficult. . . . My parents only lived together . . . for three years in total . . . [and] have four children together . . . All of the domestic violence and the custodial issues took place in [Pakistan], but there were a lot of implications that happened in Canada. . . . I lived in [Pakistan] till I was about four or five, and then I came to Canada with my mother and all my siblings were left behind in Pakistan because of the custody issue. . . . To this day, all three of my siblings still live in⁴ [Pakistan], and I grew up here [in Canada] . . . we don’t really know each other or anything. They have no relationship with my mother because they’ve always been taught to be against her. . . . It’s not their fault; it’s just what they’ve been taught over the years . . . it’s a very fractured dynamic in our family, resulting from the domestic abuse, the very controlling nature [of] my father.

The “fractured dynamic” Samantha described is present in several participants’ stories wherein FV has impacted relationships between family members – parents and children and also among children. Samantha’s story highlights the long-term impact of abuse and separation from her children on her mother’s mental health, who developed schizophrenia later in life. Samantha has played a caretaker role for her mother, while her siblings live with the misunderstanding that their mother abandoned them. From Samantha’s point of view, her mother could not bring her siblings to Canada because of custody issues and immigration policies and procedures.

Samantha also suggests that the factors that pushed her mother to reunite with her husband after deciding to leave were financial and cultural. This points to the stigma and isolation experienced by divorced/separated women in certain cultures.

Sonia described witnessing verbal, emotional, and physical violence directed toward her mother by her father and his family. She recalled the relationship between her parents, who immigrated from India, as follows:

My parents have always not really gotten along. It was an arranged marriage, so it wasn’t by choice; they didn’t really know each other. And since day one, my mom has always had conflicts or tensions with my dad’s side of the family. When they immigrated to Canada, those tensions . . . just got worse. I was around 10 when I saw a physical event happen between them . . . my dad pushed my mom down the stairs . . . she had rug burns, all the way down her arms, her forearms. . . . When they came to this country, they didn’t really have anything to get good jobs with, and my dad started off as like a cab driver and then made his way into trucking, so he’s a truck driver now, and my mom, she’s primarily worked in like factories her entire life. . . . And I think that I’m sure [finances] played a factor.

Although her parents did not explicitly say so, Sonia knew that her parents had conflicts from her childhood. Like Samantha, Sonia stated that her mother faced emotional abuse from her father’s family. Similar to Maya’s situation, Sonia’s case also highlights how financial stress increased tensions at home that contributed to transforming a home into a violent space.

Anita witnessed verbal arguments between her parents that often revolved around their daughters’ futures. Her parents lived in a Middle Eastern country and decided to immigrate to Canada. Anita described the situation as follows:

The fights I’ve seen were more about our future, about moving, about giving us a better life. My mom wanted to come here because we still lived in [a Middle Eastern country], and my mom saw that there’s no future for [her daughters]. My dad did not like the Western culture, so [he disagreed]. [Friends and relatives] would tell both of my parents that Western culture isn’t good, your daughters are, in fact, not kids, your daughters, and I’m emphasizing daughters because there is always a gender difference. Their fights would end up [with them] not talking to each other for a few days or even weeks.

Anita’s experiences reveal a cultural factor that can lead to tension in immigrant families—the fear of daughters assimilating into western culture. The tension between Anita’s parents reflects gender-based discrimination in many cultures, where girls are expected to carry the burden of cultural preservation. Anita’s mother fought to get her daughters out of a constraining environment to an environment that provided more opportunities for them. Her mother sought help from her sister, who lived in Toronto and supported their immigration plan. The father’s side of the family was resistant to the idea of immigration and influenced the father negatively. The resulting FV in Anita’s family manifests the dynamics in many family-oriented cultures where extended family members play an essential role in decision-making for other members.

Jay described the violence between his parents that was both physical and emotional. The violence was physical, as the father threw and broke items around the house, and these actions had an emotional impact on Jay:

A lot of things broke up and like, you know, furniture, glasses, tumblers . . . it was just over some small little funny things between my mom and dad, things that kind of annoyed my mom like she’ll kind of like just hold it in and then like once or twice, she’ll say certain things. . . . For me, it was just more like things that I saw; there was no actual harm that was actually done to me like, like physical harm or anything. . . . I just saw my dad kind of get like, you know, roughed up or not roughed up like you know, loud and stuff, and things might break but nothing where anything comes into harm, so everything like no. . . .[until] I saw harm done to my mom. . . . I kind of noticed something, witnessed something, and then I told my dad, I’m like, “Listen, either you call, or I’m going to call [the police].”

Jay’s experience provides insight into the reality of a home where abuse is normalized; it is not spoken about. In such contexts, it is challenging to act until the situation worsens. Jay’s action demonstrates his agency in standing up against such normalization of violence at a young age.

This section looked at the direct and indirect FV experienced by the participants. Their experiences uncovered the personal, cultural, religious, and systemic factors that converge to complicate FV for racialized immigrant families. The following section provides insight into the roles the participants played as children at the time of FV.

Roles Played by Participants During Violent Incidents

During the interviews, participants were asked to speak about their role when tension escalated between their parents. The interviews revealed that participants felt compelled to take on demanding roles often at a young age: Protector and provider, Peacemaker, and Challenger. The data revealed that some participants played multiple roles fluidly at different times, and their roles varied depending on the context and their age. However, the analysis below focuses only on the dominant role(s) the participants identified they had played within their families.

 

Protector and provider

Maya, the eldest child in her family, found herself having to act as a protector of her siblings and be their provider and caregiver while her mother was absent because of her gambling problem:

I’m the older sibling, so I had to take on a protector role at a young age. . . . I had to worry about whether my siblings [were] home and whether they [could] get into the house because [my mother] . . . said she’d leave a key, but I don’t remember there being a key . . . so I would have to go through the window first . . . then open the door so then when my siblings came home. . . . I had to learn how to start cooking.

While Maya automatically took on the role of protecting her siblings, Viktor was conscious of the need to fill the same role to alleviate his mother’s responsibilities but was reluctant to take it on:

I actually kind of [had] to act . . . like a parent to the other two kids . . . and well, I [didn’t] really feel like I [had] a choice in the matter. I . . . saw . . . how my mother had to take on three of us to provide for us but to raise us as well. . . . Even if it’s something as simple as just taking my sister to work, that makes my mom’s life easier.

Interestingly, Maya and Viktor were subtly pushed into taking this role at a young age when they were least prepared for it.

Some participants were forced to intervene physically to protect their mother from their father’s abuse. Sandiran spoke about their and Abi’s collective efforts:

My sister and I, sometimes we would put our bed in front of the door . . . so we would know when he would come in. Sometimes, my mom would sleep right next to us . . . once we woke up to him like beating on her, and so we would have to get him and . . . pull him out.

Samantha shared how she navigated playing a similar role in Pakistan and Canada:

There was always like a severe fear of my father growing up . . . because I could tell he controlled everything . . . like every day you know he would come home around 7 pm . . . we all have to be quiet and be very careful, you know, like a walk on eggshells around him, because, you know he could be very nice, but it was just like a matter of seconds when his temper went off, and then he would like lose it completely right, so it was a lot of fear. . . . I would try to . . . intervene, to stop him, but he would continue. . . . I was . . . very protective [of] my mother, and especially because [of] her mental health, I could tell from . . . a very young age [that there were] issues. We came back [to Canada] when I was ten [and] were living in . . . a shelter as well, and we stayed there for a few months. My mother . . . she’s a very . . . affectionate, loving person and . . . I’ve seen her repeatedly in very bad situations with my father and her own family. . . . I feel protective of her now, trying to help her be in a better place and . . . the impact of all that on me is that a lot of times, one, you build a lot of patience, so you have severe patience, two is like learning how to deal with . . . continuous setbacks or problems . . . and it’s exhausting at times but . . . you get better at dealing with like little crises, over and over again.

Samantha’s narrative highlights the complicated role she played in different situations. Even though she intended to protect her mother, she could not do much to protect her mother due to her father’s fear. However, she became her sole caregiver and protector through her challenging physical and mental health problems, such as liver failure and schizophrenia.

These excerpts reveal the incredible responsibilities Maya, Viktor, Samantha, and Sandiran shouldered at a young age, whether willingly or not; they accepted their expected roles. As children, they were called upon to not only deal with the impact of violence on themselves but to think beyond themselves and protect their siblings and mothers.

 

Peacekeeper

Apart from taking care of her mother and her brother, Sonia found herself having to be a peacekeeper in her home:

I got involved to de-escalate that situation for sure. I’ve never been hit or anything like that. That’s never happened, but like I’ve definitely been like the peacekeeper if that makes sense. . . . I have no problem yelling at my dad. . . whether I’m getting mad at her for bringing up something that she shouldn’t be bringing up and causing a fight about something that’s irrelevant, whether I’m trying to de-escalate him . . . I’m always the person that de-escalates. . . . And as I’ve gotten older, like I do everything for my parents. Anything financial-related, I’m now the “go-to.” I’ve always filled out my brother’s school forms, I’ve always, I’ve gone to my brother’s parent and teacher conferences because my parents don’t understand what’s being said properly, and so I’ve always taken care of my mom, and that responsibility has pretty much exponentially grown as I’ve gotten older.

 

Challenger

Participants shared the way they challenged their abusive parent/s either overtly or covertly.

Jay overtly challenged his father’s decision not to seek medical help after he hit his wife and she was injured. As a child, Jay was not sure of the severity of the wound and requested that his father call 911. His father refused to do so, so Jay called 911 based on his concern for his mother’s safety. According to Jay, his intervention was successful as it made his father cautious about not repeating such behaviour in the future.

Maria remembered being very young and screaming at her father to stop the abuse. She would “scream and tell them, stop. . . . I was young; I was like 5-6-7. . . . So when I see her screaming, or I see those kinds of stuff, all I would cry and scream and tell him, stop, like you know, beg.

Chiairo’s tactic of challenging looks different. She used the covert strategy of convincing her mother to leave her abusive husband.

Adriana shared her story of overtly challenging her parents’ expectations of wearing hijab as per their religious norm:

When I leave the house, I would be dressed as my mother wished, you know, a long shirt like down to my knees, and then hijab, and then once I leave, I would have like a change of clothes in my backpack. . . . I would change my clothes on the staircase. . . . Also, other times I would wait till I go to the subway and then change my clothes in the subway bathroom and then before coming home, I would do the same thing and change back into like clothes. So, it always felt like Cinderella, you know.

Most excerpts in this section demonstrate participants’ agency in playing different roles and accepting new ones per the situation’s demands.

 

Differential Experiences, Engagement, and the Role of Participants’ Siblings

It is crucial to emphasize that the participants acknowledged that their experiences and roles differed vastly from those of their siblings. The intersectional analysis below presents siblings’ engagement and roles based on their age and gender intersections.

 

Intersections of gender and age

Sandiran is the youngest child in their family. However, they made significant efforts to protect their mother and navigate the violence that was going on at home. Talking about their experience, they shared that their experience of FV at home differed from their older brother’s and sister Abi’s experiences:

Throughout the course of my life, my brother was always the one to take more action because he was a male, male child and he was also the oldest. I think, once, I was getting older, I had more sort of control to be able to yell at my dad and to essentially threaten him if we ever heard him threaten my mom if you ever sort of raised a hand to try to hit her.

Sandiran continued:

My mum was very strict with my brother and my sister when they were growing up, but as I was the last child in the family . . . I had a lot more privileges, and a . . . lot less of this affected me compared to how it affected my older two siblings who had to take on like [the] role of the father or this mother-role when my parents couldn’t, or were there. . . . And he taught me, and he was a really good big brother like even when I got bullied in school, he would come in and he would yell at the kid who bullied me. . . . I have a lot of respect for just what he went through because I don’t know what I would have done as a first-child, as a first-male, having so much of that pressure on him.

Sandiran’s experience sheds light on how siblings experience the same situation differently based on age and gender. Sandiran’s brother, the only male child in the household, had to take on much more responsibility because of his gender. Sandiran was sheltered and protected as the youngest in the family but took more responsibility as they got older.

Viktor is the eldest of three siblings; his parents separated when he was five. Because of this, he felt he had to help his mother and take on the responsibility of looking after his younger siblings, even if it was as simple as taking his sister to work, to make his mother’s life “easier.” Viktor also felt that sometimes his mother relied on him to support her. This family dynamic made him a critical link between his siblings and their mother.

The excerpts also highlight that gender and age played a significant role in expecting the oldest male child to take on the responsibility and fill in the void created by FV. The relationship between the first child and the parent seems much more potent based on how the child supports and stands with the parents during the separation phase of a divorce. However, in the case of some participants, the families did not adhere to gender and age-based role expectations. The discussion below provides insight into the role expectations of some participants.

 

Looking beyond intersectional analysis

Sonia’s and Anita’s reflections challenge the gendered and age-based intersectional analysis provided above.

Sonia, the eldest of two siblings, stated that her younger brother does not engage with what happens at home. Even though he is expected to take on responsibility as a male child, he has not taken any, leaving Sonia to manage.

Anita, the middle child of three sisters, reflected on her situation. She and her sister did not try to control the violence as children. Her elder sister lives on campus, but Anita lives at home. She has taken on the responsibility of collecting her younger sister (who is 11 years younger than her) from school. Being in a university, Anita has to navigate the stress of managing her classes and arriving at her sister’s school in time to take her home. As the middle child, she finds herself trapped by having to meet many of her parents’ expectations.

 

Accessing Supports During Family Violence

This section shares participants’ perspectives on accessing the services of social institutions such as the Child Protection Services (CPS), known as the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), teachers, doctors, law enforcement officers, and counselling services. We discovered that many participants had accessed few or no institutional supports and that most had maintained secrecy about the violence they were experiencing at home.

Child Protection Services (CPS): Fear and secrecy about violence

Findings revealed that a few participants kept the FV a secret because of fear of CPS. According to Abi, keeping the violence a secret impacted her relationship with people outside the family.

It was very important that we kept my dad’s illness and everything that happened at home very private. So I know that I never, like in my experience, I never got close to anyone until maybe the past, like until maybe I hit age 20.

Sandiran confirmed Abi’s perspective on the need for secrecy:

Over the course of our childhood, at least, my mum was very adamant on teaching my brother and my sister, and me to not utter a word about what was happening at home to anyone. And I’m, you know, the more I grow up, the more I’m so thankful that she did that because I think we would have ended up in foster care. So, I think she knew exactly what she was doing.

Chiairo knew that there was a negative perception of racialized immigrants in society and did not feel comfortable talking about her abuse to counsellors and other professionals for this reason:

I probably would not have talked to a counsellor about it before . . . at an earlier point in my life. I know CAS would have been called on my family . . . and I think that’s a traumatic experience, and I think that especially the way it’s wielded against immigrant families and families of colour, especially in like small, mostly white communities, which is, it’s a community where I grew up. Yeah, I think that that is, is traumatic, and often doesn’t help. . . . I’m not an immigrant, I’m the child of immigrants, but I do identify quite strongly . . . with my community. I think that the way immigrant communities are treated within the justice system and . . . social work as well . . . I think often those systems that other people might see as people who can help, are people who might disrupt our lives, or harm us. . . . In my childhood, CAS [CPS] was called on my mother; it’s because, like we did karate. At one point, my sister got a bruise from karate, and somebody thought that my mother did that. And I think a huge part of that was because of my mom‘s identity . . . that people think that . . . [South Asian] people are . . . violent against their children, and those types of stereotypes. . . . When you grow up as one of the few families of colour . . . in a white community, I think that there’s an added layer that like you’re being watched and judged. . . . I have had a number of therapists and care practitioners. I think only one of those people has ever been a person of colour. . . . The advice that a therapist gave most of the times like didn’t always feel very relevant or appropriate.

Maya compartmentalized her school and home life. While she saw school as a place of escape from the realities of home, she also knew that it was not safe from the point of view of CPS. So, she was cautious and said,

School is a place where I can like to get away from my parents. That’s why I didn’t feel the need. Also, I knew that if I told them something, they might call CAS, and I already had that happening anyway, so then there was no point.

Because of her mother’s mental health, Samantha had to access services from several institutions over the years. She recalled her numerous interactions with CPS, Ontario Works (OW), Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), and Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Talking about her experience with CPS, Samantha said,

Unfortunately, from a young age, we had a lot of involvement with CAS . . . for example, you know my mom, sometimes she would say if you don’t want to go to school, you don’t need to go to school. . . . The school called CAS because they’re like she’s just not coming to school . . . and that gave a fear in my head of like being taken away from her. . . . So, I would be very careful to not speak out at all. . . . I was just so fearful of this, like if I’m not with her, then I am with my dad. When I was in grade eight . . . she was evaluated by a family doctor. . . . They figured out it was schizophrenia, and then she was hospitalized for about three months. . . . My mum’s brother, who lives in the US . . . he came and stayed with me for a little bit [of] time. . . . It was a difficult time with CAS . . . because they said that if I was not with him, I think I would have to go to a foster family. . . . This one time, the social worker was to just actually come by for visits, and so he literally, like that night, he booked a flight from the US to be available for the visit.

Participants’ reflections reveal an overwhelming fear and apprehension of being surveilled and judged by CPS. Grounded in Eurocentric practices that look down on collectivist and family-oriented values, CPS can end up separating children from their parents; hence, racialized immigrant families do not fit the mould of CPS and its services.

 

School: From a place of guidance and inspiration to erasure of experience

Sandiran, Chiairo, Samantha, and Maria shared their experiences with the school and teachers.

Sandiran’s apprehension about the response of CPS also carried over to schooling:

I didn’t talk about this with teachers because I went to an elementary school, a public school that was located in the richest neighbourhood in Montreal, whereas I and some of my peers were living in one of the most racialized low-income neighbourhoods in Montreal . . . and one of the best indications to me was when my teacher would ask me to tell the class . . . every year where I went [for vacation] . . . it would be go ask your, go ask your parents for help on this. I was like, I would remember, I remember just laughing and thinking to myself, well, these people don’t have any idea. . . . And I guess during those actual times I . . . would just need to put on like a smile and then go into school and do the things that I needed to do. . . . In high school, it was the same thing, I went to high school where it was more students from different backgrounds, but there as well there was never a time where I felt like any teacher had proven themselves to be trustworthy.

However, Samantha, Maria, and Adriana had different experiences with their teachers. While Samantha’s teachers complied with the Duty to Report procedure that leads to CPS involvement, Samantha also commented positively about the school and teachers:

Over the years, my teachers always could tell that things are off when my mom would show up at odd hours at school like it was a lot of eccentric behaviour. So, the school could tell there were issues going on . . . they were kind of empathetic . . . they did a good job of dealing with it. I think my interactions, like I’m still good friends with that one teacher for many, many years later because we lived in the same community.

While Maria kept the violence in her family a secret from her teachers in Guyana, her school eventually found out what was happening, which made her feel ashamed. This is indicative of the stigma associated with FV. Adriana talked about the tremendous support she received from her teachers in China. Her teachers were observant and noticed that Adriana was experiencing trouble in her home because of her subdued nature and artwork. Adriana felt comfortable talking about her abuse to one particular teacher. Though the teacher was on the safeguarding team at school and empathized with her, Adriana felt there was little the teacher could do.

Adrianna shared a story of what happened to her in the year 2018 on the last day of school before Christmas break. Adrianna’s parents stormed her home and dragged her down the stairs. One of the neighbours called the police at Adriana’s request. When the police refused to support Adriana, she reached out to her teacher:

I had my school laptop in my backpack. That’s how I was able to link it to the police station’s Wi-Fi. And, you know, I sent out SOS emails to everyone in my contact list, and luckily, one of my teachers checked her email before she boarded on the plane. Then she made a few calls, and then one of the administrators, you know, workers, you know, she came with her husband, late at night and picked me up. . . . I did receive a lot of support from that particular teacher; she would later on become, you know, a very important person in my life, both, you know, throughout my studies and personal life. But the school’s official position at the time was to take no sides because they didn’t want to be involved, you know, they couldn’t afford to be involved in a lawsuit. So, you know, the school’s official position was that they would not be involved. So whatever that teacher or other teachers helped me with was on their own, you know, responsibility.

The above excerpts reveal participants’ contrasting experiences with teachers. While Sandiran’s and Samantha’s experiences were in schools in Canada, Maria’s and Adriana’s experiences were based in Guyana and China, respectively.

Adriana’s narrative reveals the positive contribution a teacher can make in a child’s life. It is noteworthy that even though the school and teachers could not do anything officially, the teacher’s compassion, concern, courage, and empathy played an important role in creating a safe space for Adriana.

 

Social service organizations and professional supports: Lack of outreach, engagement, and surveillance

It is not that participants didn’t want to access support, but that the supports available failed them. Sandiran painted a picture of the challenges of seeking support:

Like in my neighbourhood[a city in Quebec], it was, it’s a neighbourhood where there’s a lot of community organizations, a lot of mobilization, a lot of mutual aid taking place. Because of our background as South Asians, we didn’t really receive any support from these organizations. We were always othered in the neighbourhood. It was primarily Anglophone and Francophone way, and the Caribbean or people of African descent neighbourhood. And so, that’s whom the community organizations cater to as well . . . and then in CEGEP [college]after I think I had spoken to a physician at the adolescent health clinic who for the first time confided in . . . she really encouraged me to start talking to a counsellor . . . and then that’s when I started talking to a counsellor. . . .This counsellor was a white middle-class, great lady but didn’t understand the realities. And so I spoke to her here and there. And I think the very first thing I told her when I went in was that my father has paranoid schizophrenia, and I saw him beat the crap out of my mother throughout my life. So, it just came pouring out . . . but everyone at [the University] was very trauma uninformed . . . catered to the typical, the default student, someone who has privilege, was upper-middle class, didn’t come from a migrant community. I also had quite a few bad experiences with them.

Sandiran’s negative experiences with community-based organizations speak to the preference and limited scope of specific ethnic neighbourhood organizations, excluding other ethnic communities.

Samantha shared her experiences with a major mental health organization in Ontario and other organizations:

Well, I think that the [a major mental health organization in Ontario] . . . they had her [Samantha’s mother] in this new treatment program, so then they would come and verify with me and talk to me, and that provided a lot of stability because I found it easier to connect with them because their approach was like concrete, and to help me. So I had a lot of support from them. Initially, it was Ontario Works for my mother, and then after her diagnosis with schizophrenia and liver failure, it was to ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program). So, and you know, the region that we live in is not very ethnically diverse. . . . And I think there was some tension between the social workers . . . and my mother would always be fearful . . . a negative relationship between them. I couldn’t figure out what it was . . . that was a very, very challenging, turbulent experience, and I know they also came and visited her quite often in person and things like that.

 

Government departments: Mismatch of service delivery models

Sonia and Jay shared their experiences with government departments, such as law enforcement services.

Being an immigrant to Canada, Sonia’s mother lacked the traditional support of the elders she would have had in her home country to intervene when her husband got violent. Sonia shared an experience when her mother called 911 for support, which resulted in her father’s arrest. According to Sonia, there is a need for law enforcement to understand the reason for the call rather than administer a uniform protocol.

This is probably the first time in like a year that he [father] ever did anything, but he like pushed my mom forcefully and then slapped her across the face and like started becoming more physical with her. So she got quite afraid because he’s never acted like, to that extent before. So the first thing she did was call 911. And that was the very first time the justice system has ever been involved in anything relating to our troubles. . . . I get home, and you see police cars, and you’re like I can’t describe that feeling . . . it’s just horrible, and anyways, so my dad was handcuffed and taken away because he was still quite angry he wasn’t coming down. So the police said, “Well, you’re obviously showing signs of aggression; we’re going to take you away.” . . . He can’t just go because she didn’t understand this when she called 911. . . . And if they hadn’t, if they just brought the police to the house and de-escalated him, I think we would have been like, wow, she called cops like I need to get my shit together, so this doesn’t happen again. And he wouldn’t have done that again; I know my dad . . . and everything would have been resolved without this legal piece, which has really messed with all of us.

Jay called 911 when his father hit his mother, and she was injured in the head. However, Jay appreciated the intervention by the law enforcement officers and EMS. In Jay’s opinion, his action has changed the dynamics between his parents:

They came, they checked . . . to see if the person is responding . . . they just checked, my mom’s good okay, they left it, and since that day I always ask my dad, I’m like, “So how was your experience?” So after that, my dad is kind of very like, I would say not controlled, but the way how he would articulate certain conversations with my mom and myself, like despite the age difference, right, is very like respectful, even thought process, right, not only like physical behaviour, just like thought process.

The participants’ reflections on institutional supports reveal that, in most cases, the supports fell short at the most critical time for them. Instead of supporting the participants, the services of institutions such as CPS were negatively perceived and not accessed. Other societal institutions such as schools, counsellors, and law enforcement failed to adopt a trauma-informed, needs-based, culturally informed approach. There is also a critical need for increased awareness of FV as a social issue that moves away from pathologizing families and cultures.

Since the participants rarely accessed social services, we asked what informal supports these families and children accessed to address FV. The following section highlights the informal support received by participants and their families.

 

Accessing informal supports during family violence

While some participants only accessed support later in life, others sought support from extended family members.

Chiairo, Jay, Maya, Sonia, Samantha, and Viktor received support from their mother’s side of the family. Chiario’s maternal grandparents played a significant role in raising her and her sister and provided stability and security. Maya’s grandmother, mother’s sister [aunt] and brother [uncle] played a vital role by paying their bills, sheltering Maya, and guiding her in her career. Similarly, Sonia also found unconditional support from a maternal uncle and his daughters, with whom she got along very well. Sandiran and Abi, too, spoke of support from their mother’s family. Samantha’s maternal uncle helped; he stayed with Samantha when her mother was hospitalized. Like Sonia, Jay and Anita had a solid support system in their cousins with whom they shared about their family situation.

However, a few participants sought support from friends at varying stages of their life and for various reasons. As a child, Sonia did not seek support from friends, but now that she is older, she feels comfortable talking about her family. Adriana did not confide with most of her school friends, as they were from culturally diverse backgrounds and hence would not understand her situation. She only confided with one friend, who, after learning about her situation, stood by her through all her struggles. Jasmine, who had an intense fear of her father, sought help from her friend to forge a report card to help avert her father’s anger:

Like my friend was actually the one who helped me forge the report card, she’s [South East Asian], and she also has had that experience of having strict parents, so she was like, I’ll help you with this, you know, I’ll help you. And she helped me because I was like, I have no idea how to forge a report card. I have no idea; help me. And she’s like, don’t worry, “I’m gonna Photoshop, I’ll help you,” and she actually helped me make it look pretty legitimate. I was like, wow, you should make a career out of this.

Except for Abi, none of the participants received any support from their father’s side of the family. While Abi stayed at her cousin’s (paternal uncle’s daughter) when she and her mother had a misunderstanding, her sibling Sandiran felt the uncle’s family did not support their family despite being very well off.

 

Impacts of Experiencing Family Violence

In keeping with the phenomenological approach to inquiry, we focused on gathering information from participants about the impact of FV on their lives. The findings revealed that for each participant, the impact of FV extended to their physical, emotional/psychological, financial, and social dimensions. It impacted their educational prospects, careers, social relationships, and relationships with siblings, parents, and communities. Most participants demonstrated great agency in overcoming the consequences of FV, and a few are still dealing with the fallout. For clarity, we analyze each dimension of the impact separately; however, it is essential to remember that participants were impacted in several ways simultaneously.

Figure 1: Impacts of Experiencing Family Violence

Physical impact

Anita talked about noticing stress lines on her forehead due to the stressful environment in which she was living. She felt that the constant stress, pressure, and anxiety caused premature wrinkling and aging:

Yes, so I feel like I am getting lines on my forehead, and because I’m only 21, I feel like that’s not normal, especially because I’m seeing within my friend circle, my older sister, no one has that except for me, so I felt like I took in a lot of stress, especially because I lived at home. . . . I have more responsibility.

Anita’s statement highlights how siblings experience the home environment differently and are thus impacted differently. Though the middle child, Anita bore the brunt of the situation by taking on more responsibilities, pressure, and stress than her elder and younger sisters. When we think of the impact of FV on a person, we think of mental health, relationships, careers, and the like. While these are real, we often overlook the bodily changes associated with living with constant stress. When one constantly compares oneself to others, the lower confidence and negative self-image that comes with it further impact mental health. Anita’s narrative emphasizes the reality of FV and how this can impact every aspect of one’s mind, body, and spirit.

Jasmine talked about the physical impact of living in perpetual stress due to family violence, compounded by the stress of attending university.

I’ve had stomach problems pretty much since I started university. I would say maybe a year or two into university [it] got worse. I was in and out of hospitals a lot, emergency clinics. .. They could not figure out for the life of them what was going on. I did an endoscopy, and they didn’t find anything physically wrong at the time, and the doctor attributed it to stress. Which I definitely would agree with because I had a lot of pressure with the school. Especially after the first year doing so badly, I wasn’t able to stay in that co-op program, which was the main reason that I wanted to go there in the first place, and that definitely took a toll on my physical and mental health. . . . And I feel like physically. It made me feel more tired, not wanting to do things. . . . And even now, I still have the same issues with my stomach. I did an endoscopy last year, and they found my stomach was inflamed. I have a hernia on my esophagus. So physical issues, I’ve had for years and a lot of it. I would definitely attribute my stress and just my inability to like. I don’t know. I think it’s just me wanting to delay things a lot. Like even seeing a doctor, I delay it because I’m scared to go see the doctor; I don’t want to hear what they have to say to me.

In Jasmine’s case, we can see how discouraging it was for her always to feel physically unwell and her lack of motivation to visit a doctor because of the fear of more bad news. Jasmine struggles with her physical ailment, emphasizing the long-lasting impact of being in a stressful setting.

 

Emotional and psychological impact

This section presents the multiple emotional and psychological impacts participants experienced consistently and concurrently. Rather than organizing the impacts thematically, we have presented below the actual impacts for each participant to provide an insight into their compounded effect on these individuals.

Self-harm

Witnessing FV impacted Maria’s mental health as a teenager. She described episodes of physical self-harm:

I used to cut myself. My outburst in high school used to be me cutting myself . . . and no one understood it, I didn’t even understand why, but when I was angry, I couldn’t feel anything. And I used to literally just take the razor blade and cut. . . . I never used to feel that much pain when doing it, or maybe it’s just a mind thing. But I used to only cut this hand [left hand], and I tried cutting my foot once because I didn’t want people to see it . . . and then after doing it, I would just feel a sense of relaxation, but it never used to pain me that much like I don’t know why.

Maria was also rebellious in her teenage years:

I think it was me being on the phone, me being rude. I used to have outbursts. I would cry. Like, if they [parents] don’t agree with anything . . . say if I wanted to do something, and they don’t agree, and I don’t get my way, I used to just cry, and rebel like in a rude way. But I think that was me just rebelling in general, yeah.

As an adult, Maria has stopped harming herself but continues to experience anger, disappointment, dejection, and helplessness when she regards her parents’ situation:

I get angry when my mom and dad cannot see eye to eye because I look at other people. I’m like, their family can see eye to eye. Their kid is not involved. They do it just for the kid. And, you know, it’s okay, like . . . before the day before I left Guyana to come here to study, it was the last day I saw my father. He came, and he said he wants to drop me into the airport, but my mom, she’s like no. . . . And then, they had their outbursts. . . . We have a house. He’s outside of the house sleeping in the vehicle. I’m inside the house with mommy sleeping. . . . Now, I’m in a position where I have to choose. And I chose Mom because she’s the reason like she financially did everything for me, and if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t even be here studying, and at the same time, I feel sorry for my father. And it was the worst situation . . . that was hard.

Maria vividly described the mixed emotions she has experienced throughout her life for her parents. She struggles with balancing her love for her mother and father, resulting in an emotional challenge.

 

Stress and anxiety

Chiairo has always experienced stress and anxiety, and these continue even after she has left home for the university:

I was under a lot of stress most of the time because of the way he [stepfather] behaved and also worried about my mother, worried about her wellbeing, her life. . . . I lived in a lot of anxiety because of the situation for a very long time, that persisted even when I left home for school. I think sometimes it even was worse afterwards because I wasn’t close and didn’t always know what was going on. So I think psychologically, there was a lot of stress, I think, physically I reacted to that stress. . . . I think that I don’t totally understand the way that particular experience impacted my mental health because things are always complexly intertwined, but I have struggled with mental health for quite a while.

Chiairo’s excerpt highlights the interrelatedness of physical and emotional/mental health. Hence, the excerpt highlights the need for a holistic approach that responds to all areas for total recovery for individuals affected by FV.

 

Schizophrenia and low self-esteem

Abi, who experienced severe emotional and physical abuse as a child, has struggled with acute anxiety, schizophrenia, and low self-esteem. Abi felt that her mental illness affected her academic success and employment prospects:

I don’t know if it’s because of what happened in the past. But I’m more than the average person. I’m anxious. . . . And I also have a diagnosis of a mental illness as well. I also have schizophrenia. . . . And if I compare myself to somebody my age, I’m not as functional as somebody else my age would be, and I’m a lot more stressed. I have more barriers. And so, like life is a lot harder to live. . . . I have very low self-esteem. . . . I know that I have insecurities about being a racialized individual and, you know, as a woman as well . . . like, it has impacted my self-esteem to the point where I’m not . . . able to ask for my needs as, as clearly as I would like to. For example, accessing healthcare services . . . I don’t put my foot forward . . . I’m more of a passive person. . . . It all has contributed to the person that I’ve become . . . I do feel inferior, and I do feel like I’m, I’m viewed a certain way. . . . With my education, with my anxiety, like, it’s so much harder. . . . I started university ten years ago, and I’m still doing my undergrad.

Abi revealed how mental illness has impacted her life and made her dependent on her already overstretched mother and brother. The excerpt also reveals Abi’s awareness of racism in healthcare and other services discriminating against racialized individuals.

 

Depression, fear, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

At a young age, Samantha had to take on the multiple responsibilities of caring for her mother, who is living with schizophrenia and liver failure. She has dealt with CPS, OW, a major mental health organization in Ontario, and immigration lawyers, besides financially supporting household expenses in Toronto and sending a monthly allowance to her siblings in Pakistan. Until her immigration status was stabilized, she experienced intense fear of being sent back to her father or foster care. The impact of this stress, navigating various institutions, and caregiving has impacted Samantha, who has recently been diagnosed with depression, fear, and PTSD.

Lack of trust, social isolation, depression, and mental health diagnosis

Childhood experiences of abuse caused Sandiran to become distrustful of people. They experienced severe mental distress in their childhood and have experienced suicidal thoughts since childhood.

Constant, constant isolation. And, you know, I don’t remember telling myself anything in particular, apart from don’t trust these people, as in, don’t trust everyone who essentially fails you. . . . It was more so how I constructed the world around me and how I understood it. I understood it as a place where people didn’t give a shit. I understood it as a place where . . . no one was there to help; no one was there to support. . . . I understood it as a cold place . . . over the course of my life, over the first 17 years of my life . . . I experienced severe forms of mental distress. I was heavily, heavily, heavily depressed, suicidal as well. There essentially was no day over my 17 years, honestly like it’s not even to over exaggerate, but never a day when I wouldn’t think about jumping off the balcony, throwing myself in front of like a car or bus or the metro. And I also tried to take my own life a couple of times as well. And this was . . . as young, as eight, nine. . . . I responded in sort of internalizing a lot of that and wanting to self-destruct in many ways.

Sandiran continued:

And then, I think, just over the course of my university. . . I was also going through like quite a bit of mental health challenges, internally. Tried to get help in different ways, but it’s, it’s, I think a lot of our mental health structures just don’t understand the interplay of trauma, structural and social factors. . . . I visited [Sri Lanka] because I wanted to essentially go and listen to people’s stories. . . . I wanted to know about my parents prior to them being my parents too. But what ended up happening was that it was a very stressful environment . . . and that really set me off. And I essentially like developed like very harmful thoughts that were pre-sort-of psychosis and like had some forms of delusional thinking as well. And, you know, it’s, and then I reacted in ways where I was very aggressive, not physically, but more emotionally like with my mum. I was very impatient; I was yelling, you know, internalized a lot of the ways. . . . I saw my parents react to their mental health; I repeated that in my own circumstances, and . . . after coming back, I developed some worse situations of psychosis and ended up like almost taking my life as well. . . . As a person, I was disintegrating, and it was like, I could feel the devil within me . . . I could see myself change in the mirror; I could see, like, when I was walking through the world, it was like I had holes in me where things were passing through.

Sandiran’s narrative paints a vivid picture of the impact of experiencing FV and the incremental worsening of the impact over time. Sandiran’s construction of the world and isolation from others indicates the meaning they made from the lack of support their family received from extended family members, the ethnic community and the larger society. The excerpt also shows that their mental health challenges magnified and took a much more severe form without timely support. Sandiran’s reflections on the lack of mental health services that address the impact of war trauma and structural and social barriers are significant if individuals and families like Sandiran’s are to be supported.

 

Suicide attempts, nightmares, panic attacks, depression, and PTSD

Adriana described repeated suicide attempts and the panic attacks she suffered while living with her abusive father, and her ongoing battle with depression as an outcome of the trauma she experienced:

For me personally, as a result of this, I considered suicide multiple times. I felt like there was no escape, you know, even if at that time when I was 16 years old, it felt like even if I managed to run away from home, where would I go. . . . I had no one to trust, no one who could help me, you know, the law wasn’t going to protect me in that case; they would return me to him [father]. And I felt very hopeless, I felt very helpless, and so I considered suicide. . . . I tried to burn myself on the radiator. I tried to swallow toothpaste to make myself sick to go to the hospital because going to the hospital was like a holiday to me. . . . I would have nightmares. . . . In my nightmares . . . my father would abuse me or my mother, my nights would be very restless, I would not be able to get enough sleep, and then second of all, the sleep quality wasn’t that good either, even if I managed to get some. . . . In my nightmares, I’m always being chased by my family, I’m always being stabbed by my father. There were multiple occasions in my nightmares where my father stabbed all of my friends whom he believed that has helped me, and I saw all of my friends get killed because of me. . . . For a long time after I left and after that incident where they dragged me from this seventh floor to the first floor, every time I opened the door afterwards, I would pause for a second . . . I would take a deep breath. I would stop breathing actually until I open the door and make sure that no one is in there, then I would be able to take a deep breath. . . . Whenever I saw a car in the street that looks like my father’s car I would, you know, stop for a second, you know, and think “Do I need to run, should I run?” . . . So I would say the most severe impact is definitely mentally. Even though I’m physically removed from that situation, however, the psychological damage is very hard to repair, especially when it’s a sensitive person. I still experience nightmares. I do have panic attacks and mental breakdowns sometimes. I am currently waiting to have a psychological evaluation, and I am taking antidepressants, yep.

This excerpt reveals how an individual’s experience and perceptions affect the impact of FV on their physical and emotional/mental health. The excerpt also conveys the significant impact of FV on the participants regardless of when and for how long the FV lasted. Its impact persisted as they grew into adults, and in some cases, this is when the impact became more vigorous because they were more conscious of the reality of events. The findings also demonstrate the urgent need for trauma-informed mental health supports and redressal of structural and social barriers experienced by racialized immigrant families like Sandiran’s.

Supports accessed for emotional and mental health

The interviews revealed that several participants accessed counselling services to address the continuing impact of FV. Chiairo, Sandiran, Abi, Samantha, and Jasmine accessed counselling services at their universities, and Maria and Sonia accessed private counselling services. While in high school, Maria went for counselling, and Sonia went for counselling after her father’s arrest in the recent past. Jasmine was satisfied with the counselling she received. Abi and Chiairo are still going for counselling, and for Abi, counselling has helped re-establish her broken relationship with her mother. Chiairo is accessing various types of psychiatric treatment for her depression.

Despite her diagnosis of depression and PTSD, Samantha has not accessed any support, as she does not feel the need. Maria, Sonia, and Sandiran accessed counselling services but found them unhelpful and discontinued them. For Maria, counselling did not help her with her self-harming behaviour, and for Sonia, it did not offer anything beyond a cathartic release, which she felt she could do on her own. Sandiran found that counselling is designed on the cultural norms of the dominant western society and did not acknowledge war trauma and structural and social barriers experienced by racialized immigrants in Canada.

 

Impact on education

Several participants spoke about the impact FV had on their education. While some participants struggled to focus on their education, others used school as an escape and a coping mechanism.

A rocky, evolving journey towards success

Jasmine talked about her difficulty focusing on her education. She felt that she did not experience a normal childhood in her home:

When I was in university . . . I chose to distract myself with life, other things, fun things, parties, friends. Things that I probably should have focused on when I was younger. But when I was younger, I didn’t really have a chance to do that, you know. I was sheltered; I wasn’t allowed to go to parties, or sleepovers or hang out with my friends every weekend. I didn’t have those normal childhood experiences. I was home a lot . . . school was the least of my worries. . . . My grades only got better once I left university and started the [attending an assaulted women’s support program]. I had a better handle of myself and my mental health, and my parents were also communicating with me better.

Jasmine’s experiences reflect that of many racialized immigrant communities where parents want their children to focus on education. Sandiran referred to this as “model-minority pressure,” which we discuss below.

In her interview, Chiario stated,

I still worry about her [mother] a lot . . . you know she’s dating again. And I’m, I’m constantly worried . . . it’s gonna happen again, and I think that that is distracting, and that does sometimes make school quite hard.

Samantha’s journey in education evolved over the years. As a student in Canada, she started from a low point but excelled over the years when she realized that her school was the only source of stability and refuge. She narrated her journey thus:

I was a very bad student. You know my report cards, they are like Cs and Bs cuz I was out of school. You know I had very bad English surprisingly . . . I had to repeat kindergarten like one year because . . . they said that she’s just so lagging, mentally, like let’s put her through one more year . . . then I moved back to Canada. I could not directly talk to other people normally, right, because the kids that their worries were like video games, and I was like, you cannot connect with them. So I think academically I was challenged at that point because of the social environment. . . . And then, throughout until grade eight, I started getting really good grades, and in grade eight, I actually ended up being valedictorian, so it was like, the top academics, like everything right and from math and science specifically. And I was surprised. I got this like award for leadership, and like, I got to give a speech and stuff for my class, right? And you have to understand, like that same year, like I had been staying with family friends and trying not to get in foster care and stuff, right? So for me, like, it [school] provided a lot of stability. I liked it, I loved reading and stuff, so I think once that happened, academically, and so I thought I found a lot of refuge in school personally. I continued to do well in high school. I got a full scholarship to [name of the university in Ontario].

Contrary to Samantha’s description of the school as a source of stability and refuge, Maria talked about teachers who judged her and discouraged her from becoming a nurse. This caused her to lose her focus and motivation to study. It was not until Maria switched to psychology and found nonjudgmental professors that she began to excel in school. As she described, studying psychology allowed her to fall in love with herself and understand those around her more.

Unlike Samantha and Maria, Maya’s performance in school was affected by her caregiving responsibilities toward her siblings, which curtailed her opportunities to focus on her studies and take up extracurricular activities. However, Maya realized the negative consequences of not doing well in school. On receiving advice from her grandmother, a nurse herself, to pursue nursing, she found a goal and direction to do well in school. She also found ways to engage in extracurricular activities and transition to becoming an academically strong student.

This theme highlights the factors contributing to participants’ motivation to study and succeed academically. Even though their journey was difficult, they succeeded by using their capacities of critical thinking and reframing, openness and receptivity towards others’ ideas, and creativity in developing conducive conditions for their success.

Goal-directed journey towards success

Sandiran spoke of their focus on academics amidst the challenges posed by FV:

I remember this, like, very clearly, I had a biology test right before the first crisis with my sister, and she had tried to hurt my mom, and I was terrified. I called the cops, you know, gotten her to the emergency. . . . I had spent the night with her at the emergency, and the next day I went in to write my bio test and . . . it was so seamless in a way just because it was such a constant in my life to have to do that, to have to deal with something so chaotic in my home life and then be able to go to school and then, it was all normal, it was okay. It was . . . ridiculous in some ways, but it, I think, it affected my school to a certain degree where I was able to have the language now, like I was able to use these lived experiences to enhance my learning . . . There was just a dissonance between academic life and life in reality.

Sandiran elaborates further on the challenges of studying during the pandemic:

During the pandemic, that’s when things came back again. So, with . . . my father being violent again, me being stuck at home, my mom not being able to go to work, my brother and my sister being stuck at home, everything’s up again. And so it was, I had to write my thesis because it was coming to an end. . . . I was dealing with a lot of challenges with my supervisors, who didn’t understand the realities. They were all like white middle to upper class also very just ignorant people I was working with. And so I wasn’t able to talk to them about the realities that my family was facing like whether that be violence or illness . . . for the last couple of months of the pandemic, . . . it was very nerve-wracking because I lost my, my space, my space to do work in. So now I was back home, and I no longer had that ability to compartmentalize, so I wasn’t able to really do any schoolwork. I was always on edge; I was so stressed, dealing with my father, who was becoming more violent, dealing with health conditions that were bubbling up, my mum, who I knew was more in danger, me, who was like deteriorating. It was just like layers of just challenges, and I wasn’t able to essentially do any schoolwork, but I did have a desk at school . . . and so I would go in there and essentially run from security, trying to evade them. . . . When they left, I would go in. I would do my data analyses; I would write my thesis. Eventually, I got kicked out because . . . one of the professors found out, and he told me that . . . I couldn’t stay in, even though I had told them that I was facing violence at home.

Sandiran’s story provides an insight into the “dissonance” between their two worlds, home and school. While the context of violence could have been extremely overwhelming for some, for Sandiran, as they described earlier, the context of violence was “normal.” Sandiran used this term a second time in their interview—while describing the violence at home and again while talking about daily navigating the two worlds, indicating that the violence and dealing with its aftermath was a regular feature of their life. However, their narrative demonstrates their agency and survival skills in getting through school and performing exceedingly well.

Sandiran’s experience also draws attention to navigating academics and home life during the pandemic. The excerpt highlights that the academic programs are generally not structured for students whose context and reality are shaped by innumerable personal struggles such as Sandiran’s. Very few students such as Sandiran can survive in such a context and thrive by completing the program and successfully getting admission to a competitive medical program in another Ontario city.

Adriana also spoke about navigating the dissonance between her school and home life. She felt that she was living a double life, one at home and another at school, and these two lives were entirely different. She felt overprotected and controlled at home, but school allowed her to reinvent herself as a new person. For these reasons, she loved going to school.

Anita and Sonia also spoke of their success in school, and Anita, Sonia, and Sandiran were expected to perform well by their parents. According to these participants, this is a standard expectation for immigrant parents. Anita described it as “invisible pressure,” Sonia called it “to upkeep their reputation by being a good kid and proving herself to others.” Sandiran spoke of fitting into the stereotype of being a “model minority.”

 

Mental health as an impediment to education

Abi struggles with schizophrenia, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Her mental health has significantly hindered her education as she has been working on her undergraduate degree for the last ten years. She regretfully said,

I’m pretty sure like, you know, part of my illness is that . . . I can’t discern reality with my mind, sometimes my, I get some paranoid thoughts and stuff. And that’s a huge limitation sometimes. But another thing is, like, with my education, with my anxiety, like, it’s so much harder . . . for me, I started university ten years ago, and I’m still doing my undergrad. I took some time off. I went back. I wasn’t sure what program to choose. Everything seems so impossible to do.

With mental health support, Abi is working to repair the broken relationships with family members, focusing on studies and looking for a job.

Overall, the findings in this theme reveal that most participants, except Abi, have done well in academics. While the journey for some was smooth and focused, it was rugged and challenging for others. It is significant to remember that, unlike other children, excelling in school was complicated as they had to navigate the stress from home and academics. The situation called upon their extraordinary agency, steel determination, focus, adaptability, and capacity to reframe a problem in their favour.

 

Impact on career

While the impact of FV on a career was not relevant for most participants, as they were still pursuing post-secondary education, for Sonia, it was. She talked with great emotion about her experience of FV in the recent past, which led to the arrest of her father, and its subsequent impact on her hospital internship:

Stuff like fell apart, for sure. I wasn’t doing well. . . . It’s like a big deal to like to have a hospital job, they’re very difficult to get, I was very grateful . . . and that on top of like everything that was going on at home, it was too much, and I actually lost my residency, so they fired me. And because they said that I was too stressed out and it was too emotional. . . . So not only was I dealing with all of this stuff going on at home. I was now jobless, and I was feeling like I have no career left because how do you come back from losing that, and how do you explain that at future job interviews, and it wasn’t my fault? So I was just really angry, and I didn’t mean to be angry at my mom. But I was really angry at her for calling 911 and ruining my life. And I was really angry at my dad for even doing that in the first place. And I was just angry at God, I guess, for putting me in this household. So I didn’t deal with it. I didn’t deal with it at all, and I had to get a therapist because I was feeling increasingly like suicidal. I’ve never felt that way before. It was just a lot.

This excerpt reveals the significance Sonia attached to her job, which she thought was “untouchable.” FV impacted an aspect of her life that was so significant for her.

 

Impact on financial situation

The interviews revealed that participants experienced different levels of financial challenges due to FV.

No financial stress

Five participants, Jasmine, Maya, Jay, Anita, and Sonia, felt that FV had not affected their financial situation. Jasmine talked about her financial dependency on her father and how she felt this was justified because of the trauma he had put his family through:

I think what’s interesting for me, something that I’ve been more aware of now, is that, especially in university and once I left home, I feel like I was very dependent on my father to take care of me, extremely dependent. . . . I felt like he owes me for all those years of harm that he caused us—to me, my mom, my brother, and our family, making us feel like we’re not worth it, like we’re not good enough. I wanted to make him pay for almost growing up. So for me, me asking him for money, I never felt shame.

Like Jasmine, Maya, Jay, and Anita also did not experience any financial stress. Maya was not in a financially difficult situation because she had the support of her extended family. Jay, too, had the support of both of his parents.

Although Sonia did not experience financial stress growing up because her parents always cared for her, the situation changed after her father got arrested. This was when Sonia had to share the financial responsibility of managing the household. Since Sonia found an alternate job, she was happy taking on this responsibility and did not struggle with paying any bills but said that she could not save money.

 

Experienced financial stress

Viktor, Chiairo, and Maria spoke about experiencing financial stress. Viktor never considered how not having a father at home impacted his family financially:

So, financially, obviously, it would because having that main income in the house was tough because my mom basically had to go to university or to get an actual job to provide for us; that was her motivation for going to university. My mom definitely did more than she should have, or she did more than what would have ever been asked of her. I never really thought of finance, how not having a father in the home affects it because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. It’s better to have a home that doesn’t have a problem and not as financially secure than one that is financially secure.

Viktor’s reflections reveal not only his awareness of the financial burden his mother carried but also his value system of placing greater importance on peace at home than on the financial security that the presence of his father would have provided. While Maria’s mother provided for her while growing up by “put[ting] herself out there,” her father never contributed to their basic needs, which impacted her mental health. Much of the financial difficulty Chiairo faced was because her mother did not have a stable job, which impacted her family financially at different times. For these three participants, the financial stress of living on the income of a single parent, specifically their mother, was a common thread in their experiences.

 

Lived in severe poverty: Compounded trauma

Four participants, Samantha, Sandiran, Abi, and Adriana, spoke about extreme poverty. They experienced violence both inside and outside the home. Samantha talked about the intense poverty she and her mother faced after coming to Canada:

The financial, that was like very unstable for us all the way through right especially until I was in grade eight where my mother pushed ODSP . . . when I was younger, [the situation] was severely bad to the point where, you know, like my mother, tried to ask people for help for money and things like that because you know, the Ontario Works people paid the rent. And then we would wait it out until the 20th, where the child benefit will come in. Every month it was just trying to like hang on to like literally $50 or something to have groceries or something right, so it was very painful, and I think that continued. . . . We got the subsidized housing. That was one turning point. But even then . . . I don’t understand exactly like, so it was subsidized to some degree but not fully. So, you know, even then, like there were severe shortages. . . . So, like I would always know, like okay if I need something, you cannot ask for it. . . . I know once it was this $700 cell phone bill . . . she was not equipped to deal with that. . . . It went to our credit rating, and then, like, it was very difficult going forward from that. . . . As soon as I turned 16, I started working.

Like Samantha, Sandiran and Abi also experienced intense poverty. Their poverty was further complicated by the violence they witnessed in the public housing building where they lived. Sandiran described the living conditions and the fear associated with that:

So we grew up in a neighbourhood that had quite a bit of gang violence, and then in our building, it was a public housing building . . . I was terrified all the time that when I was sleeping in the living room that, I was already on edge because of just like the family situation, but then added to that there was the dynamic of my neighbours . . . and then like there were days when there were fights in the middle of the night, you would start hearing pounding on our front door, and every time I thought someone was gonna break in and kill us. . . . I just want to go back to the financial well-being part because I think so, because my, my father had schizophrenia, and he wasn’t able to work, and he made my mom go to work. . . . So we were on welfare, and then eventually, ten years later, once he was forced into the psychiatric institution, we got him, or he ended up being on psychosocial disability and received a bit more money [through ODSP]. But, so over the course of my life, my mom had to go to work. And so, we always knew that we were in a very financially precarious situation. . . . As soon as my brother could, he started working, and then as soon as I could, I started working and then during my master’s, I was finally able to like financially support my family to some respect.

Adriana’s situation was slightly different from others. When living with her father, she did not experience financial stress, but after moving out and living on her own, she experienced severe financial stress:

Very unstable employment. My income was not stable at all. Sometimes, you know, I would have income, sometimes I would not have income, and that’s when I would rely on my friends. . . . It was very stressful; however, I was very lucky that, you know, I had friends who were supportive and would say you know if you don’t have money to go eat, then you can come to our house to eat, and they would help me out. . . . I tried to diversify my sources of income I was teaching. I was teaching English to younger Chinese students. I was helping with homework. I was modelling. I was translating; I was working as a personal assistant. I was working in a bakery. I did a lot of things . . . to keep it going. . . . I was living in a small attic that I was able to rent at the time and, you know, I was working, I was going to school, I was working during the weekends, teaching English, I was teaching English to children, helping them with their homework, that sort of thing, that’s how I was able to survive at the time.

 

Impact on social relationships

While a handful of the participants felt that they generally had good social relations and that the impact of FV on this aspect of their lives was not as much, for others, FV had a negative impact due to mental illnesses, overwhelming responsibilities, and pressure to keep the violence a secret.

According to Viktor, witnessing violence between his parents has made him sensitive to other’s emotions:

It’s also sort of taught me to be more, I guess, detail-oriented in this regard when it comes to any kind of interpersonal relationships, whether it’s friends or family, looking in signs not just for others but for myself as well, because I feel like I do try to make an effort, whatever, because arguments are only natural, in any kind of relationship, family or friends or relationship.

Like Viktor, Maya also felt that she was more aware of other people because of her experience of FV. This allowed her to identify “red flags” and be strategic about those she let into her life. Several other participants, Jay, Anita, Jasmine, Maria, and Adriana, felt that they generally had good social relations, and this aspect of their life was not seriously impacted due to FV. Adriana had a lot of supportive friends who knew about her situation. Her friends checked in on her, and many provided her a place to stay when she needed to escape her abusive home. She loved going out with her friends and being a typical teenager.

There were various reasons why other participants could not develop strong social relationships. These ranged from mental illness to family responsibilities to maintaining secrecy related to the FV.

 

Mental illness

Abi’s challenges with her mental illness caused social anxiety, making it difficult for her to build and maintain social relations:

In terms of my social situation, I don’t have many friends. I know growing up, I never got close to people. But then at the same time, like now, especially . . . for the past ten years, at least, like I had, I kind of had a breakdown . . . and since then, I haven’t made any new friends. . . . Even now, I’m socially . . . I guess I have a certain degree of social anxiety as well.

This excerpt reveals how Abi’s mental illness impacted her social relationships and created anxiety while meeting others. Abi’s situation also raises the urgency of supporting youth severely impacted by FV in childhood.

 

Family responsibilities

Samantha shouldered much responsibility as a child. Although she had a few friends, she felt that her friendship was “superficial” because it was hard for her to connect with people: “it’s hard for me to connect with people because they don’t understand these problems. Their problems are very different.” She felt she also lacked social skills and did not know how to interact with people: “ Like I just did not know how to talk to people or anything for a very long time … I had a sick parent but what’s worse is that I had no family in Canada, right so no cousins, nobody. Like for every birthday or every celebration, there was nobody at home … I was a very shy person …

This excerpt demonstrates that children often lose the critical milestone of childhood when they have to shoulder responsibilities at a young age. While their contribution benefits others and their family, it tends to impact them negatively as individuals. The loneliness that Samantha experienced highlights the significance of providing support and a safe space for children to talk to someone who can understand their situation and be a source of strength and security.

 

Needed to maintain secrecy

Chiairo and Sandiran both felt pressured to keep the violence in their family a secret. They could not trust others, confide in others, and build relationships like others could. Chiairo said:

[The situation at home] affected my relationships with others. . . . I think that also like affected friendships. For me, there was always like a certain amount of secrecy. I felt some fault that I didn’t; I didn’t tell many of my friends that my mom was, was married after my father died. Um, and so that was a lot of my childhood and adolescence that I just completely did my best to hide that he existed. And so that involved, you know, not having people over, not really discussing a lot of my personal life with people.

Like Chiairo, Sandiran kept the violence secret, even from their closest friends, maintaining a “stern barrier” between themselves and everyone else. These excerpts highlight the fear racialized immigrant families experience in revealing FV. As discussed earlier, secrecy is maintained to keep CPS away. In other words, the negative reputation of CPS has a far-reaching negative effect on other aspects of these children’s lives.

 

Impact on sibling relationships

FV impacted the participants’ relationships with their siblings in various ways. In some families, the violence created a division between siblings, and in others, the shared traumatic experience led to stronger bonds among siblings.

Divisive influence of trauma on sibling relationships

Abi, Sandiran, Samantha, Maria, and Jay discussed FV creating a divide between them and their siblings. Abi talked about the dynamics between her, her sibling, Sandiran, and their brother, who was very violent towards Abi for several years:

My siblings, and I, we witnessed my parents’ violence, and then I think . . . we became violent as well. When I was like 14, maybe like 13 to 16, or something like when my brother, like, would get angry for a lot of things and . . . he would just take it out on me. . . . My mom didn’t have time to deal with . . . the situation because she was busy with everything that she had to deal with. . . . So I just had to continue experiencing that for a number of years. And it just made me like . . . very defensive . . . around that time from like 14 to maybe 20, where I kind of blocked out all my emotions. . . . It backfired and had like, a number of years . . . we didn’t talk at all. It was like we were strangers. And then now it’s like, we talk here and there . . . it’s not that we’re strangers now it’s more like we’re kind of like, acquaintances. . . . [With] my sister growing up, like . . . I was violent with her sometimes, but it wasn’t like a repeated thing. . . . I was always closer to my sister anyway. Like, when we were younger, we would play together . . . we used to spend summers together.

Abi’s sibling Sandiran described how, as the family’s first and only male child, their brother felt the brunt of the FV and the caretaking responsibilities at home. Abi and Sandiran’s brother internalized and mirrored many of his parents’ ways of relating and reacting.

Sonia felt her relationship with her brother was on a “surface level.” Despite sharing a traumatic experience, they continue their life without discussing it.

Me and my brother [grew] up quite physical with each other like always like fighting. . . . But other than that, no, and we’ve grown out of that too. . . [Currently] I feel like he doesn’t really talk to me about personal things, but we’re . . . cordial. Like I talk to him when I go home to visit, and he messages me when he needs something or needs help with something . . . like it’s very like, light and airy it’s all very surface level with him; it’s not deep. Like we don’t really talk about what happened [father got charged and was taken away by police], you know, even if he’s going through things and I asked him about, he won’t really get deeper with me, not really with anybody. He just kind of like he just personally just holds it in.

Sonia’s relationship with her brother reflects a change in relationship from when they were children. Abi and Sandiran have mended their relationship as adults, and in Sonia’s case, her relationship with her brother deteriorated after the serious FV incident.

Maria mentioned that it was difficult for her to see eye to eye with her stepsisters, who were much older than her. Her experience made her angry with a need to control relationships.

Jay stated that although his relationship with his siblings was generally good, things changed after the FV incident that resulted in him calling the police. The siblings disapproved of Jay calling 911. Hence, it created a divide between them.

Samantha also discussed the divisive influence of FV on herself and her siblings. Samantha and her mother were physically separated from the rest of Samantha’s siblings after they escaped from Pakistan. The father prevented any relationship building between the twin sisters and Samantha till they matured and continues to prevent any communication between Samantha and her brother. The coercive control of the father has affected their relationship. Samantha said:

When I was there [Pakistan], of course, I was eight to 10. They were five to seven [years old] during that period. And we were pretty close friends. We got along very well. . . . But . . . you know like leaving them was very difficult because . . . I still remember . . . when we left, we had to go to the shelter . . . and she [mother] had to tell them that we’re just going to a store, but you know like they were just screaming, crying. So, I remember, like, difficult to think of it, but after that, we got cut off from them. He [father] cut off contact for many, many years between me and my siblings . . . and from that time [time] for almost 11 years, there was no contact at all. . . . We connected when they [two sisters] turned 18, and this is in 2017, you know, and very completely different people. . . . I’ve only spoken with them through social media . . . but I’m still not allowed to talk to my youngest brother.

Samantha continued,

Yeah, so about four years now, and I send like monthly, like, maybe it varies, how much I can do, but I usually try between $200 to $300 every month. . . . I’ve just continued doing that because . . . where are they going to get that and they never really had like a mother to turn to . . . so I thought, you know just alleviate a little bit of the suffering that they have. And you know that relationship with them now it’s for me it’s a very difficult one. From their end, you know they have endured a lot . . . so that’s why, even when they’re disrespectful, or they’re angry, or rude, I’ve always been as calm and kind as I can throughout it and just not respond to the disrespectful part. But it’s like, I don’t think there’s any way it can get better. I think it will just stay where it is, unfortunately.

The excerpt reveals Samantha’s strategic efforts to overcome her father’s control over her sibling relationship. These efforts reveal Samantha’s love, unconditional acceptance of their behaviour and concern for providing a secure future for her siblings (as mentioned in the interview), a role often adopted by the eldest child in family-centric cultures. Samantha took the bold step of sponsoring them, and at the time of the interview, Samantha’s application was approved.

The analysis of this theme has also revealed how their siblings’ perceptions of and responses to trauma have impacted their relationships. In some cases, based on their realizations of its negative impact on their relationships, siblings have worked to restore their relationships. However, the narratives demonstrate the need for professional intervention and support for siblings to recover and heal.

 

Sibling relationships when a sibling reflects a parent’s personality

Several of the participants shared that seeing their parents’ personalities reflected in their siblings impacted their relationship with them. Maya talked about the difference in her relationship with her brother and sister based on their personalities:

I’m okay with my sister. Me and my sister growing up never really got along because we had very differing personalities. I think my sister adopted more of my mom’s personality of being very direct, not in the same way as I am. Still, like she’s kind of more, I think, less emotional, emotionless, and less empathetic about doing certain things. And then my brother, he’s the most emotional one out of all of us, so I get along with my brother the most obviously. . . . I’m much closer to my brother than my sister.

Although Jasmine and her brother have a good relationship, she feels like he is a lot like their father. Jasmine describes him as being “too serious and stubborn.” Children who experience FV seem to notice qualities in their parents that they dislike and become increasingly conscious of these qualities in their siblings.

 

Varying bonds of attachment with siblings

Trauma seems to bring or separate siblings. Anita and Adriana discussed their different bonds with their siblings based on closeness in age and their experiences of facing FV together. Anita, the middle child among her siblings, is very close with her elder sister as they are close in age and grew up together watching their parents arguing. However, she is not close with her younger sister, who is 11 years younger than her and has not gone through the FV trauma Anita and her elder sister experienced. Anita also finds it difficult to accept that her parents hold different standards in raising her younger sister from how they raised Anita and her elder sister.

Similarly, Maya also talked about her closeness with her sibling brother based on her closeness of age to him than to her sister, who is the third sibling.

Adriana, who has several siblings, also talked about the difference in her relationship with them:

The relationship would differ, first of all, according to the age. It would differ; for example, I am the eldest, and there’s another boy who is two years younger than me. Then there was the third girl, she is about five years younger than me, and then there is number four, number four is in fifth grade, primary school at the moment and number five, she just finished kindergarten, so she’s going to go into primary school. Number six is a boy who is going to be turning four this year. . . . Because of how you know when you pressure a child, the more you pressure a child, the more pressure the child will feel, and in that case, you know, my siblings, we’re all . . . at least me and the one who is two years younger than me and the one who’s five years younger than me, the three of us are all dysfunctional, in one way or another. All [of us] have our . . . unique problems. . . . I still communicate with my siblings, you know, my younger brother and my younger sister [the two siblings immediately after her]; they have their separate phones, so I’m able to connect with them. Occasionally, every now and then, we would message just to check up on them, and I would be able to connect with my younger siblings [the two youngest siblings] through them.

The excerpt reveals that a small age gap, growing up together in the same context of FV, plays a significant role in their bonding as siblings. Even though Anita and Adriana do not live with the sibling/s they get along with, they maintain the relationship with them.

 

Taking on the role of a parent for siblings

Viktor felt he needed to be a father figure and care for his siblings. Viktor saw how many responsibilities his mother juggled and felt obligated to help her:

My mom says that my sister and my brother . . . look up to me or something along those lines. . . . I feel like because my mom’s relationship with my siblings isn’t good . . . I need to help my siblings out, to be a father to them. . . . Even if it’s something as simple as just taking my sister to work, that makes my mom’s life easier, right? Like I do these things more because . . . I feel like I have an obligation to just make it easier for her as much as I can and help her out as much I can because she feels like I’m the only one that can really reach out to my siblings. That there’s some kind of a disconnect between parent and child, and that I can really feel that I am sort of the connection between my siblings and my mom.

During his interview, Viktor said he would not assume this role if the situation differed. However, he felt that he had to do this for his mother. Samantha played a similar role with her siblings.

Several factors impacting siblings’ relationships are evident in this theme. Based on varied factors we have seen that influenced sibling relationships among participants, it can be said that each family’s context could be unique and needs to be considered before working with siblings. However, as Sandiran suggested (elsewhere), trauma-informed counselling focusing on healing should be offered to all family members to recover from the impact of FV, as FV impacts all family members.

 

Impact on relationship with parents

During the interviews, we asked participants to speak about their relationships with their parents and how their experience of FV impacted their relationship with them. While some participants had good relationships with their parents, others had unconventional relationships, and a few resented their parents. Some participants also spoke about their past relationships with their parents, while others discussed their current relationships.

Good relationship with both parents

Sandiran, Sonia, Jasmine, and Anita described good relationships with their parents. Sandiran talked about their relationship with their father and how they felt much empathy for their father despite the abuse:

I think, even from a younger age, because my dad was someone who was not afraid to show love to me, I developed a lot of empathy for the experiences that he was going through. . . . So I think, even at a young age . . . I was very much able to maintain a very balanced relationship where I, I knew it was unacceptable for him to treat my mother the way that he was treating her, but I was still able to love him as a person . . . and it became more challenging when I had to be the person to establish the boundaries when my brother left that role. . . . These days . . . it’s a lot more challenging to maintain a relationship with him, especially with the alcohol stuff, but he still . . . expresses his love for me and tries to get me to come back home. . . . When I reflect on the way he treated my mother . . . I have a lot of anger, but it’s not anger towards him; it’s anger towards the situation. So I think that has allowed me to navigate my relationship with my father.

Sandiran also described their relationship with their mother:

Then with my mother . . . She is the strongest person I have met to date. And so for her like just an incredible . . . sense of admiration . . . what a strong like an incredibly resilient woman with, with so many layers to her and I think like, I can write poems about my mom for days. . . . From the get-go was very strict, but also just very loving in many different ways and . . . she taught me so much. . . . It’s been a privilege to be able to defend her and to protect her. . . . When I was 17, when I, like, got out of the depression and when I stopped wanting to take my own life . . . I realized that holy shit, like this woman, is the only person who was fighting for me throughout this whole time. And I think just being able to now, in various senses like financially, now in my role as a physician . . . I feel like physically being able to protect her, but also just protect her in a way where I’m like, Mom, what you went through . . . it wasn’t in vain like it paid off . . . in ways you’ll never know.

Sandiran’s narrative reflects unconditional love for both parents despite their bitter experience of FV that is still with them. As mentioned elsewhere, they attribute FV to their father’s internalized war trauma, for which they received no trauma-informed mental health support. This analysis seems to have facilitated Sandiran’s ability to separate the behaviour from the person. On the other hand, Sandiran’s immense admiration and gratitude for their mother comes from a keen awareness of her strength in surviving the violence, protecting, guiding, and providing for her children. Her mother was Sandiran’s source of inspiration for surviving trauma and excelling in academics.

Like Sandiran, Sonia has a good relationship with her parents. She takes care of their needs:

I do everything for my parents. . . . I am always taking care of my parents. . . . I’m also the same support for my dad . . . if there is anything he needs, that goes through me. I’m supporting my mom; obviously, what happened to her wasn’t right. But I also understood my dad’s point of view of what happened.

Sonia has maintained a relationship with her father even after he moved out following his arrest. Sonia felt indebted to her dad because despite living apart, he still paid her bills and student loans and supported her in every way he could.

Jasmine and Anita also have a good relationship with their parents. Despite the tension Anita experiences, she still loves her parents for giving them a promising future. Jasmine’s relationship with her father is good because she worked towards transforming him. A good relationship is something that Jasmine and her brother worked for and not something that came naturally. Jasmine had to build her relationship with her father, and her efforts were successful because her father also loved and cared for them. He worked to mend their relationship because he did not want to lose his children. Anita’s and Jasmine’s experiences reveal that parents’ desire and efforts to be a part of their children’s lives are essential in shaping their relationship with their children. Efforts to maintain a good relationship must happen from both sides, the children and the parents.

 

Unconventional relationship with mother

Because of the FV that they had witnessed between their parents, Chiairo’s and Viktor’s relationships with their mothers are a little non-traditional. “Non-traditional,” or unconventional, in this context, means that the relationship resembles an adult-to-adult relationship rather than a child-parent relationship.

Chiairo felt that her non-traditional relationship with her mother was primarily due to her stepfather’s behaviour towards her mother:

It was pretty hard . . . he [stepfather] was really rude and petty to my older sister. So he had some grudge against her. . . . I don’t know that I would call it abuse. Mostly, he just didn’t like her. Would often instigate a bunch of nonsense fights with her. And that was very stressful for me, and that was something that I tried raising with my mother. . . . I think that for a lot of our childhood and adolescence, too, we would want to do stuff with our mom so, but not with him. But he, he sort of was everywhere she was. And so I think . . . we avoided it like suggesting doing things because we didn’t want to do it with everybody. And I think that time sort of degraded our relationship too. . . . [With my mother], I think that . . . we don’t have, like, what a lot of people would say as a traditional relationship. I love her, and I respect her so much. I think that for some time, there was some resentment, and I felt like I had to assume a lot of the parenting relationship . . . especially . . . as she started dating again . . . and didn’t want to engage with my concerns. I think that I had a really hard time with that.

Chiairo’s reflections reveal her mixed feelings of disgust towards the stepfather, regret for missing good family time, and a deep concern and responsibility for her mother. Like Chiairo, Viktor had a similar unconventional relationship with his mother. Earlier, we shared an excerpt in which Viktor talked about caring for his siblings to help his mother. Neither Chiairo nor Viktor had a relationship with their mother in which they could be a child. Instead, they both had to take on adult roles at a young age,

 

Relationship with parents: A work in progress

Abi, Maria, and Samantha described their relationship with their parent as a work in progress. They continue to face ongoing struggles in their relationship with their parent and are currently working at mending these relationships. Abi spoke about the misunderstandings between her and her mother when she was growing up that tainted their relationship and how she is slowly restoring this relationship:

Actually, growing up, I had a really bad relationship with my mother. . . . I am also the middle child, so I thought . . . she didn’t love me. . . . I was also the child between the three of us to kind of talk to my mom a little bit more and . . . always asked for . . . trouble . . . she kind of took out her anger on to me. But I think I just I didn’t see what I was doing wrong. I just thought that I was being targeted, and she . . . ill-treated me. But then, like, over the past ten years, I think, since my diagnosis and since I started dealing with things I’ve had, like, I have improved [my] relationship with my mom.

The excerpts reveal that children have different relationships with their parents based on their perception of that relationship and their position (eldest child, middle child, youngest child) in the hierarchy of children. Today Abi critically looks back at the reasons for her stormy relationship with her mother and is trying to improve it.

Maria shared similar emotions about her relationship with her father. In her interview, Maria said she does not like what her father did but still loves him. She also said, “I was perfectly fine with them [parents] not being together because I did not like to see . . . him hitting her.” Maria’s father suffered a heart attack, and now he feels farther away from her than ever (because of COVID-19), creating a fear of losing her father. Maria is currently working towards mending their relationship.

Samantha talked about her relationship with her father, which was based on fear when she lived with him in Pakistan. Still, her concern for the well-being of her younger siblings, who currently live with him in Pakistan, motivated her to work towards restoring that relationship:

There was always like a severe fear of my father growing up. . . . But the thing is, like, over the years, like I . . . figured it was like if I build a good relationship with him that he’d be more likely to, like, listen to me. And so over the years since 2015 or so, I’ve been continuously trying to like talk to him and be kind of bite my tongue and just cooperate with him and build a good rapport with him. And ultimately, I sold him [on] the idea that you’re getting elderly, and if something happens to you, these three kids will not have anyone. And so I’ve kind of like got into his head, and he ultimately he was like okay . . . And so we did file the case in 2019 winter . . . actually, it is kind of a little strange, but literally yesterday morning, I found out that the paper was approved after a year and a half.

Samantha’s relationship with her father was based on fear. Today, she has earned her father’s trust and acquired permission to sponsor her three younger siblings to come to Canada and live with her and her mother. Her experience reveals how frequently children who grow up fearing their parents develop strategies to navigate their parent’s moods. They continue to use these strategies to their advantage as they get older.

 

Resentment towards parent(s)

Maya, Adriana, and Jay carry feelings of resentment toward their abusive parent/s. Maya talked about how growing up, her mother took the frustration of her abuse out on Maya and her siblings. This experience continues to influence her current relationship with her mother:

Even now, I’m not talking to her at all. Like, I don’t talk to her unless she calls me . . . it’s not like I actively try to have a relationship with her because she’s very meddling, she’ll meddle in your life, and she did that a lot with me . . . yeah definitely it’s not good with my mom.

Growing up, Maya constantly advised her mother not to get back together with her dad, but her voice went unheard. The cycle of abuse continued when her mother returned to her husband, which further triggered the mother’s abuse of Maya and her siblings. Maya felt they were in that situation because of her mother, and she still carries this resentment. Maya also resents and is bitter towards her father for what he put them through. However, she feels it is better to interact with him than ignore him because he is getting older and not keeping well.

Jay also revealed that he still carries some resentment towards his father. Since witnessing his father abuse his mother, Jay has kept a mental tally of his father’s good and bad behaviour. This shows that experiencing abuse can taint children’s image of their parents, leading them to over-analyze their parent’s actions and behaviour as they grow older.

The experiences of abuse and the hardships Adriana has experienced are still fresh in her mind. Even after her forced immigration to Canada, the tension continues between them.

As findings portray, FV significantly impacts the relationships between children and parents. All participants have explicitly denounced their parent’s abusive behaviour. However, Sandiran, Abi and Sonia see a connection between FV with systemic factors such as a lack of trauma-informed mental health service or culturally appropriate law enforcement service for racialized immigrant women. In their opinion, these factors are foundational contributors to the FV in their families and need redressal for addressing FV in racialized immigrant families.

 

Impact on community connections

In the interviews, we explored the impact of FV on participants’ relationships with their communities. Sonia, Jasmine, Samantha, Chiairo, and Sandiran felt that FV did impact their relationships with their community members. Whereas in the case of other participants, their relationships were not affected. We present below the voices of participants who expressed that their relationships were affected.

Well-connected to the community

Sonia made a conscious effort to continue to be involved in her religious community. After the serious abuse leading to her father’s arrest, Sonia found comfort in volunteering and getting involved with ethnic and religious community institutions. As she got older, she felt more connected to her ethnic roots. Involvement in their communities and the sense of connectedness this brings was something that Sonia sought out and pursued.

 

Could not build community connections

Jasmine and Samantha felt that because of their parents, they could not build strong connections with their communities. Jasmine talked about her lack of contact with her ethnic community because her father discouraged it. She often felt excluded but could not express it to her father:

Growing up, I will say that my father discouraged connecting with the Bangladeshi community. Especially when we moved to Canada, he was very against it. So we didn’t really have many Bangladeshi friends or Bangladeshi community connections, and I do feel like that affected my connection with my community now because I don’t really have any Bangladeshi friends. It makes me sad when I see other people and, like, they’ll have [ethnic] friends, and I’m like, what’s wrong with me? And you know, I’ve been through the instances of Bangladeshi people calling me a coconut because they think I’m whitewashed and not cultural enough because I’m not as into the culture. It’s not because I don’t love our culture. I love it; I’m just not as well versed. . . . But to me, I do feel like that keeps me from connecting with other people in my community because I do feel judged by them.

Jasmine felt excluded and judged by her ethnic community. Jasmine’s father’s control over whom she could interact with resulted in her isolation from her community. On the other hand, Samantha could not connect with her community because her mother’s mental illness, physical condition, and hospitalization did not leave her with options to maintain a community connection. As discussed earlier, Samantha also did not have the privilege of pursuing community connections because of the need to maintain the secrecy of her family situation and keep CPS away.

 

“Ostracized by the community”

Chiairo, Sandiran, and Abi talked about how they felt ostracized by their communities. Chiairo talked about how her stepfather’s nature stopped community members from connecting with her family:

I think a lot of people didn’t like him and just stopped inviting us . . . stopped interacting with the family. I think part of that too was . . . that he didn’t want to go somewhere and didn’t like my mom going places without him, and so I think that really destroyed a lot of social and community, family relationships.

Chiairo’s excerpt reveals the controlling nature of her stepfather that led to the community breaking ties with the family. Additionally, being from a different cultural background, his connection to his wife’s community was fragile; he disliked that community. Unfortunately, all these factors led to the family’s loss of connection with their ethnic community.

Sandiran also talked about how their community ostracized their family due to their father’s mental health and poverty. They said:

I have a lot of strife with the rest of the community just because we grew up very actively being ostracized by the rest of the community because people . . . didn’t know exactly what like father had, but they knew that there was some sort of a mental health issue, and they knew we were poor . . . they didn’t want to associate themselves with us, everyone from distant relatives to friends to my dad’s own younger brother and his family. . . . Essentially a background where community members tend to want to assimilate . . . because we’re so fearful of what the consequences are in the way that I saw it take place within me and my own family. . . . Always focus on your studies, don’t worry about what’s going on outside. Keep doing what you’re supposed to do . . . and sort of hold your head down, type of thing . . . don’t get together with groups of people that have been deemed as dangerous or not part of this model-minority . . . but also from the outside, people don’t expect us to speak up in group settings, we’re often expected to not have issues, to not . . . cause conflict, to not raise our voice, to not take up space. So, you know that space thing, mentally and physically, we are in terms of not just model-minority women but the model-minority community.

Sandiran said their community members wanted the children to focus on academic success and material advancement. Hence, they did not associate with those families that did not meet those standards. According to them,

I have so much bitterness, and I know it’s not, it’s not the best, but I, it’s a form of protection, and I hold that bitterness. I hold it in a way where I’m now claiming my own agency that even though you put us in the situation you ostracized us, our families still remain resilient. And so it’s a sense of pride for me to not want to take their shit. . . . I don’t like a lot of the people, a lot of the youth in the community just because a lot of them grew up with privileges that made . . . them . . . not necessarily attuned to the realities that marginalized people in the community face, so I’m very apprehensive about interacting with them. . . . I think, for my family . . . I don’t . . . engage in any other like [religious] interactions or any functions. I keep to myself, and . . . don’t want to form any relationship. But then here I’m like . . .I’m really keen on getting to know the community better. That being said, I did a project . . . on environmental conceptions and concerns within the community, where I actually reached out to community members . . . walked up to men and asked them . . . if they could provide their insights on a survey. I had a conversation with elderly women, asking them about stories about how they interacted with the land back home . . . when it comes to the informal sphere, I will keep an arm’s length distance. In professional spheres, I will engage.

Sandiran’s discussion reveals how the pressure of fitting into the image of a model minority community often deters its members from extending their support to fellow community members who might be vulnerable. Such experiences of rejection by one’s community can further aggravate their loneliness and helplessness without state support. However, in the case of Sandiran, their awareness of the model minority pressure got them to move beyond their subjective experience and find ways to rekindle that connection with community members professionally.