A new study explores how boys view their fathers as the boys move from childhood into adulthood. The study, "Witnessing Marital Violence as Children: Men's Perceptions of Their Fathers," is by Gary Dick, assistant professor of Social Work at the University of Cincinnati, and is published in the current issue of the Journal of Social Service Research, Volume 32, issue two.
Dick says previous research suggests boys who witness a father's violence against their mother are at risk of becoming abusers themselves, in addition to developing an ambivalent relationship with their fathers and even ending contact with them in adulthood. "Much is known about the internal and external effects that witnessing violence has on children, but we know little about the type of relationship men had with their fathers after witnessing parental aggression," Dick writes in the study. "Understanding abusive men's relationships with their children and how they carry out their paternal roles is an important issue in preventing violence against women."
In a study of 104 men ranging in age from 19 to 61, Dick compared a group of men who had witnessed marital violence as children to a group of men who did not witness marital violence as children, to see if there were differences in how the men perceived their relationships with their fathers. Forty-three percent of the men studied had parents who divorced during their childhood ? the mean age of the children at the time of divorce was about eight-and-a-half years old.