Let me begin with two kitchens.
In the first, it is a little after eleven at night, and the house is finally quiet. A woman I will call Ellen sits at her table with a cup of tea gone cold. Upstairs, her two children are asleep, the younger one with a flashlight still switched on beneath the blanket. The lunches for tomorrow are made. To anyone looking in through the window, everything appears to be in order. It is not. For six years Ellen has lived with a partner whose moods decide the temperature of every room. She has learned to read the sound of the car in the driveway, the way the keys are set down, the silence that comes before the shouting. She tells no one, because she is ashamed, because she is afraid, and because she has come to believe, as so many do, that it is somehow her fault.
In the second kitchen, three states away, a man I will call David sets two places at the table out of habit, then puts one plate back. It has been fourteen months since he last saw his daughter. There was no act of violence, no police report, no finding against him. There was a separation, a long and bitter case, and then a slow silence: calls that went unanswered, visits that were cancelled, a child who began to repeat words that were never hers. David has stopped telling people what happened, because he has learned that the story makes them uneasy, and that some of them assume he must have done something to deserve it.
Neither Ellen nor David is one person. Their stories are drawn from many families who have come to the Alliance and to our partners, and their names stand in for others. Ellen could just as easily have been a man, and David a woman; abuse and estrangement observe no rule of sex. But both kitchens are real, and both are quiet in the same way. The harms are not the same, and I will not pretend they are. Both are injuries to a family, and both are carried in silence. This month, two observances that were born separately ask us to look into both of them.
How October came to hold both
For most of our history, what happened inside either kitchen was considered no one else’s business. The change came slowly, and it came because ordinary people refused to stay quiet.
In 1971, in the London suburb of Chiswick, Erin Pizzey opened one of the first modern refuges for women and children fleeing violence at home. It is a point of pride for this Alliance that she serves today as our Emeritus Advisor. She also argued, at real cost to her standing in the movement she helped begin, that the capacity for cruelty in a family is not the property of one sex. Fifty-five years on, the national data bear out at least that much.
In America, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence held its first Day of Unity in October 1981, connecting advocates who had been working alone. The day grew into a week, and in October 1987 the first national Domestic Violence Awareness Month was observed. This year the national campaign is themed With Survivors, Always, and its organizers have asked that it move from awareness to action.
World Mental Health Day came to October by a different road. The World Federation for Mental Health first marked it on October 10, 1992. This year’s theme is Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change, a call to treat the knowledge of people who have lived through mental illness and recovery as a form of expertise.
I can think of no better pair of themes for the families we serve. What Ellen and David carry is lived experience. Both have too rarely been heard. And both are mental health stories before they are anything else.
What the data says, and what it doesn’t
The CDC’s newest National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey data, released this year, estimates that 34 percent of women and 17 percent of men in the United States have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. Nearly a third of women (30.2 percent) and more than a fifth of men (22.3 percent) have experienced psychological aggression by a partner, a measure that includes coercive control and entrapment. Those are not small numbers on either side. Because the CDC changed its survey methods, these figures cannot be compared with earlier years.
Violence leaves its mark long after the bruises fade, if there were ever bruises at all. It lives on in sleepless nights, in the startle at a slammed door, in an anxiety that settles in the chest and will not leave. It teaches a parent to doubt their own judgment. A parent cannot protect children while drowning, and cannot begin to heal while still in danger.
When children become the weapon
Not all abuse is physical, and not all of it is aimed at a partner directly. Sometimes it takes the form of control exercised through the children: threatening to take them away, turning them against the other parent, cutting off contact without cause. The domestic violence field has a name for patterns like these, coercive control, and either parent can practice them.
Let me be careful here, as I try to be whenever we write about this, because the subject is badly served by overstatement. The research on what is often called parental alienation is still developing, and the term is contested in courts and in the clinical literature. Accusations run in both directions, and some of them are false. No honest advocate pretends otherwise.
What we can say is this. Children absorb what adults do to each other. Parental separation already sits on the CDC’s list of adverse childhood experiences. And a 2021 systematic review in Current Psychology found that adults exposed to parental alienation as children consistently reported depression, anxiety, and lower self-esteem. A child made to give up a loving parent in order to keep the peace with the other is not a spectator to the conflict. That child is its casualty.
We must be equally clear about the other side of the ledger. A parent who limits contact to protect a child from real danger is not committing abuse. That parent is doing exactly what a good parent should. Safety comes first, always. Family preservation has never meant keeping anyone in a home with an abuser. It means preserving what is worth saving: the bond between children and every parent who is safe and loving, the dignity of mothers, fathers, and grandparents who are trying, and the chance for a family to heal once the danger has passed.
What one person can do
In the stories we know best, the turning point is rarely dramatic. It is a neighbor who says, “You seem tired lately. Are you all right?” It is a teacher who notices a child’s drawings have gone dark. It is a friend who asks a second time, gently, after the first answer was “I’m fine.”
This month, think of the parents, grandparents, and caregivers in your life, and ask one of them how they are really doing. Then listen, without judgment and without hurry. If the person you are thinking of has lost contact with their children, don’t assume time has softened it. Holidays, birthdays, and hearing dates are hard. Call on those days, and keep calling after them.
What the Family Preservation Alliance is asking of you
Hear lived experience on both sides of the kitchen table. This year’s World Mental Health Day theme asks us to treat lived experience as expertise. In family matters, that must include survivors of partner abuse, parents and grandparents separated from their children, and the adult children who grew up in the middle. Their voices belong in the rooms where policy is made. Standing with survivors, always, means standing with all of them.
Bring coercive control involving children into family court training. Judges, mediators, guardians ad litem, and family law attorneys make decisions about safety and contact every day, often with little training in either. The Family Preservation Alliance supports evidence-based training that helps family court professionals recognize coercive control in every form, including the use of children as a weapon, while screening carefully for genuine risk to any child or parent.
Put both numbers where families will see them. Every allied group, support meeting, and family law practice should display the 988 Lifeline and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. People should know where to turn before they need it.
Help close the evidence gap. The research on family rupture, coercive control through children, and mental health outcomes is still too thin to guide policy with confidence. If you are a researcher, clinician, or graduate student, this question is wide open.
Don’t heal alone. Our partner STAR Network offers free peer support for people recovering from trauma and toxic relationships, including weekly TAR Anon meetings. Recovery is something we do together.
The history of this cause was written by people who would not look away. It is still being written, in kitchens like Ellen’s and David’s, one quiet night at a time.
988 offers 24/7 judgment-free support for mental health, substance use, and more. Text, call, or chat 988. You can reach out for yourself or because you are worried about someone you love.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline is free and confidential, 24 hours a day: call 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.
If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.
This October, the Family Preservation Alliance marks World Mental Health Day on October 10 and Domestic Violence Awareness Month throughout the month.
John S. Hamel, Jr. is President of the Family Preservation Alliance, which works to keep children connected to the parents and grandparents who love them. He also serves as Vice Chairman of the STAR Network Foundation.