Mary* was three years old when she witnessed her father physically attack her mother, Beth*. The police arrived and arrested him for actual bodily harm, although Beth later withdrew her police report when her partner promised to attend a perpetrator prevention course.
He never did. The course leaders wrote to Beth, warning her of his absence and expressing concern for the family’s safety. They were right to be worried. The domestic abuse continued until Beth eventually left her partner shortly after, with the pair then sharing custody of Mary.
While staying with her father, Mary’s attitude towards her mother began to change, as she started echoing things her father had said about Beth. An expert commissioned by their local police force said the evidence “strongly suggests” that Beth’s abuser was subjecting their daughter to “coercive control”. But Beth’s local authority refused to help her regain full custody of her daughter, despite being aware of the abuse she had faced.
Beth’s fight to protect Mary is not unusual. An exclusive investigation by openDemocracy has found that 377,000 children in England and Wales have been identified by local authorities as being at risk of domestic abuse in the past five years. Perhaps even more shockingly, 396 of these children have died in the same period.
The news comes as a new report by Women’s Aid reveals that 19 children, aged between three weeks and 11 years old, have been killed in the UK by a parent who was also a perpetrator of domestic abuse over the past nine years. Seventeen of the 18 perpetrators were men, and 15 were the fathers of the children killed.
openDemocracy also asked England and Wales’s 43 police forces how many domestic abuse crimes they have recorded where a child was linked to the offence in recent years. The results were equally disturbing: the 33 forces that responded had recorded 535,439 such crimes between 2022 and 2024. Nearly 110,000 children had been linked to domestic offences where there was “violence with injury”.
Our investigation shows that children are still trapped in homes where they are in danger, often with the knowledge of the authorities, four years after the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021 recognised that children in households where domestic abuse is present are victims in their own right. The violence they experience can have a lifelong impact on their mental and physical health.
Our findings, said domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales Nicole Jacobs, “show the huge scale of this problem”. But the data we have uncovered is only the tip of the iceberg; it relies on people making tip-offs about a child in danger or police responding to a call out for a domestic abuse incident. On average, women experience 35 incidents of domestic abuse before calling the police.
Jacobs, whose role involves making recommendations to the government on domestic abuse, published a report earlier this year. “One of the recommendations we are making is to get clearer data,” she told openDemocracy, “as understanding the scale of this problem can help drive reforms in social services, police, health and social care, and education.” A report published by the Foundations charity estimates the figure of at risk children is closer to 800,000.
The commissioner said that children experiencing domestic abuse have told her that they “feel ignored”. She continued: “People around them may have recognised the abuse of the adults in their lives, but children are not feeling like anyone’s given any time or attention to them. Children said to us: ‘Please, we need our own individual support.’”
The need for reform is urgent. Many children remain trapped in danger, following years of austerity and funding cuts to organisations supporting victims. Over half of domestic abuse services have had to place children on waiting lists because they receive more referrals than they have the capacity or funding to manage, Jacobs says. More than a quarter have turned children away as a result.
The impact on children and mothers
After her parents separated, Mary spent years splitting her time between her mother and father, living with each parent on alternate weeks. Beth said she and her daughter were close during that time, and that Mary would express reservations about her father, describing him as “mean”.
But when Mary was 12, she started to be severely bullied by her classmates. It was decided she should move to a new school closer to her father and live with him during the week, returning to Beth at weekends.
It was not an easy decision for Beth. The history of violence weighed on her mind. But as is common for abuse victims/survivors, she hoped her ex had turned over a new leaf.
Mary’s attitude towards her mother dramatically changed once she was under her father's care. She started to see Beth as the “mean” parent, and during one vicious row referred to her mother as a “fucking psycho” – language, Beth said, that her ex had used against her.
As their relationship deteriorated, a family court ruled that Mary should be able to decide when she sees her mother, and the two have had no contact for several years. The mental health impact on Beth has been so severe that she is now in domestic abuse-induced suicide support.
During her fight to regain access to and protect her now-teenage daughter, Beth has repeatedly turned to local authorities for help. On one occasion, she contacted her local council with concerns that Mary may be suicidal. This led to an assessment by social services, which Beth has shared with openDemocracy. While the report did not find evidence that Mary was suicidal, it quoted a family member who described her as “suffering with panic attack and anxiety”, “always sad” and “quite isolated from the family”.
It is not unusual for children who have witnessed and therefore been subject to domestic abuse to suffer from poor mental health; half of the patients seen by the Children and Adolescents Mental Health Service, an NHS service that provides support and treatment for young people, report experiencing domestic abuse.
The same social services’ assessment, which Beth obtained via a Subject Access Request, stated: “We do feel [Beth] has been a victim of abuse”. Despite this acknowledgement, social services did not support Beth’s efforts to remove Mary from her father’s care. Instead, they expressed concerns about Beth’s behaviour, as she had attempted to meet her daughter despite Mary saying she did not want contact with her mother.
Beth then reported her ex to the police, with officers commissioning a leading academic specialising in coercive control to review Mary’s case. The academic’s report, which openDemocracy has seen, suggested that Mary’s sudden change in behaviour towards both her mother and father “strongly suggests that the child’s perspective is being distorted by the domestically abusive parent as part of the abusive parent’s coercive control”.
Ultimately, the police did not take Beth’s case forward. This, she says, fails to follow statutory guidance on coercive control regarding “weaponising children in family courts proceedings, financial abuse through legal proceedings and making false reports to professionals”. This was disputed by a spokesperson for the local police service, which we are not naming to protect Mary’s identity, although they said they could not comment on individual cases.
While all this was taking place, Beth was also continuing to fight her case in the family courts. She hoped a judge would see what she says all the other services were missing: that she and her daughter were being coercively controlled.
Family courts and child safety
The family courts system in England and Wales has faced much criticism in recent years for putting children in danger by failing to take account of domestic abuse.
Since a ‘presumption of contact’ was enshrined into law in 2014, “judges and professionals [in family courts] strongly promote and prioritise contact between children and non-resident parents following parental separation, even in cases involving domestic abuse”, according to a 2024 report by Right To Equality, a non-profit organisation focused on achieving gender equality through legal reform in the UK.
Evidence suggests this pro-contact principle is “rarely disapplied”, Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner, wrote in a report last year, adding: “Domestic abuse allegations, and impact on the child being required to have contact with an abusive parent, sometimes against their will, were not sufficiently taken into account.”
In the same report, Jacobs warned that perpetrators are weaponising the courts to commit ‘post-separation abuse’ against their children and ex-partners. She also expressed concern that the adversarial nature of the family courts process can leave women afraid to disclose domestic abuse in case they are accused of ‘parental alienation’ – a claim that they are using malicious allegations to estrange the child from a parent. This failure to alert judges to previous abuse puts children at risk.
“I have heard of women warned by their solicitor not to raise domestic abuse in the family courts,” Jacobs told openDemocracy. “My great frustration is that, from the point that you've been accused as someone who's trying to alienate your child, any concern you have will be met with the answer ‘well that's because you're trying to alienate your child.’ It gives you absolutely no ability to raise a concern, and we would expect parents to raise a concern about their child’s safety.”
Beth said her ex used similar tactics in the family courts as part of a pattern of his alleged coercively controlling behaviour. During the court process, she said he omitted evidence about his history of domestic abuse and instead made false allegations against her, including that her house was unsuitable, and that she was abusive towards Mary – allegations she denies and for which he produced no evidence. Beth has now spent £65,000 on family court costs, in unsuccessful attempts to protect her daughter.
Telling openDemocracy of her frustration at what she views as a failure by the family courts, local authorities and the police to deal with her allegations of coercive control, Beth said: “No services are working to protect victims unless there is physical violence.”
Children are also reporting suffering in the family courts system. Last year, Jacobs instigated ‘Tell Nicole’ sessions, where children and young people aged between four and 24 could share with her their experiences of domestic abuse and their support needs.
During the discussions, “children brought up the family courts, unprompted by us,” said Jacobs. “They asked for improved understanding from the family courts, because the arrangements made by the courts were not always safe for them.
“Victims are very much beholden to a family courts system where the domestic abuse may be completely minimised. Domestic abuse is often characterised as in the past, with the court not thinking at all about the child and the impact on a child.”
*Names have been changed
This article was corrected on 2 July 2025 to clarify that the figure of 800,000 at-risk children came from research by the Foundations charity, and not the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, as originally stated.
