This article discusses the harmful impacts of intimate partner violence on mother-child relationships and argues that such family violence is not simply an attack on an adult victim, but is an attack on the relationship between the child and their mother. The article draws on an action research project that involved women, children and refuge workers in developing activities to address this destructive aspect of family violence by strengthening the relationship between mothers and their children. The need for refuge workers to recognise these effects in their assessments is highlighted. The author argues that traditional parenting programmes fail to provide the space necessary for healing the combined effects of family violence on the child's experience and the constraints it places on mothering, and that the divide between women's and children's services needs to be overcome to ensure that relationship work is possible.

Social Work Now (37) September 2007 : 9-11