How can the fictional representation of domestic abuse trauma in children expose the authentic experience as systemically silenced and ‘hidden behind closed doors’?

Children are often said to be witness to domestic violence in the home, as opposed to experiencing it. This is to misstate their reality. The Breaking by Kathryn Heyman (1997) is set in a small country town in rural Australia. The synopsis states it ‘is the story of a family tainted by the force of rage, of a young life haunted by it, but also of the strength it gives to fight back’ (2021). Republished in 2021, it includes an author’s note as a foreword which highlights the societal shift in conversations around familial male violence and control, and child trauma. Following the 1997 publication, Heyman speaks of the complete silencing of the violence that is at the very heart of the narrative, ‘…violence was rarely mentioned – avoided altogether… by the media’ (viii). The novel was spoken of in exalted tones: the energy and hilarity of the child voice, the exotic and compelling landscape. Critics spoke of wit, and of beauty, and of the outback. Interviews discussed horses, Australians, and circled around anger. Only one interviewer, Heyman posits, used the phrase ‘violent man’. The violent man in her novel – who enacted control strategically and with brutal regularity – was kept behind closed doors. Twenty years on, the author posits, the sense of shame around domestic trauma has begun to lift. The conversation is now public, the fragmented lens through which domestic abuse was viewed is being pieced together. As Heyman states in the final lines of her foreword, while the numbers may make us despair, we must remind ourselves of this: ‘if it seems worse it is partly because, finally, we are really looking’ (ix). The time is now to authentically represent the implications of domestic abuse on children, the effects of growing up in a culture which normalises familial control and coercion, and the impact of systemic silencing.