Children with multiple stays at refuges for abused women and their experiences of teacher recognition

Abstract

Numerous children around the world are forced to make multiple moves with their mothers in and out of refuges for abused women. Each time, they experience a sudden upheaval of their familiar environment. For these children, domestic violence and flight from violence is not an isolated event but part of their upbringing. Few statistics and little research exist on their living conditions and experiences. This article adopts the children’s perspective, examining the ways their teachers recognize their situation and offer them support. Experiences were collected in qualitative interviews with 20 children of ages 6–16 residing at Norwegian refuges. The choice of “mutual recognition” (Schibbye 2009) as a theoretical framework was inductively generated from the data. The constructivist grounded theory coding system was implemented as a data analysis method (Charmaz 2014). The analysis produced five different forms of teacher recognition—formal, practical, third-party, forced, and coincidental—through which teachers offered children various forms of support.