Child protection, family support, and early-intervention systems frequently depend on parents or caregivers to identify concerns, seek assistance, and advocate for a child’s needs. That model can leave a critical gap where family violence, addiction, mental illness, or chronic instability affect every adult in a household. Listening to adult survivors offers an important source of evidence for policymakers, researchers, schools, and service providers seeking to understand how children remain unseen and how support systems can identify risk before it becomes entrenched.
I grew up with a PTSD-impacted father who was often violent, and a depressed and alcoholic mother who, due to her own mental health struggles, very rarely intervened in the beatings or psychological abuse my siblings and I received. When I was eleven, Dad had left and we kids lived full-time with our mum. When I was sixteen, my mum moved away to go into rehab. I stayed behind to finish year twelve, completing the whole of Year 12 without parents, cooking, shopping, washing my clothes, and working to pay bills, while I studied. I rode my bicycle to musical practice and sport and made up stories if anyone asked about my parents.
There was no extended family stepping in. No neighbour who noticed. No teacher who asked the right question. There was also no system of support wrapped around us. I didn’t enter the child protection system. I wasn’t counted in any dataset. Like a lot of children growing up in homes like mine, I learned very early that drawing attention to myself was dangerous, so I hid. But I always hoped someone would find me. Nobody did.
In large part, this is because the systems that should have found me were not built to look, because most programs and studies related to children exposed to adverse childhood experiences assume the presence of at least one functional parent.
The realities of home
Take university studies as an example. For a child to be included as a research participant in a study on children in high-adversity homes, at least one parent needs to be together enough to recognise the problem exists and that it affects their children. Once they find out about a study, they must also be willing to let their child participate, knowing it may paint them in a damning light, or end with their child taken away from them.
The idea that my mum, who left school in year nine, and who was too ashamed to reach out for help herself, would somehow find a university study, think that we might have anything worth contributing, and that I, in turn would speak about the impact her and my dad’s behaviour had on me, in front of her, so she would feel even worse about herself, is so far out of the realm of the imaginable to be ridiculous. This means that the nature of research naturally selects for a certain type of dynamic that many of the most at-risk children do not have.
Support services operate on the same assumption: that there is at least one parent functioning as protector, advocate, and access point. This caretaker is assumed to be engaged enough to be actively concerned about their children’s welfare. This is simply not the case for many of us. It means the children at greatest risk often have no awareness that support even exists. And if they do know, they are too young to access it themselves.
Research and support services systematically miss families like mine. In homes where both parents are struggling, and a community of support is absent, there is no functioning caregiver or other adult to report what is going on. No agencies are notified, so the many children facing the severe end of childhood adversity are left without support as a result.
The missing link
After Dad left, I learned to forge my mum’s signature. I wasn’t skiving off school or hiding bad reports. I was signing my own permission slips so I could attend sports carnivals or go to school camp because there were few times when Mum wasn’t drunk or unconscious. I did what I could to never bother her with anything because I could see she was drowning and I did not want to add weight to her struggle.
When a house is in crisis mode, and both parents are struggling just to make it through the next minute, relying on the capacity of caregivers is not a sound strategy for children’s wellbeing. There is rightly a strong ethical framework around researching children. But it bewilders me that researchers seem to think speaking to a child is the only way to capture the child perspective.
A person’s capacity to speak from the child’s perspective does not end when they turn eighteen. I am well recovered. And yet the rage and bewilderment and confusion of my younger self is always with me. It drives everything I do. Just because my experience wasn’t counted when I was young, doesn’t mean it can’t be counted now.
Adult survivors of childhood trauma are so often missing from the research that drives the creation of support programs, and yet many of us have very specific insights into how systems can be improved and what is actually needed.
If government and researchers and systems of support want to stop kids like me falling through the net, the only way to access us is retrospectively, once we are adults and can speak for ourselves. If anyone wants to know what it was like to be that child, all they have to do is ask us now.
What needs to change is simple, even if it isn’t easy.
Stop building intervention programs on the assumption of a functioning parent. Start treating adult survivors as a primary research population, not an afterthought. And ask us, directly, seriously, with the same rigour applied to every other gap in the evidence base, what it was like, what we needed, and what would have helped.
