SINGAPORE, May 13, 2001: Children who experience abuse in the family often bear emotional scars. A US study shows they sometimes grow up to be abusive parents themselves. At a symposium held in Singapore, Professor Jeffrey Edleson, director of the Minnesota Centre Against Violence and Abuse, said that a study of 500 American families which experienced domestic violence found that 17 per cent had seen violent behavior at home as children. Thirty to 60 per cent of wife-battery cases investigated in the United States included abuse of children in the family. And one out of three among the three million abused children in America grow up to be abusive parents. In Singapore, although there are no parallel statistics on children who have witnessed domestic violence, a service center specializing in dealing with family violence said that in the 568 cases it handled, 827 children had seen their parents, usually their mothers, suffer violence at home.
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