The missing conversation about contact after CPVA
This blog emerged from discussions within our peer support group, where parents and caregivers shared their experiences of family breakdown because they were not safe in their homes due to CPVA, and the challenges that followed when children left home, lived elsewhere, or entered Oranga Tamariki care. While every family's story is unique, a common theme emerged: the profound loss, grief and trauma experienced by those left behind.
Many parents speak not only about the impact of years spent living with violence, intimidation, coercive control and fear, but also about the difficult questions that emerged once their child was no longer living at home. For some, a new dilemma replaced the old one: was it safe to continue seeing their child? Despite no longer sharing a home, many remained frightened by the prospect of close contact, uncertain about how they would respond emotionally, and worried about what might happen during or after visits. Yet they often felt an expectation and pressure to maintain contact and demonstrate ongoing engagement, with little acknowledgement of the trauma they were carrying or whether they felt ready and safe to do so.
Others wanted to maintain a relationship with their child, but in ways that felt safe and manageable. They wanted opportunities to parent from a distance, establish boundaries, rebuild trust gradually, or have a say in how contact occurred. Some felt their concerns were minimised or dismissed by professionals and wider whānau, and that long-standing parenting decisions and boundaries they had put in place to keep themselves and other family members safe were overridden without full consideration of their lived experience. This left many feeling powerless, unheard, and fearful that the impact of the violence was not being adequately considered in decisions affecting their family.
How is the rest of the family doing?
Siblings are often the forgotten victims. They may have spent years adapting their behaviour to avoid incidents, feeling unsafe in their own home, or witnessing events no child should have to witness. Long after their sibling has left, they may continue to carry fear, anxiety, grief, confusion, guilt, or divided loyalties, yet their experiences are rarely explored.
Once a child leaves home or enters care, the family's experience can quickly disappear from the conversation. Contact arrangements may be made, visits scheduled, and parents expected to attend, engage positively, and maintain the relationship, often while their own trauma remains largely unacknowledged.
What is often missing is a conversation about whether contact is emotionally and psychologically safe for everyone involved.
Maintaining relationships can be important, but contact should not be viewed as automatically beneficial simply because it is possible. Parents who have lived with years of violence, intimidation, threats, or coercive control are often expected to resume regular contact with little acknowledgement of what they have experienced . The focus can quickly become when contact will occur and how often, rather than whether the parent feels safe, ready, or adequately supported.
For many parents, nobody asks:
What was life like for you before your child left home?
What impact has the violence had on you?
What impact has it had on your other children?
What happens emotionally for you before, during, and after contact?
Do you feel safe having contact at this stage?
What support would help make contact safer and more meaningful?
Are there therapeutic interventions needed before contact that can be beneficial for everyone involved?
Instead, many parents feel that contact is something being done to them rather than planned with them.
Years spent in survival mode can leave people hypervigilant, anxious, emotionally exhausted, and struggling with complex grief. Some experience dissociation, becoming emotionally numb or disconnected as a way of coping. To others, this can look like indifference or disengagement, when in reality it is a common trauma response from a nervous system that has been overwhelmed for too long.
Parents may be expected to attend contact and present as calm, regulated, and engaged while carrying levels of fear and distress that go largely unseen.
It raises an uncomfortable question.
If this were an abusive intimate partner relationship, would we expect the victim to participate in regular contact with the person who had harmed them while demonstrating warmth and positive engagement? Would we closely scrutinise those interactions without first ensuring the victim had access to support and opportunities to heal?
Families affected by CPVA deserve the same understanding.
Recognising parental and family trauma does not mean ignoring the child's needs or ending contact. Rather, it means acknowledging that healing may be needed across the whole family and that contact should be considered through the lens of safety, readiness, and wellbeing for everyone involved.
A trauma-informed approach would recognise the impact of violence towards parents, siblings, and whānau. It would provide opportunities for family members to have their experiences heard, access appropriate support, and have genuine conversations about whether the current form of contact is helping or causing further harm.
Most importantly, it would ask two questions that seem to be forgotten far too often:
Who is supporting the family?
And who is asking whether contact is truly safe?
If we truly want to support family healing, we must stop viewing parents and whānau solely through the lens of contact arrangements and start recognising them as people who may have been deeply harmed and who deserve support in their own right. Only then can we begin to hold space for the full reality of families living with CPVA.