Yesterday was Australia Day in this country……..some of us may have difficulties with the date….I for one would prefer a date that our Indigenous people feel good about, rather than the date  that commemorates  the invasion of this country by Europeans.

But there is one feature that is unreservedly good; the nominations of “Australian of the Year”  for 2015 and 2016 were Rosie Batty and David Morrison; and both of them have taken a leadership role in encouraging us to find ways of dealing with Domestic Violence.

While it is clear that exposure to family violence damages children emotionally and psychologically, a range of further research findings supports the obvious intuition that many perpetrators of domestic violence themselves come from backgrounds of the various kinds of problematic early developmental nurturance that have been described at length in various postings on this blog.

The stage is thus set for a transgeneration cascade of domestic violence……..and of course, a perpetrator of domestic violence is unlikely to confine their aggressive action to the home front alone.

It is encouraging to see how plans to minimise domestic violence are coming more and more into national prominence. And here again, while there is a whole range of measures that have a positive effect, the earlier in the life cycle that they are deployed, the better……nurturing the nurturers……identifying those at risk and supporting them sensitively.

I am currently working on Chapter 6 of my “Politics of  Nurturance”  book. This is the Chapter on identification and sensitive supports and interventions…..and how our recent understandings of developmental neuroscience can inform this.  An extremely difficult area……one of the core problems is that because so much of this stuff is PRE-verbal…i.e. addressing the emotional/relational “networks”and “programmes” of the right hemisphere of the baby and infant, but ALSO of the nurturer, much of the supportive  input needs to be pre-verbal as well, if it is to be effective.  And a book is very VERBAL after all. Prosody is largely absent unless it is read aloud, and then much hangs on the reader’s voice.

I’ve had some ideas about how to subtly address this issue, but I want to do it “under the radar”as it were, without making it so obvious that it loses any good impact.

Any feelings or ideas , dear reader?