‘Thinking and doing’: children’s and young people’s understandings and experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA)

It is the aim of this chapter to present two types of research that have examined children and young people’s relationships with intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA). First, research has explored how young people (generally from the ages of 11 to 21) understand and talk about such violence – which may or may not focus upon personal experiences. The second type has looked specifically at analysing young people’s personal experiences of the violence within their own relationships. This has usually focused upon those deemed ‘old enough’ to be in sexual partnerships (generally from age 14 onwards). In this chapter, we term the former researching understandings of IPVA and the latter researching experiences of IPVA.