Applying Joint Painting Procedure to Understand Implicit Mother–Child Relationship in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a severe and prevalent global problem. It can damage women who survive it and children who witness it. Nurturing the mother–child relationship is critical to support mothers’ and children’s recovery. Research to date has mainly reflected information captured from conscious, verbal accounts by women and their children of explicit relationships. There is a lack of research on implicit relationships involving nonverbal and unconscious interactions that can be difficult to verbalize, especially for children. This is the first paper that describes the application of an art-based method, Joint Painting Procedure (JPP) with Chinese mother–child dyads who survived IPV to study their implicit relationship. It was conducted in a shelter for abused women in Hong Kong. Mother–child dyad was considered “partners,” and JPP was used in novel ways of promoting their agency and strengths, which became the key to turning difficulties in the data collection process into advantages. The dyads mutually enjoyed their co-creation process; however, this did not guarantee their engagement in the post-painting discussion. To facilitate this, a post-painting discussion guide was co-developed to encourage dyads to exercise their agency and strengths, decide what to present in their discussions, and how to do this. JPP and the discussion guide created a synergistic way to optimize children’s active participation, uncover mothers' needs of personal space boundaries and encourage children to learn to respect it, facilitate open dyadic dialogues, and allow reflection in a relaxed setting. Dyads’ participation in JPP and the post-painting discussions elicited information that would have been otherwise challenging to obtain. This approach can improve understanding of the mother–child relationship in the context of IPV that may imply that the art-based dyadic process can be an effective approach to rebuild and restrengthen the mother–child relationship in the post-separation stage of IPV.