Children's emotions – as described by children themselves – have not been very widely portrayed in social scientific research on family and close relationships in general, or in literature on violence in familial relationships or child abuse in particular. This chapter attempts to capture the way children exposed to violence in their own homes construct emotions related to familial relationships, especially the emotions connected to the violent father. I am interested in how and with what words children speak of their emotions during the process of recovering from violence, in situations where children's workers at shelters, specialised in helping children exposed to violence, make space for these children's ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild, 1983). My examination is theoretically and methodologically anchored in the interest within childhood sociology in highlighting the world from the children's perspective, through the children's own way of assigning meanings.

The data are derived from treatment encounters with children in Finnish shelters of the Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters, and from interviews conducted with the children approximately a year after the close of the helping period. In examining the data, I concentrate on the ‘emotion talk’ of children who have experienced severe violence against themselves and their mothers, but who are nevertheless attached to their violent father. I place the children's emotions in a dialogue with the recent sociological debate on ‘the new family’ and close relationships and, more particularly, with research on children exposed to violence at home/child abuse. Through the non-encounters and gaps between these two discourses, I explore a question closely linked to emotions, the question of morals and power and their links to the social order.

Children's emotions as a challenge to social scientific Research

Children's emotions have received little attention in social scientific literature in general (Mason and Falloon, 2001). There is very little research, for example, on children's emotions towards people with whom they share a close relationship (Hughes and Dunn, 2002). Even though the thesis on the increased significance of emotions has attracted plenty of attention in recent sociological debate on family and close relationships in general, children have been neglected in the argumentation or, at most, have been seen as the objects of adults’ emotions.