The Children

RESEARCH NOTE — THE SECOND GENERATION
ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES · DISORGANISED ATTACHMENT · NO COHORT STUDY EXISTS

I was an army wife. My former husband was deployed to East Timor, where he participated in the antimalarial drug trials this series documents. I lived with the consequences for years before I had the evidence or the framework to understand what had happened — to him, to me, and to our family. This series is the result of that understanding.

This article discusses the impact of domestic violence and household adversity on children. If you need support: Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (aged 5–25) · Lifeline 13 11 14 · Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636

When an ADF veteran returned from East Timor or Bougainville neurologically altered by the drugs administered during those deployments, he returned to a household. In many cases, that household contained children. Those children did not deploy. They did not consent to anything. They did not know what mefloquine or tafenoquine was, or that their father had been given either, or that the drugs could do what they did to a brain.

They grew up anyway — carrying what they witnessed, internalising what they could not name, and moving into adult lives shaped by an experience that no institution has ever formally acknowledged, studied, or counted.

This article is about them.

A note on evidence before we begin. The research on adverse childhood experiences and developmental trauma is well established in peer-reviewed science. Its application to the children of ADF quinoline veterans is inferential — the mechanism is plausible and consistent with the literature, but no direct studies of this specific cohort have been conducted. That gap is itself part of what this series documents, and part of what must change.

What children in these households were exposed to

The behavioural profile associated with quinoline neurotoxicity did not affect only the intimate partner. Children living in the same home were exposed to the same environment.

They were exposed to explosive and unpredictable rage episodes with no apparent trigger — often described by partners as a quality not him, frightening in their speed and intensity, leaving no reliable signal for when they might occur again. A child cannot predict what will happen at dinner. A child cannot read the environment for safety. A child learns, over time, to be perpetually alert.

They were exposed to paranoid ideation sometimes directed at family members including children — accusations, surveillance, and suspicion that made ordinary family life feel dangerous and unstable. Being accused of things you have not done by a parent is not a minor experience. It is an experience that shapes how a child understands trust, authority, and their own perception of reality.

They were exposed to dissociative states during which a parent was frightening and unrecognisable — present in the room but absent in every meaningful way, sometimes followed by harm the parent could not recall. They watched a parent disappear and return with no account of where they had gone.

They were exposed to sleep-related violence — thrashing, striking out, vocalising in terror — audible and sometimes visible within the household, experienced as a form of unpredictable nocturnal danger. Night, which should be safe, was not always safe.

They were exposed to emotional unavailability and relational withdrawal that they experienced as abandonment — a parent who was physically present but emotionally unreachable, unable to offer the warmth or attunement children require for healthy development. The research is unambiguous on what chronic emotional unavailability in a primary caregiver costs a child across their development.

They were exposed to hypervigilant and controlling behaviour that restricted the family's movements, social contact, and sense of normality. A home experienced as a place of monitoring rather than safety is not a childhood anyone designs for a child.

And they were exposed to a mother who was herself managing acute trauma while trying to protect and parent — a primary protective figure who was also a casualty of the same institutional harm, without support, without explanation, and without rest.

Children in these households were not passive bystanders. They were participants in a domestic environment characterised by chronic unpredictability, intermittent fear, and the particular confusion of loving a parent whose behaviour was sometimes frightening and sometimes warm — with no reliable way of knowing which it would be, or why.

What the research shows

The general research literature on adverse childhood experiences is well established and directly relevant to this population, applied inferentially. The landmark ACE study — Felitti and colleagues, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1998 and replicated extensively since — established that childhood exposure to household dysfunction, parental mental health crises, and family violence produces elevated risk across a wide range of developmental, psychological, and physical health outcomes. The dose-response relationship is robust: the more adverse experiences, the greater the risk.

Children who grow up in households characterised by the features described above — unpredictable parental rage, paranoid accusation, emotional withdrawal, sleep violence, restricted social contact — are not exempt from these findings. There is no reason to expect the children of ADF quinoline veterans to sit outside the well-documented consequences of equivalent levels of household adversity.

During childhood, the consequences include disrupted attachment formation, heightened anxiety and fear responses calibrated to an unpredictable environment, difficulty concentrating and learning, social withdrawal or behavioural difficulties at school, and physical health effects associated with chronic stress activation — sleep disruption, immune dysregulation, somatic complaints.

During adolescence, the consequences include elevated rates of depression and anxiety, difficulties with emotional regulation and impulse control reflecting nervous systems conditioned to hyperarousal, increased risk of substance use as a coping mechanism, and relationship difficulties reflecting disrupted attachment templates.

In adult life, the consequences include elevated risk of complex PTSD, impaired capacity for safe intimate relationships, increased vulnerability to depression, anxiety disorders, and chronic health conditions, and — in some cases — intergenerational transmission of adversity, in which the effects of the original institutional harm propagate into the next generation of families.

The particular confusion of episodic harm

The episodic nature of quinoline-related behavioural disturbance creates a specific challenge for children that differs from households in which harm is more consistent.

In households where a parent is chronically and predictably dangerous, children develop adaptive responses that provide some structure. The danger is at least knowable in its shape.

In households where a parent is sometimes warm and present, and sometimes frightening and unrecognisable, children face a different problem. The threat is unreadable. There is no reliable signal for when safety will give way to danger. The child who loves their parent is also the child who fears them — and who has no language for holding both of those things at once.

This ambiguity is clinically significant. Research on disorganised attachment — the attachment pattern most associated with caregivers who are simultaneously a source of comfort and a source of fear — shows elevated rates of dissociation, emotional dysregulation, and difficulty forming safe relationships in adulthood. The work of Main and Hesse (1990) and Liotti (2004) is foundational here. The episodic, unpredictable pattern of quinoline-related behavioural change maps directly onto the caregiving context most associated with these outcomes.

A child with a disorganised attachment to a parent does not stop loving that parent. They also do not stop fearing them. They carry both — simultaneously, without resolution, for as long as the situation continues and often long after it ends.

Children as witnesses to their mother's harm

In many of these households, children were not only exposed to a neurologically altered parent. They were also witnesses to the harm that parent caused to their mother.

The research on children who witness domestic violence is extensive and consistent. Children who observe intimate partner violence experience many of the same psychological and physiological consequences as children who are directly harmed — including post-traumatic stress responses, disrupted attachment, hypervigilance, and developmental delays. Kitzmann and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 2003, found in a meta-analytic review that witnessing domestic violence was associated with outcomes as serious as those produced by direct abuse.

Children in these households watched their mothers navigate paranoid accusation, rage episodes, controlling behaviour, and physical danger. Some watched their mothers leave. Some watched their mothers stay. Some experienced the fracturing of their family through separation, family court proceedings, and custody arrangements that did not account for the neurological context of the risk. In all of these situations, the child was absorbing an experience that no institution named, no teacher was equipped to address, no court was equipped to weigh, and no welfare system was designed to reach.

When the protecting parent is also traumatised

A critical dimension of the children's experience in these households is that the parent most available to protect them — almost always the mother — was herself managing the consequences of sustained exposure to a dangerous and unpredictable environment.

A parent living with complex trauma, chronic hypervigilance, social isolation, and financial crisis is a parent whose parenting capacity is under significant strain. This is not a criticism of these women. It is a description of what chronic, unaddressed, institutionally unsupported trauma does to a person's capacity to function. The research on this is clear and the implication is significant.

Children in these households were navigating their own exposure to adversity with a primary protective figure who was also a casualty of the same institutional harm — and who was, in many cases, doing so without appropriate support of any kind. Two casualties. One cause. Neither counted.

What these children were never told

They were not told that their parent had been administered a neurotoxic drug during a government clinical trial — because the institutions that knew this chose not to disclose it, and the family had no way of finding out independently.

They were not told that the personality changes, the rage, and the paranoia were the product of neurological injury, not their parent's fundamental nature — leaving them to construct their own explanations from the evidence available to them in that household.

They were not told that nothing they could have done differently would have changed what was happening — that the origin of the harm was institutional, not relational, and not in any way a consequence of who they were or how they behaved.

They were not told that other children in other households were living through versions of the same experience — that what was happening was part of a documented pattern with a name, a cause, and a responsible institution.

The absence of an explanation is not a minor gap. It is the denial of the narrative that makes recovery possible. Children who grow into adults without an accurate account of their childhood do not simply move on. They carry the weight of an experience they cannot fully interpret — and that uninterpreted weight shapes everything that follows.

The absence of research

No study has directly examined the health, developmental, or psychological outcomes of children raised in ADF quinoline veteran households. No government agency has counted them. No welfare program has been designed for them. No court guidance addresses their specific situation.

There is no evidence base from which to design support services, no data from which to make entitlements arguments, and no documented harm to which policymakers can point when making the case for action.

The absence of research is not evidence that the harm is small. It is evidence that no institution has been required to look. The children exist. The harm exists. The research does not — because the research has never been commissioned, because the families have never been recognised, because the institutional decisions that produced the harm have never been formally connected to the outcomes they produced in the households they affected.

That must change. Independent longitudinal research on family harm outcomes in the quinoline cohort is not an optional addition to the policy response. It is the foundation on which every other response must be built.

For adult children reading this

If you grew up in a household shaped by a parent's quinoline-related neurological injury, this section is written directly to you.

You may be reading this as an adult, looking back at a childhood that was confusing, frightening, and that you have perhaps never been able to fully make sense of. The absence of an explanation was not an accident. It was the product of the same institutional silence that this series documents.

What happened in your home had a cause. That cause has a name. The behaviour that frightened you, confused you, or made you feel invisible was not about you — it was about an injury your parent sustained from drugs administered by the Australian government without adequate warning, monitoring, or follow-up care.

You were not the reason. The difficulty in that household was not a reflection of your worth. The fear you felt was a reasonable response to a genuinely frightening environment. The confusion you carried was the natural result of living in circumstances that no adult around you had the framework to explain.

And you deserved to know this — not now, years later — but at the time, from the institutions that created the conditions for it.

Key sources

• Felitti VJ, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998.
• Kitzmann KM, et al. Child witnesses to domestic violence: a meta-analytic review. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2003.
• Main M and Hesse E. Parents' unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status. In Attachment in the Preschool Years. University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• Liotti G. Trauma, dissociation, and disorganized attachment. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 2004.
• Senate Inquiry report and submissions, December 2018 — Parliament of Australia.
• Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, Final Report, Volume 4, Chapter 22, September 2024.

Part of Unacknowledged Casualties. Read the full series at /tag/unacknowledged-casualties/