Name changed for this.
I have a relation who has two kids age 10 and 14. She has been married to their father since before they were born. They are to all outward appearances a middle class family of total respectability. They look like a Boden advert and their house looks like one for Emma Bridgewater.
Unfortunately for the whole of my relation's marriage, and especially the years that the kids have been around, her marriage has been a godawful toxic shitshow. You could write a dissertation on whether she's a victim of her husband or whether they are equally foul to each other but the kids have been stuck in the middle all their lives.
To give some examples the dad will scream to the mum in front of the kids that she makes him want to kill himself and she will scream back that he ought to just do it. He will hit himself in the face in front of the kids. She involved the children when she was having an affair but made them swear not to tell their dad. Not a day goes by without them snarling at each other, yelling, storming off or telling one another that they're ruining the others life.
In addition the dad won't share financial information with his wife and nitpicks anything she spends. He is also a godawful snob who warns the children that they're turning into 'common little chavs' and calls them losers.
Everyone in the house is wildly unhappy. The older child is having MH problems which school are attempting to tackle but crucially without the information that the children's home life is a horrible angry mess.
Now it should be noted that everybody and I mean everybody in this couple's life has been telling them to split up for literally more than a decade. Nobody thinks they're good for each other and everybody realises how shit it must be to be a child of that marriage.
But neither will. The dad won't leave and the mum is too scared of the loss of money and status in becoming a single parent. Instead what she does is tell everyone in her life how awful her husband is. We get chapter and verse on every bad thing he says or does to her and we are invited to agree that he is horrible. I even wonder if she gets a kind of subconscious gratification out of telling us how awful he is and that we fulfil that by agreeing. (Our whole family is it has to be said enmeshed and fucked up going back aways.)
But nothing changes. She never leaves, she just talks about it. She has insight into the effect that staying with this man has on her children but she won't do anything except complain about her life, cry and then stay with him for another miserable year/decade/lifetime.
In my opinion both parents are very depressed (the dad talks all the time about suicide) but neither takes any steps to address this. The dad is also an alcoholic.
My priority is the children. I am so tired of trying to advocate their need not to be living in a warzone to my relation. She will always agree and nothing ever changes. Suggestions of doing the Freedom Course, or seeing a lawyer, or getting counselling, or moving away, all fall flat. 'Oh but I can't because...'
But they can't just be quietly miserable either. They will spend their days storming around their (elegant middle class) house and calling each other cunts at the top of their voices and saying to the kids 'See? Your mother/father is ruining my life because she wants you to be unhappy!'. It is wretched, manipulative, self-absorbed stuff and I am so so sorry for the kids. To give a typical example one.parent will put a child on the phone to the other and make them relay that parent's anger. Like 'Molly, tell Mummy that she is upsetting you and you need her to stop buying things she doesn't need' or 'Jonathan, tell Daddy that you want him to stop picking on Mummy'.
It's so fucked up.
My question is, if I report the atmosphere of rampant emotional abuse these kids are living in to the NSPCC, will anything happen? Or will somebody just see that the parents are financially comfortable and have a lovely home and professional careers and polite well-dressed children, and look no further?
I don't know what to do.