By Dr Anu Adebogun
Child to Parent Abuse (CPA) remains one of the most stigmatised and least understood forms of family harm. There is little empirical exploration of how this hidden harm is perceived, experienced and navigated within families of diverse ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. My PhD research, completed at the University of Oxford, empirically documented for the first time the lived experiences of Black (African and Caribbean) mothers affected by this harm. My study drew on conversations, surveys and focus groups with 19 African and Caribbean mothers, alongside interviews with 26 professionals across social care, youth justice, education and mental health. What emerges are pertinent realities around how race, gender, culture and religion not only shape harm but also dictate Black maternal coping mechanisms and help-seeking efforts, often resulting in a deliberate avoidance of services.
Cultural Scripts and the Hiding of Harm
At the Reframing Professional Practice conference, I noted that the overrepresentation of mothers as victims of this harm is widely observed in research and theorised as resulting from the sexism and gender inequality that perpetuates the acceptable control, dominance and subordination of women. In the experience of Black women, however, gender power dynamics are but one structural force shaping the social constitution of their motherhood. Their motherhood is racialised, classed, surveilled and culturally scripted, and that intersection is precisely what keeps CPA hidden.
A central part of my presentation outlined one of six cultural scripts (narratives and expectations) shaping Black maternal identity and its implications for how CPA is experienced. One illustrative example was the script of “Matriarchal Providers”, which centres labour and provision in the carework of Black mothers. This encapsulates mothering across borders, including cultural financial obligations to support extended families in countries of origin, colloquially described as “Black tax”. I explored how this cultural script coincides with CPA through the infliction of financial harm on mothers: depletion of resources, theft of credit cards, and unauthorised purchases. An act justified by one young person on the grounds of entitlement. Without understanding what economic provision means within Black maternal identity, financial obligation rooted in intergenerational duty and collective survival can be reframed as entitlement, rather than exploitation, by both mother and child.
Racialisation of Maternal Blame
Shame, silence and stigma operate both within communities and within services. The cultural scripts shaping Black motherhood collide with a double bind, where they can be blamed within their own communities for disciplining too firmly or softly by failing the ideal of maternal strength. In some religious circles, for failing to pray, fast, or practise spiritual devotion sufficiently.
Within services, Black mothers experience judgment and a characterisation of their mothering as deviant when measured against White, middle-class standards of “intensive mothering”. These standards problematise single motherhood, matriarchal providership or authoritative mothering as risk factors or triggers for CPA. The simultaneous veneration and weaponisation of strength is salient here: tropes used to characterise Black womanhood render a Black mother’s vulnerability, victimhood and need for protection structurally inconceivable.
Rethinking Engagement
A theme anchoring the experiences of Black mothers is the tripartite burden they carry as mother, victim and advocate, often in direct conflict. Disclosure or (dis)engagement with services is rarely a simple calculation of “will this help?” Rather, it involves weighing whether engagement will confirm racist stereotypes of Black children as aggressive or dangerous, invite criminalisation, or cost the family more than it gives. The mothers in my study were largely first-generation migrants, often uncertain whether Western systems would recognise CPA as harmful, or whether services perceived to “other” African and Caribbean mothering would instead pathologise her motherhood as deficient.
Recommendations for Practice
Adopting culturally responsive practice and representation within services is not simply about who sits across the table. It is about whether the frameworks, language and assumptions guiding that conversation were designed with Black maternal realities in mind. This means auditing risk tools for racialised assumptions, training practitioners in the cultural scripts shaping disclosure, and holding a mother’s tripartite role in mind at every first contact.
It also means recognising and engaging the informal support pathways through which Black African and Caribbean mothers seek solidarity and collective care. Having lost the literal and symbolic “village” of extended family through migration, the mothers I spoke with built makeshift ones instead: sister circles, community mothers and elders.
Services must not pathologise these stakeholders but actively strengthen these connections, resource these avenues of support, and co-design interventions to better reach Black families in need. Nor should services misrepresent reliance on this informal protective architecture as unwillingness to engage. Rather, adopting non-judgmental attitudes and professional curiosity, practitioners must acknowledge the pre-eminence of faith and spirituality to some Black mothers, recognising that community groups and faith leaders are often first responders and providers of informal support.
This was a particularly inspiring session within the Reframing Professional Practice conference; Anu creatively crafted the narratives of Black mothers into a presentation which was highly relevant to the practitioners in the room. Not only being culturally competent but culturally responsive and open to not only what parental narratives are, but also what might be underpinning these narratives. Black mothers experience so many compounding challenges in their navigation of service intrusion, into their lives, informal supporters often act as a necessary lifeline.
