The CAADA tweet posted yesterday referred to intimate partner violence, but it doesn’t take long on message boards to find similar concerns around the reporting of child to parent violence: parents reluctant to seek help from Children’s Services because of a belief that the response will be that they are failing to protect their other children. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
As a social worker myself, I am deeply troubled by the narrative; but also concerned because social workers that I meet at conferences or at work tell me that they DO know about parent abuse, and that they desperately want to help if only there were more resources. What is it that happens at that point of disconnection?
I am presenting a paper about this issue at the RCPV conference in Brighton in January, and plan to follow it through further in some other work I am undertaking. If you are a social worker engaged in any way in the field of children’s violence to parents, and would like to contribute to the debate, I would love to hear from you in confidence. You can contact me through this website. I look forward to hearing from you. Alternatively, you can comment on the post in the normal way.
HOLES IN THE WALL 
It was an excellent paper too.