It was great for the Holes team to speak at the Reframing Professional Practice conference in May. Here conference organiser and Silenced CEO provides her insight into the importance of these events.
Why I Put the Conference On
The conference was created in response to growing recognition that Child to Parent Abuse and Adult Child to Parent Abuse (CPA/ACPA) remains one of the most hidden, misunderstood and under-recognised forms of family harm. The day was designed to model a community co-ordinated response, exploring the complexities, realities and responses surrounding CPA/ACPA.
Despite growing awareness, many families continue to experience fear, shame, isolation and judgement whilst professionals often describe uncertainty around language, thresholds, safeguarding responsibilities and intervention pathways. Families repeatedly tell us they feel blamed rather than understood.
The Fractured Bonds report exploring ACPA across London reinforced what many families and practitioners already knew, that CPA/ACPA often sits hidden between systems, with families falling through gaps between safeguarding, domestic abuse, mental health and adult services.
A key aim of the conference was to bring together a range of professionals to share knowledge through the lens of families with lived experience in their differing contexts across the life span. The aim was never to provide one single answer to CPA/ACPA, but to begin reframing the conversation itself.
What I Hoped to Gain from the Day
My hope was that attendees would leave with:
- a deeper understanding of CPA/ACPA
- a greater professional curiosity and willingness to challenge binary perceptions
- a stronger awareness of the relational, systemic and multi-layered approaches needed when working with families
- an increased confidence in discussing CPA/ACPA
What the Day Delivered
The day exceeded anything I could have hoped for, especially as it was my first time hosting a conference. Across the keynote, panels, poster presentations and workshops, there was honesty, compassion and a genuine willingness to sit with complexity. Discussions explored:
- the importance of language and definitions
- Voices of lived experience through research
- adult child-to-parent abuse beyond adolescence
- sibling and wider family impact
- Diasporic families’ experiences of CPA/ACPA
- trauma-informed and relational practice
- systems misalignment and fragmented pathways
- hidden harm, shame and stigma
- the importance of multi-agency collaboration.
The poster presentations highlighted the growing momentum across research, policy and practice to better understand CPA/ACPA as a relational, systemic and trauma-informed issue requiring whole-family responses. One of the strongest messages emerging throughout the day was the importance of listening to lived experience not as an ‘addition’ to professional learning, but as essential knowledge that should shape policy, practice and service responses.
The feedback from professional so far, has been overwhelming:
- 100% of evaluation responses rated the conference as Excellent or Very Good
- 100% said the conference was Very Relevant or Extremely Relevant to their role/practice
However, more importantly than statistics is the fact that professionals had space to reflect with other organisations whilst families’ narratives were heard, validated and understood. Feedback from attendees reflected the depth and breadth of the conversations throughout the day, with many describing the conference as “thought provoking”, “powerful” and “informative”. Participants particularly valued the lived experience narratives, panel discussions and workshops, with attendees highlighting sessions exploring sibling experiences, racial inequality, intersectionality and adult child-to-parent abuse as especially impactful.
Several attendees commented on the value of hearing perspectives not often centred within mainstream conversations around CPA/ACPA, particularly the discussions relating to Black mothers, diasporic families and lived experience research. Others reflected on the importance of having space for honest conversations, professional reflection and multi-agency learning, with one attendee sharing that “all the panels built on each other” and another describing the personal stories shared throughout the day as “particularly powerful”.
What Now?
The conversations do not end here.
If anything, the conference reinforced how urgently more work is needed across safeguarding, domestic abuse, health, education, policy and research. CPA/ACPA cannot continue to sit hidden between systems.
We need:
- earlier intervention
- whole-family responses
- culturally responsive practice
- better transition pathways between child and adult services
- improved multi-agency collaboration
- and greater inclusion of lived experience voices within policy and practice development.
Families experiencing CPA/ACPA are not “failing families.” Many are surviving within incredibly complex relational, systemic and traumatic circumstances whilst trying to protect and care for one another.
Thank you again to everyone who attended, presented, facilitated workshops, shared research via posters, volunteered and contributed to creating such a thoughtful and reflective space for learning, challenge and collaboration.
This year’s conference was kindly supported by Durham University’s ESRC IAA Fund and The National Lottery Community Fund – Awards for All.
This was never meant to be an endpoint, but the beginning of a much wider shift in how we better understand, respond to and support families experiencing CPA/ACPA, with compassion, curiosity and humanity at the centre. I hope this is the beginning of many more conversations and potentially another conference next year.
Thank you so much to Maria for her insights and setting us up for more conference reflections this series! To learn more about Silenced go here: https://www.silenced.org.uk – CPVA training | child to parent violence and abuse
HOLES IN THE WALL 