by | December 17, 2013 · 9:13 am

News from the 2013 Youth Justice Convention

The Youth Justice Convention, hosted over two days in Birmingham, UK, at the end of November, included this year a seminar on children’s violence to parents (CPV).  The convention is an annual event – this was the fourteenth – and is an opportunity to debate and discuss the latest youth justice policy developments. All the seminars are archived online and can be accessed here. (Update 2017: these videos don’t seem to be available any longer)

The CPV seminar, number 20 in the archive, was chaired by Paula Wilcox, with Martyn Stoner of Break4Change, and Paul Morris and Vicky Hodgson, from Hull Youth Offending Service, where a Step Up project has been piloted. Each gave a presentation of their project with a discussion at the end about differences and similarities. Continue reading →

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by | December 12, 2013 · 6:13 pm

The Lost Soul: parent abuse on the big screen

Every so often I come across something completely different in my searches regarding parent abuse. One such find was the company Paramita Entertainment, which I first encountered tweeting about the development of a film, THE LOST SOUL.

Paramita Entertainment was established to create films that have a positive impact on important issues that need to be brought to life. It was created by two Buddhist Lamas, Emilia Henriques da Silva and Jacques-Yves Mistretta, after they had been consulting on a film project in France. They saw the positive and powerful impact that films can have and decided they could address important topics through the medium of film. The company has been set up with the initiative to not only create films that are powerful on topics that might have been taboo in film before, but also to undertake direct action towards assisting those facing the issues they are addressing. Continue reading →

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by | December 6, 2013 · 3:31 pm

Some book reviews

A couple of reviews for Amanda Holt’s text, Adolescent-to-Parent Abuse: Current Understandings in Research, Policy and Practice, have been brought to my attention recently.

Janet Jamieson has a review in the journal Youth Justice, and Sarah Galvani in Social Work Education: the international journal.

Both are very positive, commenting on the dearth of available literature, and drawing attention to the usefulness, to those from many backgrounds and fields of work, of the text itself.

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by | November 29, 2013 · 2:14 pm

Parent abuse coverage during the international week to end violence against women

BBC Radio Northants provided a comprehensive backdrop to the NADA (Northamptonshire Against Domestic Abuse) Domestic Abuse Conference which took place in Kettering on Wednesday 27th November, during this International End Violence Against Women week. Stuart Linnell used his breakfast show to introduce the issue of parent abuse and to interview parents as well as keynote speakers at the conference. You can listen again here for the next few days. Continue reading →

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by | November 25, 2013 · 2:58 pm

Parent Abuse: the victim / perpetrator problem

When I speak with people about children’s violence to parents, the question of terminology regularly raises its head: How helpful is it to talk about ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ in cases of parent abuse? So this post has been in the making for some time, but was finally brought into being after I was sent a link to a piece in the Sheffield Star last week. It may be lacking a few references so please feel free to comment on this with links to relevant articles.

The news piece itself is very clear in identifying the 20 year old man as the perpetrator of violence, and the mother as the victim. We may agree or not that the judge overstepped the mark in his summing up; but read through to the comments stream and a dissenting voice emerges – as well as a reminder not to jump to conclusions without knowing all the circumstances. Continue reading →

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by | November 12, 2013 · 8:43 am

Welcoming in a new era

As the new Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, takes up her post this month, it looks as if her appointment may herald positive moves within the parent abuse field.

As she drew near to the end of her term as London’s Chief Crown Prosecutor, Saunders spoke in an interview of the disturbing scale of abuse perpetuated by teens against their parents and seen in the courts, with news that more than 50 boys and girls aged 13 or under, and nearly 850 older juveniles have been prosecuted for domestic violence in the past three and a half years in London alone (includes parent abuse and teenage relationship abuse). This follows the publication of the findings of the Oxford University based research which found 1892 incidents of  violence in the home (including damage to property) by 13 – 19 year olds reported to the Metropolitan police between 2009 and 2010 (and here). Saunders was at pains to state that such abuse was not confined to one section of society, but drew attention to the issue of nurturing as linked to the apparent growing lack of respect within families. Continue reading →

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by | November 8, 2013 · 3:17 pm

East Midlands Practitioners Peer Learning

I have just spent an exciting and inspiring morning with representatives of the Youth Offending Service across the East Midlands at their first Regional Practitioners Peer Learning Event in Nottingham. Around 50 – 60 had gathered to learn more about responses to adolescent violence to parents, and – importantly – to formulate action plans for their own areas before they left.

I was privileged to open the session, setting the scene with an overview of parent abuse, before Anne-Marie Harris from the Youth Justice Board spoke about upcoming developments at a national level. The feasibility study on the introduction of special domestic violence courts within the youth court system is not due to report until December, but Anne-Marie indicated that a number of practical and ethical difficulties have been identified around this direction of travel. Nevertheless, opportunities remain for creative thinking around service delivery, including programmes similar to the Step Up model. Continue reading →

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by | November 4, 2013 · 8:05 pm

Parent Abuse covered by the BBC

Following on from the Guardian article at the weekend, there has been coverage across radio and TV regarding the findings of the Oxford University research study into adolescent to parent violence. You can listen to an interview on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme here for the next week (about 50 minutes in). In it ‘Jane’ describes living in fear of her son after a violent assault with a knife, the guilt and shame experienced by parents in her situation, and the help she received from the Rosalie Ryrie Foundation in Wakefield. Her son spent one year living out of the home, but has now returned and with the help she receives she has been able to be more confident in the way she responds to his behaviour, walking away when necessary and establishing good boundaries – feeling safer, though not entirely safe still at this time. Rachel Condry, author of the study, and Joe Lettieri, of PAARS in Enfield, also appeared on the early evening BBC London News television programme, and the interview is to be shown again this evening in the late news programme.

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by | November 1, 2013 · 10:09 pm

That thing …

… When you do or think something and suddenly everyone else is doing the same? Well it’s been that sort of day!

Following the presentation of the key findings and recommendations on Thursday, Professor David Gadd of Manchester University received coverage across a number of radio stations for the From Boys to Men Project, which examined why some young men go on to become perpetrators of domestic abuse, and what can be done to prevent this. The research found strong correlations with past experience of domestic violence in the home, but David Gadd made it clear that this did not amount to causation. The authors of the research call for the development of preventative work in schools, with work on violence and abuse included in sex and relationship education. Continue reading →

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by | October 21, 2013 · 9:52 am

A growing problem in Ireland

This piece in the Irish Times dropped into my inbox over the weekend.

Declan Coogan addressed the Annual Work Conference in Dublin, hosted by the National Family Support Network, with details from his own work in the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre in NUI Galway, and as project leader in Ireland for the EU-funded project ‘Responding to Child to Parent Violence’. Reporting that this is the one of the fastest growing issues in calls to parent-support organisations such as Parent Line, he gave examples of children as young as eight terrifying and violently assaulting their parents. He also spoke about his programme of Non-Violent Resistance (NVR), which has been found to be helpful in work with families experiencing parent abuse.

You can read more about NVR in an earlier post on this site. Details of the international conference in Galway in June 2014 will be posted on my Events and Training page as soon as they become available.

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