It’s hard not to feel a sense of helplessness – as well as fury – when reading pieces such as this from the Orlando Sentinel last week. Reporter, Kate Santich, has put together a litany of examples of extreme violence from children towards their parents, but finds little in the way of help: thresholds for intervention not met, parents charged with abandonment, children locked up without attempts to investigate or change behaviour, and in a nation where therapeutic support must be paid for. She reports on the situation in the States, yet the examples could be from anywhere. Continue reading
Boys Rule. OK?
To celebrate the holiday season, this is a bit of a different post to usual. I can often be accused of asking rhetorical questions, but I offer this one in all sincerity.
I stand before you as a fully paid up (closet) member of both the Prude Society and the Angry Brigade. For years, I have railed, in my head and occasionally to friends, against the objectification of women and girls in clubs, on posters on the Underground escalators, on clothing, in the gender stereotyping of children’s toys. Individual protestors and campaigning groups alike have been barraged with accusations of prudishness, extremism, absence of fun etc etc, as they have argued against the widespread dissemination of such images which they have considered demeaning, or misrepresenting women. Those who spoke up were made to feel in the minority and the implications was that they wanted to return to Victorian standards of decency. Yet the last few years have seen the development of a new kind of feminism in Britain which has taken on these issues and made real inroads into what is deemed acceptable and normal. Continue reading
Filed under Discussion
A Police Response to Parent Abuse
When I undertook my Masters study in 2004 – 6, one of the people I interviewed was a police officer, who described his sense of frustration at the difficulties in responding to incidents where parent abuse could be clearly identified. Pretty much everything I had read online or in the literature had suggested that the police hadn’t a clue, sided with the young person, maybe arrested the parent and certainly had nothing useful to offer; so it was interesting to sit down with someone and hear the other side. He identified a system of adhoc responses depending on the awareness of the individual officer, and then nothing concrete to offer, nowhere to refer on to as there was no agency taking responsibility for meeting the needs of families where children’s violence to parents was an issue. Continue reading
Filed under Discussion
You can’t afford to dabble
Can anyone respond to a referral of parent abuse? Since we are encouraging practitioners to recognise when child to parent violence is a feature of family function or dysfunction, what are people supposed to do next? How should they intervene? Do you need to follow an approved programme, or can you use practice that works in other settings?
A discussion with Sandra Ashley, Director of Hertfordshire Practical Parenting Programme, touched on these questions as we looked at the range of support programmes on offer and the training offered to facilitators. (You can learn more about some of these programmes on the Resources pages of this blog) Some of these programmes have commonalities. Others feel quite different in emphasis and style and in philosophical background. Meanwhile, bespoke parent abuse projects increasingly find that they are taking referrals from mainstream agencies that feel their own staff lack the necessary expertise (or time perhaps?), while initiatives such as that falling within the Troubled Families remit may be using practitioners from a range of backgrounds to tackle this among many other issues. Continue reading
Filed under Discussion
Model students perpetrating abuse
If, like me, you prefer your maths concrete and you use things like a classroom of students as a unit of measurement, then you might find this image interesting. Courtesy of Ipswich Borough Council White Ribbon Day, it represents the number of students in a class likely to be perpetrating violence at home – those wearing ties. We can argue over the exact number, depending on the level of violence we are counting – and we might never know the true figure – but images like this can help to make something a bit more real and less of something happening out there to other people.
Photograph © Lorraine Arthur Continue reading
Filed under Discussion
The law of unintended consequences
Today see the roll out of the welfare benefits cap across England, Wales and Scotland. What we are supposed to expect is that this will encourage families to find work or move to a different, cheaper area to live. Sadly, what we may see is a rise in violence and family break up. The Enemy Within, the 2012 report from the charity 4Children, using data from a specially commissioned YouGov Family Violence survey, highlights redundancy, long-term unemployment and serious financial worries as the major contributory factor in family violence. The dual pronged budgetary cuts to benefits and funding of services are thus especially worrying. Continue reading
Filed under Discussion, news reports
No rules about controlling relationships
Coverage of an assault by Charles Saatchi on his wife Nigella Lawson, outside a London restaurant at the weekend, has sparked considerable debate in the press and on social media – not least as to why people felt it was OK to photograph and document events, rather than intervene.
Writing in the Telegraph, Iris McCann and Dr. Petra Boynton have used the opportunity to discuss the different faces of domestic abuse, and to offer advice to those who recognise their experience. Continue reading
Filed under Discussion, news reports
An update on Step Up in the UK
Today we have a guest post from LynetteRobinson, of Alternative Restoratives. Lynette is thrilled to have had her work in the field of parent abuse recognised by the Youth Justice Board, who have adopted her programme based on the American Step Up model.
Three years ago, I visited Youth Justice Teams in Seattle and Toledo (America) to observe their ‘Step Up – Building Respectful Family Relationships’ programmes, as part of my Winston Churchill Fellowship research ‘Interventions and restorative responses to address teen violence against parents’.
The parents and teens who attended these joint group work sessions seemed as interested in me (a UK visitor) as I was in them and their programme! During that first coffee break, one mother came over to me (with a puzzled look on her face) and asked “Do parents in England have this problem too?” Continue reading
Filed under projects, Training opportunities
HOLES IN THE WALL 