Today is international child to parent abuse day!
Originally created by PEGS, October the 14th will be recognised by PEGS in England at the National Child to Parent Abuse Summit Child to Parent Abuse Summit 2026 | PEGS | PEGS; and VisAble in NewZealand CPVA conference Oct 2026 — VisAble
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In a non-representative Australian survey of more than 5,000 young people aged 16–20, 20% reported having used violence against a family member. Among those reporting family violence, 51% reported violence towards their mother, 37% towards their father and 68% towards a sibling.
CAPVA can affect the whole family.
Australian research reminds us that siblings can be affected by adolescent family violence too.
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One of the earliest written legal references to a child using violence against a parent appears in the Code of Hammurabi, from ancient Babylon, dated to around the 18th century BCE (some older sources give earlier dates). Law 195 specifically addresses a son striking his father and prescribes an extremely severe punishment: his hands were to be cut off. Historical scholarship on violence against parents identifies this as very early evidence that societies formally recognised violence by offspring towards parents thousands of years ago
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Break4 change the first UK evidence based group supporting families launched in Brighton 2009
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MYTH: “They behave fine at school, so it can’t be that serious at home.”
FACT: Behaviour can be context-dependent. A young person appearing regulated in one environment doesn’t invalidate what a parent is experiencing at home.
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At the Reframing Profession Practice conference, we heard from Al Coates. Al’s own work, research, and lived experience of child-to-parent abuse brought to the fore some of the challenges facing dads in particular.
Living with a child with complex needs and behaviour that reflects that struggle can be challenging. That’s polite and palatable language for what is often messy, difficult and scary behaviour, aggression, shouting, threats, hitting, property destruction to name a few manifestations.
Thankfully there’s a growing understanding of the behaviour that many families’ experience. Far from being a simply monolithic behaviour or a lazy stereotype the manifestation of this challenging behaviour can be complex and nuanced. One of the most refreshing aspects of the CPA Reframing Professional Practice conference was the opportunity to look closer at areas within this sphere and to that end I was asked to speak to my personal experience as an adoptive dad as well as to the direct work I do with adoptive dads living with children’s whose behaviour can be aggressive and violent.
Broadly dads remain in a small minority in terms of primary carers for children and within my experience that includes adoptive parents. Mums do the heavy lifting and we know that when we look at children’s negative behaviour it is predominantly, though not exclusively, directed at mums.
That’s not the focus of this post but it’s important to understand the broader contexts. Dads do often witness violence and aggression as well as being victims of it. Simple biology means that dads may not feel as physically vulnerable when behaviour manifests. That may be simple biology but it also may reflect mens experience of violence or the lack of it in their lives. But witnessing people you love and care for being hurt or living in an environment can be just as challenging. Impacts on mental and physical health with nervous systems set to alert constantly.
Many models of support are built by women and for women and that is wholly right but there also need to be a place for dads to talk plainly and directly to their experience. But as one dad said to me ‘when I’m in a group with my wife and she’s talking I just stay quiet, I see things differently but in a room full of women that’s not the place I can share my experience’.
That’s not to blame women but it is perhaps an indicator of why men are less present in those spaces. There are other reasons, generally men express themselves in different ways and, as said, have different experiences.
At the conference I was given the opportunity to unpack all of the above and more. I spoke of the rawness of the peer conversations and the challenges of breaking down taboos and the isolation that dads feel.
The challenges that parents face are often universal, stigma, shame, isolation and stress to name the obvious. How parents and carers experience these challenges is influenced by a myriad of factors but it’s clear that we need to create spaces where everyone can not only share but to look around the room and listen to experiences and voices that reflect our own.
Al now runs an online support service, alongside Beacon Services, for adoptive Dads living with child-to-parent abuse. You can find out more here: Dads Support Group – West Midlands and UK
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As we are coming to the end of our conference theme, I have a few reflections on the importance of practitioner focused events which manage to centralise lived experience; very much what was achieved at the Reframing Professional Practice conference. This event brought together perspectives that are too often kept apart: those of practitioners, researchers and people with lived experience. As I was able to support Maria in organising the conference, I was already familiar with the arguments being presented. What was significant was seeing these different forms of knowledge placed alongside one another, in an almost chronological fashion, and recognising the possibilities that creates when viewing child to parent abuse across the life course.
Practitioner knowledge is often described as anecdotal or experiential, as though it sits below academic evidence. Yet practitioners work within the realities of complex systems every day. They understand what policies look like when translated into practice, where professional assumptions break down and what is possible within the constraints of real services. Lived experience offers a similarly important challenge to professional certainty. It shifts attention from what services intend to do to what it is actually like to encounter them. When these perspectives are taken seriously, they can expose gaps that professional or academic accounts alone may miss.
For a reader who was not at the conference, this is perhaps its central message: professional practice is not produced by one type of expertise. It is shaped through the interaction of evidence, professional knowledge and lived experience. Reframing practice means recognising that each can change how we understand the problem… and what we decide to do about it.
Coming up in October, we will have several more events:
PEGS
PEGS will once again be hosting an event of Child-to-Parent Abuse Awareness Day (October 14th), moving from their international conference format, to what they are referring to as the Child to Parent Abuse Summit 2026. If you are wondering what the difference between a summit and conference is, here is a basic description:
Summits are often smaller and more focused than conferences, and the line up has not completely been announced but PEGS have previously given us some excellent online conferences, so the national summit is expected to be a good place to see the start of some important structural change. You can book here: Child to Parent Abuse Summit 2026 | PEGS | PEGS
International CPV Network
I (Nikki) am heading to Spain to share work on the UK context for the Professional Conference on Child-to-Parent Violence: “Acting Early: Prevention and Intervention in CPV,“ which will be held on 22 October 2026 at Universidad Loyola. This is an exciting opportunity to look at the international context of CPV in Spain, which produces more than half the global research on CPV. You can book your place here: https://eventos.uloyola.es/153750/detail/jornada-profesional-en-violencia-filio-parental.html
At this conference, the international practitioner-research network on CPV is being launched, which is a great opportunity for collaboration, as well as ensuring the research being conducted is relevant to practitioners who are doing the direct work with families.
If you are aware of any other events, do let us know. We will soon be moving onto a new theme about many publications in this area!
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Next up in our conference blogs is mine! It was an absolute privilege to be the first panel speaker of the Reframing Professional Practice conference, and Maria did a great job of creating a life course narrative thread through the planning of the day. My particular interests are the early indicators and how we can support families before harm escalates. Here’s a bit more about that:
When families experience Child-to-Parent Aggression (CPA), or child and adolescent-to-parent violence and abuse (CAPVA), the response often comes too late. Support frequently arrives when harm has escalated, relationships feel fractured, parents are exhausted, and children are already being viewed through a lens of risk. However, families do not suddenly arrive at crisis. There are usually moments, sometimes years earlier, where different questions could have been asked and different support could have been offered.
One of the challenges within this field is that we have often tried to understand children’s harmful behaviours using frameworks developed for adults. Yet children are not adults. Their behaviour exists within the context of development, relationships, unmet needs, emotional regulation, neurodivergence, trauma, family systems, and wider social pressures. This distinction matters.
When a child causes harm, we must hold two truths at the same time: parents can be experiencing very real fear, distress, and harm, and the child causing that harm may also be struggling. Recognising a child’s needs does not minimise a parent’s experience. Instead, it creates more accurate opportunities for support. Many younger children displaying aggressive or harmful behaviours are not necessarily acting from a place of deliberate intent, control, or a desire to cause fear. For some children, these behaviours may be better understood as explosive and harmful impulses; expressions of distress or maladaptive attempts to meet underlying needs.
This requires us to move beyond asking only: “How do we stop this behaviour?”
We also need to ask:
Children communicate through behaviour, particularly when they do not yet have the emotional, cognitive, or relational tools to communicate in other ways. Harmful behaviour may reflect reactive responses to overwhelm, affective needs linked to emotional or sensory regulation, relational needs around belonging and connection, or attempts to regain a sense of safety. If we only respond to the visible behaviour, we risk missing the distress underneath.
Too often, families seeking help describe feeling blamed. Parents may feel they are seen as failing to manage their child, while children may internalise messages that they are simply “bad” or “dangerous”. These narratives can increase shame and make families less likely to seek support until they reach breaking point. Earlier intervention means creating pathways where families can ask for help before they are in crisis. It means recognising that parents are often the most important people supporting their child — but they cannot do this without being supported themselves. Expecting families to absorb increasingly complex needs without appropriate help is not prevention.
A meaningful response to CPA must therefore be relational and systemic. It must consider the whole family: parents, siblings, children, schools, communities, and the services surrounding them. No single explanation or intervention will fit every family, because families’ experiences are not all the same. This is why public health approaches are so important. We need to build systems that notice early signs, reduce stigma, provide accessible support, and respond to need rather than waiting for harm to escalate.
Earlier intervention is not about excusing harmful behaviour. It is about understanding it well enough to change it. When we recognise children as children, listen to parents without blame, and respond to families with curiosity rather than judgement, we create opportunities for repair, connection, and safety.
The future of CPA support should not be built around asking families to prove they are struggling enough… It should be built around ensuring they never have to reach that point in the first place.
Whilst some of this may feel like ‘blue sky thinking’; will we ever have the resources and capacity to provide true early intervention again? I don’t know, but relational practice is at the heart of all of this, and with so many in the room with us at the conference who have the power to make change, I really believe it’s possible.
Nikki Rutter
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This week included Elder Abuse Day (15th June), and so we have Freda Quinlan talking about her PhD study, in which she developed a new model of understanding filial coercive control.
By Freda Quinlan, Principal Social Worker (Adult Safeguarding) and PhD researcher
When we discuss Child-to-Parent Abuse (CPA), conversations usually focus on adolescents. But what happens when this dynamic tracks into adulthood, colliding with the inevitable vulnerabilities of a parent’s later life? At the recent ‘Reframing Professional Practice’ conference, I explored this through the lens of the FIL-CO Model (Filial Coercive Control). The reality I presented suggests that when abuse persists into adulthood, the dynamics may shift from overt behavioural outbursts to a quieter, less visible, and deeply complex form of domestic entrapment. To respond effectively, we may need to recognise the hidden layers of this ongoing family trauma.
1. The Trap of Silence and Wounded Identity
One of the greatest hurdles that professionals identified in my research is the profound silence of victims. It is dangerously easy for safeguarding systems to misinterpret this silence as a passive ‘lack of will’ or an unwillingness to engage. The FIL-CO Model invites us to look deeper. Many older parents seem to operate under a heavy belief that because they raised the person hurting them, they have forfeited the ethical right to speak out. This potentially creates a ‘dual entrapment’: a state of constant physical dread paired with an internalised shame that tells them their adult child’s actions reflect their own failure as a parent. When a parent stays silent, they may actually be navigating a wounded identity. Their silence is rarely passivity; it can represent an ethically-laden negotiation—a final attempt to protect what is left of their parental legacy.
2. Weaponised Care: Becoming Invisible Within Systems
In later life, a critical shift can occur in how control is maintained. Unlike intimate partner violence, where an abuser merely claims to provide protection, an older parent’s physical or cognitive care needs may often be objectively real. This can create a painful relational paradox. The adult child is the primordial being the parent is hardwired to protect. As social networks narrow with age, this bond often intensifies, repositioning the adult child as the parent’s primary ‘secure base.’ This biological drive for proximity may override the parent’s cognitive recognition of harm. Abusive adult children strategically exploit this by weaponising actual frailty. By tying control to real health needs, the abuser ensures their dominance is perceived by external observers—and sometimes by the parent—not as abuse, but as a dutiful response to failing health. This is precisely how parents can become entirely invisible within care systems.
3. Epistemic Injustice: The Theft of Reality
The psychological peak of filial coercive control is often reached through epistemic injustice—the systematic erosion of an older parent’s ability to trust their own knowledge and perceptions. Here, gaslighting emerges as a primary tool of entrapment. Abusive adult children may leverage a parent’s minor memory lapses to delegitimise their reality, countering their lived experiences with assertions like, “You’re just getting confused.” This can breed a profound cognitive dissonance that slowly undermines the parent’s sense of personhood. Crucially, this gaslighting appears to interact with structural vulnerabilities. Our institutional systems naturally tend to defer to the younger caregiver, sometimes giving them the benefit of the doubt over an older adult. The abuser may make strategic choices to secure compliance because they know the system will likely reinforce their narrative.
The Path Forward: Re-evaluating Autonomy
Ultimately, the FIL-CO Model frames a parent’s compliance not necessarily as weakness, but potentially as a calculated surrender within a very compromised family and societal context. For professionals, this suggests a fundamental shift in practice. When assessing an older parent, we can rarely simply ask what they ‘want’ on a surface level. If a parent’s will is a strategic response to an unbreakable, lifelong bond, our assessments must account for the painful internal processes they may be navigating. Moving forward, compassionate responses mean looking past the surface of ‘compliance.’ Only when we begin to understand the potential strategy behind a parent’s surrender can we hope to break through the walls of silence and offer true avenues for validation, safety, and hope.
It was great to hear more about Freda’s work in the Reframing Professional Practice conference. Freda is completing her PhD at University College Dublin.
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We last heard from Sophie Cero in October 2018 (https://holesinthewall.co.uk/2018/10/31/an-eye-for-detail-an-interview-with-sophie-cero/) when she was starting her Fine Art PhD, taking a unique approach to investigating the violence from a child to their parent. Now that this is completed, Sophie has written us an update and included some art work from the research. While other people have used art work as part of the therapeutic process, as a diary record, or as a method of illustrating research, this was the first time that the whole project has been undertaken from a visual point of view.
You might find it helpful to reread the earlier blog first to remind yourself about her work.
Sophie is the first in our ‘mothering’ series, and we are happy to welcome her back to HITW
Explored through my artistic practice, in writing, film and objects, my Royal College of Art, PhD research project ‘Little Horror. At home with filial violence’, sought to make visible the maternal experience of CAPVA, which, as perhaps the last taboo, is one of the few instances where it is almost impossible for a mother to own and tell her own life story. Revealing it challenges the very nature of motherhood and places the mother in the role of both victim to and creator of the problem. Someone who she may love and fear simultaneously, and who above all, she wants nurture and to keep safe. To turn away from nurture and to reject the child for reasons of safety is almost impossible, every turn has a devastating consequence, every aspect of life into trauma in waiting, making the mother trapped in an impossible life with an impossible child. This mother must both protect and survive her child.
In the seven years of study, the most compelling finding I have encountered is how commonplace the experience is. When describing my research, I found it astounding how many people had had an encounter with it in some form, be it from a sibling, a neighbour or their own child. On the opposite side to this, I had several instances of open disbelief, of misunderstanding, of incredulity, with the listener being convinced that surely, I had mis-spoken, I must have meant the mother being abusive to her child.
Working through art practice as opposed to more traditional research strategies, allowed me to develop my own methodology and to form an inquiry that would be hard, if not impossible to replicate through usual research gathering approaches. It allowed me to think around the spaces of events within the home, and to find common themes that occur within objects and places, and commonalities across different ages of mother and child.
Finding no existing direct artistic representations, my research sought out contemporary parallels that held elements of the experience within them, in art, film and literature, taking a wide frame of reference from disparate sources ranging from Lacan to Family Guy. This study was initially underpinned by the idea of CAPVA being akin to ‘the maternal unheimlich’, considering Freud’s writing on The Uncanny, when viewed through a maternal frame. This led to the realisation that CAPVA bears resemblance to the horror film genre, relating to key elements such as ‘the scary place’, ‘the final girl’ and ‘the ominous atmosphere’. This applied to all horror tropes except for that which makes horror exciting, enticing and unpredictable, ‘the jumpscare’. Here the scares are expected and known.
I worked with existing testimonies from mothers that highlighted domestic objects as being integral to violence within the walls of the home, the objects acting as if witnesses to events. This methodology allowed for difficult stories to be retold and represented through a universalised, fictional birth mother and her (ungendered) child, Mymmy and Vic, as holders of trauma events.
I used a process of writing and diagrammatic drawing to analyse and represent the episodes of abuse, with the final outcome being to assimilate the ‘object events’ into a film script, which documents a day/18 year period of the relationship between Mymmy and Vic. It is my intention to further the research and to find funding to realise the film script in the near future.
Since embarking on the project in 2017, when research was sparse and awareness very limited, it is heartening to see that interest in the subject has increased and I hope this will continue.
Suggested Image(s)
Sophie Cero. Safeguarding wallpaper (Christmas edition) 2024
Sophie Cero. Object Event (crockery) 2021 – diagrammatic timeline drawing
Sadly it is not possible to read the final paper as it has been embargoed to protect those involved, but Sophie is on Instagram as sophie_cero and you can view more of her work there.
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