Tag Archives: Parent abuse

by | September 20, 2013 · 9:21 am

Weekend round-up

Over the last weeks a number of things have caught my attention and I thought it worth while bringing them all together here before they get lost.

A new journal article from Mounir H Fawzi, Mohab M Fawzi & Amira A Fouad, Parent abuse by adolescents with first-episode psychosis in Egypt, Journal of Adolescent Health, published online 16.08.13 (abstract here). The purpose of the research was to determine rates of parent abuse among this group of adolescents presenting at outpatients, and to identify the association between parent abuse and a number of socioeconomic and clinical factors. I found the article interesting for a number of reasons. It does not seem so long a time since people were asking whether parent abuse was a phenomenon confined to western societies with particularly lax forms of parenting, yet time and time again there are news items and articles emerging from societies right across the world. The findings show clear bias towards sons as abusers and mothers as victims, (apologies for the terminology which I know is uncomfortable for some people). Once again parent abuse is described as a taboo, a hidden problem, and there is a call for greater awareness raising, education and support. Continue reading →

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by | September 16, 2013 · 7:28 am

Trouble in the Troubled Families Department

I have a sort of Love-Hate relationship with the Trouble Families Programme and so I like to keep abreast of developments and opinion as it unfolds, for instance the announcement last week on September 10th that 14,000 families have now been ‘turned around’.

I am torn between the belief that intensive family support can be extremely productive – and that this is in fact what brought many folk into social work in the first place – and the concern about the turn such a model of intervention has taken on the current government’s watch. Intensive Family Support Programmes have a proud heritage and it is from them, significantly, that we have learnt much about children’s violence to parents in the UK. Continue reading →

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by | September 9, 2013 · 11:48 am

Elder Abuse: Is this the same thing as parent abuse?

In June 2006 an article in the Times newspaper reported on  a parliamentary Health Committee inquiry, set up in 2003 and prompted by estimates that up to 50,000 of Britain’s elderly were subject to abuse from relatives and carers. The inquiry declared the abuse of the elderly to be Britain’s “last hidden abuse scandal.” This weekend the Observer has reported on former health minister, Paul Burstow’s concern that figures show as many as 370,000 older people were abused in their home last year  – a “hidden national scandal” – and that the number is likely to increase to nearly half a million by the end of the decade. These figures are based on data extrapolated from a survey of 2000 people in 2007. Nevertheless, they suggest that this is a story that has captured the imagination of those in power. Continue reading →

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by | August 30, 2013 · 2:19 pm

Silent Cries: a child’s account of living with violence

Amongst the many factors that have been identified with regard to children’s violence to parents, the experience of living with domestic violence has been found to have significant prominence. Yet the way this influences children’s behaviour is itself multi-layered and will vary from family to family.

The normalising of violence, anger and disdain for the parent who failed to protect themself or the children, “stepping up to the plate” once the abusive adult is no longer in the household – these are the links commonly cited, but we hear less of the child who fights back at the time in attempts to protect one parent from the other. A book, which I was sent this week, opens up this aspect of parent abuse, in what the Yorkshire Post described as “an intensely moving account” of domestic violence through the eyes of a child. Continue reading →

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by | August 5, 2013 · 8:57 am

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 →

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by | July 29, 2013 · 4:45 pm

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 →

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by | July 19, 2013 · 9:13 am

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.

classroom

Photograph © Lorraine Arthur Continue reading →

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by | July 4, 2013 · 1:37 pm

From witness to perpetrator: is it inevitable?

The recent Respect National Practitioners Seminar, held in London, featured a keynote speech from Professor David Gadd, of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at Manchester University. David reported on the findings of the three-year ESRC From Boys to Men project, in his speech: The Making and Unmaking of Domestic Abuse Perpetrators.

Essentially, the research has been examining why some young men go on to become domestic abuse perpetrators and others not; and then what can be done about it. Work such as this is incredibly important in a field such as parent abuse, where a significant amount is known about correlation, but less about causation. Continue reading →

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by | June 20, 2013 · 2:48 pm

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 →

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by | June 10, 2013 · 3:54 pm

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 →

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