Practitioner accounts of responding to parent abuse – a case study in ad hoc delivery, perverse outcomes and a policy silence

Practitioner accounts of responding to parent abuse – acase study in ad hoc delivery, perverse outcomes and apolicy silencecfs_860 1..10

Amanda Holt* and Simon Retford†*Senior Lecturer in Criminological Psychology, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth,

Portsmouth, †Police Superintendent, Operational Policing, Greater Manchester Police, Divisional Headquarters,

Stretford, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT

Parent abuse is becoming recognized as a serious problem in somefamilies. It can have a damaging impact on physical and mentalhealth, family relationships and employment and has been found tobe implicated in other past, current and future forms of family abuseand violence. For this reason, many frontline practitioners who workwith troubled families frequently find incidents of parent abuse intheir caseloads, but we know little of how they respond to it. Thisstudy used in-depth interviews with nine practitioners who work in arange of agencies in one large county in England and explored howthey each identify, conceptualize, explain and respond to parentabuse. In a context where there is no national guidance regardinghow agencies should respond to this problem, this study finds thatpractitioners must ‘make do’ without appropriate resources or policyguidance to help them. The study concludes with suggestions forchange for the benefit of families who seek support but who currentlyfind little effective response.

Correspondence:Amanda Holt,Institute of Criminal Justice Studies,University of Portsmouth,Ravelin House,Museum Road,Portsmouth PO1 2QQ,UKE-mail: [email protected]

Keywords: adolescence,parenting/parenthood,policy/management, violence,young people

Accepted for publication: February2012

PARENT ABUSE: A CHALLENGE TOFRONTLINE SERVICES

‘Parent abuse’ refers to the continual use of abusivetactics towards a parent, which enable children andyoung people (under 18 years) to exercise power overtheir parent(s). The abusive tactics may be physical(e.g. punching, kicking), emotional (e.g. threats,attempts to humiliate and undermine) and/or eco-nomic (theft, damage to property) and, like otherforms of family abuse, it is characterized by secrecyand shame. In particular, parent abuse involves a‘double stigma’ because it combines the stigma ofparenting a problematic child with the stigma of expe-riencing domestic violence in the home (Holt 2011).As such, it is difficult to estimate its prevalence, butthe one small-scale survey conducted in the UK

suggested that approximately 14% of young peoplehave used violent tactics against a parent at least once,with 3.8% reporting having used severe violence(Browne & Hamilton 1998). Such data is broadlyconsistent with more robust international prevalencedata which has emerged over the past 30 years, pri-marily in the USA, Australia, Canada and Spain. Suchdata has drawn from surveys from communitysamples alongside analysis of criminal justice data (i.e.from young people who have been arrested, chargedor convicted of violence-related offences towards theirparents) and data from clinical populations (i.e. fromfamilies who have sought medical/psychiatric supportfor their child’s behaviour; see Holt 2012a for review).While of course there are methodological problemswith such quantitative data, there is also an increas-ing qualitative literature which has highlighted the

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doi:10.1111/j.1365-2206.2012.00860.x

1 Child and Family Social Work 2012 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

physical and psychological impact of parent abuse,with many studies identifying mental health problems,such as clinical distress, anxiety and depression (e.g.Paterson et al. 2002), physical health problems (e.g.O’Connor 2007), problems within family relation-ships (e.g. Howard & Rottem 2008) and problemsrelated to work and employment (Cottrell 2001).There is also some evidence that its perpetration isimplicated in earlier experiences of childhood victim-ization (Ullman & Straus 2003), concurrent perpetra-tion of sibling abuse (Laurent & Derry 1999) and laterperpetration of dating violence (LaPorte et al. 2009).Given the suggested prevalence, which is likely tounderestimate the extent of the problem, and thedamaging impact it can have on parents and families,it is clearly an issue of concern for those who workwith families and young people. However, despiteanecdotal evidence of practitioners being continuallyconfronted with such cases, parent abuse has yet toreach the status of ‘social problem’ and, as such, in theUK and elsewhere, there is a distinct lack of policyguidance surrounding its governance.

For us, this poses an important research question:how do frontline practitioners identify, understandand respond to parent abuse when it appears in theircaseloads? To our knowledge, no study has yetexplored this issue, yet parents’ accounts of experi-ences of parent abuse suggest that they have fre-quently sought help and support from a range offrontline services, and in the main have been disap-pointed by the response. In particular, both UK andinternational research which has explored parents’experiences, suggests that the police (e.g. Haw 2010),the judiciary (e.g. Eckstein 2004), youth offendingservices (e.g. Holt 2009), social care services (e.g.Hunter et al. 2010), education and health services(e.g. Parentline Plus 2010) and voluntary and com-munity services (e.g. Holt 2011) all fail to respondeffectively to parent abuse. In some reports, involve-ment of support services can make things worse bytriggering violent retribution from the child (Paganiet al. 2003) or leaving parents feeling blamed by prac-titioners (Cottrell 2001). To some extent, this may bebecause there is no policy guidance for frontline practi-tioners and a recent examination of national socialpolicy in England and Wales (see Holt 2012b) sug-gests that the guidance which does shape frontlinepractice in relation to family abuse either assumes thatfamily violence is perpetrated by adults over 18 years(e.g. Domestic Violence Delivery Plan, 2005) orassumes that children are the victims of family abuse(e.g. Working Together to Safeguard Children, 2010).

Clearly, neither of these configurations is applicable incases of parent abuse, and we were left wondering howsuch policy guidance is navigated when incidents ofparent abuse – which runs counter to these configu-rations – appear in practitioners’ caseloads.Therefore,while we accept that the study below is small scale andlargely exploratory, we feel it tells us something origi-nal and important about what can happen whenfamily abuse and violence come up against a policygap in one large metropolitan county in England.

METHODS

This study aimed to examine how practitioners – whoregularly come into contact with families in trouble –identify, conceptualize, explain and respond to thecases of parent abuse that feature regularly in theircaseloads. Nine practitioners who work within onelarge metropolitan county in England were inter-viewed about their experiences of responding toparent abuse in their work. The interviewees wereselected using a snowball sample through the workcontacts of the second author, who is also a practitio-ner working within the same county.The practitioner-interviewees comprised (and are coded as in theinterview extracts):

• Victim support worker from a national victimsupport agency (VS-N)

• Health visitor who is/seconded to theYouth Offend-ing Service (HV-YOS)

• Practitioner from the Children & Young PersonsServices’ Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Team(CYP-Marat)

• Probation officer currently seconded to the localYouth Offending Service (Pr-YOS)

• Police Officer from the Public Protection Investiga-tion Unit (PO-PP)

• Domestic violence support worker from a nationalcharity (DV-N)

• Police staff member who coordinates MARAC(PO-Marac)

• Victim support worker from a local independentcharity (VS-Ind)

• Detective inspector from the Police Public Protec-tion Investigation Unit (DI-PP)Semi-structured interviews were used and lasted

between 44 and 85 minutes. With consent, all weredigitally recorded and transcribed verbatim, and thetranscripts were then imported into NVivo data analy-sis software (QSR International [UK], Southport,UK). Analysis drew on Parker’s (1992) notion ofdiscourse dynamics to identify the ways in which prac-

Practitioner accounts of parent abuse A Holt and S Retford


titioners constructed parent abuse and its causes andhow it is currently responded to, including the prob-lems with current responses. Prior to the start of theresearch, ethical approval was obtained from the uni-versity faculty ethics committee and issues ofinformed consent, confidentiality, data protection andprotection from harm were all addressed in ways thatcomply with guidance set out by the British Psycho-logical Society Code of Ethics and Conduct (BritishPsychological Society 2009) and the British Society ofCriminology Code of Ethics (British Society of Crimi-nology 2006).

FINDINGS

Identifying parent abuse

All of the practitioners had experienced incidents ofparent abuse in their caseloads and were familiar withthe physical, emotional and economic abusive tacticspractised by children and young people in the familyhome. However, not all of the practitioners definedsuch cases using this terminology. As one practitionerexplained:

The nearest we would come to is a category for ‘socially

unacceptable child behaviour’, and that would be the one we

would choose. But that would [also] include drugs and

alcohol, missing from home, stealing, offending in the com-

munity, and obviously not necessarily ‘parent abuse’

. . . [ . . . ] . . . Until you came up with the term ‘parent

abuse’ I must admit I really didn’t think of it like that.What I

was aware of, there was a lot of violence and that sort of

behaviour towards parents. (CYP-Marat)

All of the practitioners commented that the numberof cases was increasing, and most felt that this was aresult of both an increase in incidents and a greaterpropensity for it to be reported (with suggestions thatboth the politicization of domestic violence and theincreased profile of parent abuse explained an increasein reporting). However, all practitioners suggestedthat parent abuse remained hugely under-reported,and many commented that what we know is likely tobe ‘the tip of the iceberg’, with perhaps only the mostsevere and long-term cases brought to their attention:

It must be quite difficult for a parent to report their own

child’s abuse.To me that probably evidences the level of abuse

– that it’s got to this stage, the chances are it’s happened a

number times before as with DV. (VS-N)

There was agreement among practitioners thatunder-reporting was shaped by how we constructparents, particularly lone parents, in relation to

troublesome young people. For practitioners, this (i)prevents parents from reporting abuse and (ii) pre-vents practitioners from recognizing it. The followingtwo extracts exemplify these two positions:

The reasons people don’t report it are because, I think, people

feel ashamed and they feel as parents that they’ve failed. If

you’re a single parent, every single thing in the world is your

fault, and if you’re a single parent and it’s happening, then

you’re even less likely to tell someone. If you’re a divorced

parent, the same thing applies. We’ve got that parental blame

culture going on and I think that’s going to get worse, with the

advent of marriage focused policies. (HV-YOS)

I think [we] don’t always recognise the problem. Because if it’s

a teenager with a 40 year-old mother or father they think “you

should be able to sort it out yourself, because a kid’s a kid”. So

I think there’s that aspect of it. (PO-Marac)

Cases of parent abuse appear in practitioner’s case-loads either through direct contact (by parents or theyoung person [see Note 1]), by referral from anotheragency, or through intervention work with familieswhere another concern is the initial cause of referral(e.g. youth offending outside the home, or inter-parental violence). For example, one practitioner whoworks in the local YOS team explained how parentabuse becomes evident from their work with both theparent and the young person:

Initially a lot of [parents] will tell you everything is fine and

maybe minimise what’s actually gone on at home and don’t

want to make the situation worse. It’s only usually after maybe

two or three months of working with someone on home visits

or picking it up if Social Services are involved that you tend to

find out that there’s probably a little bit more going on at

home . . . [ . . . ]. . . . But most of [the cases] have been

through observation and just ‘rooting’ really through the back-

grounds and checking with Social Services and just picking

up, when talking [to offenders] about intervention, picking up

that they’re telling their parents to “fuck off”. And you can get

[information] when you probe them about “well how did you

react when ‘this’ happens?”. You’ll also hear them talk about

when they’ve punched a wall or broken a door. (Pr-YOS)

While there was a commonality in recognizing theproblem of parent abuse, there was a polarity in opin-ions as to the typical socio-demographic make-up ofthe families who appear in practitioners’ caseloads.Some practitioners did not identify any obviouspattern, while others suggested that parent abuse mostheavily features within ‘son–mother dyads’ in loneparent families where poverty, deprivation and unem-ployment are common. We do not make this point tosuggest that such observations can be used to gener-alize about ‘typical’ families which feature parentabuse, but that such understandings are implicated in



practitioners’ constructions about the causes of, andsolutions to, parent abuse.This is a point to which wereturn.

Conceptualizing parent abuse

There are a number of ways in which parent abuse canbe conceptualized, and one might assume that profes-sional orientations shape practitioners understandingsof it, such that criminal justice practitioners concep-tualize the problem as one of ‘youth offending’, socialcare practitioners conceptualize it as one of ‘familyviolence’ and so on. However, while different concep-tual frameworks were offered, these did not appear tocorrelate with practitioners’ own professional back-ground. Three clear conceptual frameworks wereevident in practitioners’ accounts: parent abuse ascriminal, parent abuse as family violence and parentabuse as power and control.

Parent abuse as criminal

The conceptualization of parent abuse as a form ofcriminal behaviour was evident in some practitioners’suggestions as to how such cases should be dealt with

My first thing would be, if the police have been called on ‘999’

then it’s a crime. The victim must be scared to be phoning

‘999’ . . . Some of the [perpetrators] are quite big and physi-

cally strong, quite angry, quite aggressive and [the police

should think] this could be a crime going on here and look at

safety and look after the other children there. (VS-Ind)

There’s a few names that are known to the YOS for cri-

mes . . . certainly [incidents] where they’ve been involved

with the police regarding anti-social behaviour within the

community and I can’t see how that can be disassociated from

their behaviour, as a lot of it is to do with the management of

their behaviour and management of their anger. A lot of that is

happening within the family home, and they don’t have other

strategies to deal with it and so they resort to violence and

aggressive behaviour. (CYP-Marat)

Such conceptualizations position parent abusewithin a wider spectrum of ‘offending behaviour’which takes place both within and outside the familyhome. In many ways, this compares to how adult-to-adult domestic violence has been increasingly concep-tualized over the past 20 years – as a crime for which‘perpetrators’ must be made criminally responsibleand where ‘victims’ must be seen as such (Hester2011). However, such a conceptual framework israther more problematic when perpetrators are stilllegally children and consequently are not held crimi-nally responsible in the same way that adults are.

Furthermore, parents of young offenders are heldcriminally responsible in ways that parents of adultoffenders are not (e.g. through the use of legal sanc-tions such as parenting orders).

Parent abuse as family violence

Alternatively, some practitioners situated the problemof parent abuse within a framework of family violence,which takes into account both current and past familyabuses which form a backdrop to family life:

I would say that a big proportion are a wider family violence

issue and there is also on-going child protection issues,

on-going enquiries or interventions, and domestic abuse inci-

dents between the people involved. Not all, but the vast major-

ity – that there’s other issues. (DI-PP)

It’s interesting when you go back – worryingly, a lot of these

[parent abuse] offenders are quite young. Go back into files,

and these young people were involved as child protection

issues, issues with mother or mother’s partner, whether they

were abused as children, and whether that abuse now is per-

petuating itself in abuse towards parents. (PO-MARAC)

Practitioners reflected on the fact that, in manycases, the families were already known to variousfrontline agencies, and it was often this ongoing inter-vention work that enabled them to identify problemsof parent abuse. Such a conceptual framework clearlyhas implications for how we might bring in frontlineagencies, particularly children’s social care services, toenable better assessment of parent abuse. It also high-lights the need to take a longer term perspective andnot assume that violence within the family is ‘over’(case closed) once an adult perpetrator has beenforced to leave the family home. Some practitionersalso remarked that parent abuse may be the ‘missinglink’ between earlier experiences of child victimizationand later perpetration of dating violence, a link thathas been identified in the research literature (Mitchell2007; LaPorte et al. 2009).

Parent abuse as power and control

A third conceptual framework situated parent abuse interms of an exercise of power and control:

I have noticed that a number of young people that I’ve worked

with there’s been issues where they’ve used some form of

manipulation or some form of power and control within the

family setting for their own means to get what they want, so I

think that would fit in to it (Pr-YOS)

More specifically, some practitioners identified ado-lescence as a time when the power balance between



parent and child quickly shifts, and the ensuing powerstruggle is implicated in the onset of parent abuse:

I think in terms of the power balance, the parent and child

relationship is never equal . . . but then that power imbalance

changes, and that young person starts to subjugate his mother.

And that child, in his head, is taking control back. (DV-N)

While developmental shifts in adolescence tend tobe constructed as maturational, some practitionerscommented that changes to a more ‘permissive’ styleof child rearing in combination with the changingstatus of childhood in the past 50 years has producedwhat one practitioner called ‘spoilt child syndrome’.To a few practitioners, such social changes have servedto exacerbate intergenerational power struggles whichcan spill over into abuse and violence towards aparent.

Constructing the causes of parent abuse

All of the practitioners were keen to emphasize thatthere was no single ‘cause’ of parent abuse (and thusthere could be no single solution) and a number ofcausative factors were suggested. Least frequentlyoffered were proximate factors which drew on indi-vidualistic discourses of psychopathology (such asattention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ‘mental healthissues’ or substance misuse). Such discourses locatedthe cause entirely within the ‘perpetrator’. Moredistal factors were suggested primarily by practitio-ners, who worked in victim/DV support agencies.These drew on the problematic way in which gender,power and violence is constructed in modern culturaldiscourse:

I guess it’s always been there and just evolves as society’s

treatment of women in general, but that’s me from my femi-

nist background. We need to change that perception of how

males should behave and how women should behave. But I do

think it is emerging and it’s getting worse as society is getting

more violent. I just hope that in society, domestic abuse will

end – yet we get 14 or 15 year olds involved. (VS-Ind)

However, most frequently offered were explanationsthat drew on discourses of family dysfunction, par-ticularly the role of past family violence and poor parent-ing skills. However, these were often qualified and werenever suggested as the entire answer:

I don’t think there’s one specific cause . . . we have high

poverty indicators so that can compound it – poor housing

and economic status. I think children have witnessed domestic

violence in the household, I think that’s a big issue as well and

the associated problems with that: if Mum’s suffered abuse for

many years, she’s left with mental health problems and doesn’t

cope very well. She can have depression – feelings of helpless-

ness, low self-esteem and poor body language prevent you

from being positive. (DV-N)

In relation to explanations that draw on past familyviolence, the notion of ‘cycles of violence’ is commonin practitioner discourse and, as Baker (2009) pointsout, the inherent determinism within this discoursecan cloud how domestic violence support servicesrespond to families in need. However, explanationsthat draw on poor parenting skills are equally problem-atic, in that they risk blaming the parent for their ownvictimization by suggesting that it is the parent whomust be the transformative agent within the abusiverelationship (Holt 2009). However, the practitionerswe interviewed were careful to explain that the issuewas complex, and that all sorts of factors – includinga history of domestic abuse – shape the ability toparent. The conundrum posed by identifying ‘poorparenting skills’ as a potential contributor to parentabuse while avoiding blaming the parent was evidentby practitioners’ careful negotiation of this doublebind within their accounts:

In the majority of the cases these parents are trying their best,

and blaming them doesn’t assist the situation. If you want

things to change, apportioning blame is not going to allow

them to ‘open up’ and get them to engage with you to accept

the services that are available . . . There may be cases where

the victim had some involvement, but you’re not going to say

‘you’re less of a victim because you had some involvement’

. . . [Bad parenting] is very small compared to the young

person and their [abusive] behaviour. (Pr-YOS)

Failure to sensitively negotiate this double bind inprofessional practice risks parents feeling blamed andsubsequently refusing to engage in intervention work,and several practitioners recognized and commentedon this.

Responding to parent abuse

Normative constructions of family abuse and theconfiguration of frontline services

Practitioners tended to construct ‘parent abuse’ inrelation to other forms of family violence of whichthey have greater professional experience, and as suchconsidered parent abuse to be ‘much more complex’.For practitioners, this complexity made itself knownin terms of (i) the complex range of support that wasnecessary and (ii) the complex qualifications thatparents must make when seeking support. An exampleof these qualifications was explained succinctly by one



practitioner who worked with victims of domesticviolence:

Sometimes, if they’re suffering domestic abuse from a partner,

they make it very clear they want refuge accommodation or

they want legal measures . . . [But] when it is a child, they feel

quite torn, they’ll make a lot of excuses – perhaps that child

may have witnessed their father being abusive to their mother,

and the mum will try and look for reasons within that . . . Just

really complex things: “well it’s my child, I’ve got a responsi-

bility” and “I don’t want to go in a refuge and I don’t really

want him to go into care, and I don’t want to [throw] him out

of the house” or Social Services may have said “you can’t do

this, it will be abandonment if you leave or throw your child

out, under 16”. (VS-Ind)

The central issue which underpins such qualifica-tions is the reversal of normative power relations thatcharacterize parent abuse. That is, normative con-structions of abusive relationships tend to feature a‘perpetrator’ who is in a position of greater power (e.g.physical power, economic power, political power) inrelation to the ‘victim’. In a world where parents areassumed to exercise power over their children, thesenormative constructions make it impossible forparents to occupy the position of victimhood in waysthat are possible for victims of other forms of familyviolence (e.g. child abuse, elder abuse, intimatepartner violence). And because frontline services areconfigured within these normative constructions,cases of parent abuse present a particular challenge tofrontline practitioners.

Practitioners recognized this lack of fit and dis-cussed how its inherent conflict shaped their ability torespond effectively when faced with a case of parentabuse. For example, one practitioner who worked inpublic protection explained the anomaly that is pro-duced by a system which does not formally recognize‘parent abuse’:

They aren’t coming to our attention as ‘parent abuse’ cases.

They are being reported as domestic incidents. They come in

as a child protection matter, but the irony is that this isn’t a

child protection matter, this is an adult protection issue to

some degree. But if there is a child involved in a domestic

abuse incident, then they will come through as a concern for

child. And sometimes you also have to be open to the fact that

there might also be some other stuff going on in that child’s

background, which is of concern in the child protection arena

and is contributing to that child’s behaviour. But sometimes,

it’s as straightforward as, the child is the perpetrator and the

adult is the victim. So it’s a bit of an anomaly really, that it

lands in our child protection list. (DI-PP)

The practitioner went on to explain that the localIDVA (see Note 2) service would not take on casesinvolving parent abuse because they were not consid-

ered to be ‘high risk’ (i.e. unlikely to result in seriousharm or death) and they only had the resources torespond to high-risk cases. Similarly, while very severecases of parent abuse have been referred to a localMARAC (see Note 3), one practitioner explained thatbecause MARACs are designed to support victims ofdomestic violence in cases where perpetrators are over18 years (and are not the victim’s children), then manyof the options available to MARACs are inappropriatein cases of parent abuse (e.g. sanctuary schemes, pro-viding victim support for children).

Perverse outcomes

Practitioners also shared concerns that the ‘child-centred’ orientation of social services departmentsmeans that they may act in ways that are counterpro-ductive by blaming the parent and, as in one casewhich was recounted to us, threatening to prosecutethe mother with child abandonment if she evicted herabusive son from the family home. Some practitionersconstructed different frontline practitioners as ‘siding’with different family members, depending on theirprofessional orientation:

From Mum’s point of view, social services take the young

person’s side and the Mum feels left out, that she’s not being

listened to. And I’ve had probation and social workers saying

“well she IS the parent” andYES she is, but things have gone

wrong. I can take both sides because I get Mum’s version of

the child being really abusive and horrible, and then I speak to

probation workers and say “What’s that young person like?”

and they’ll say “really nervous, under-confident”. It’s a whole

different picture from what Mum is saying. I thought “God,

there’s two stories here”. It really opened my eyes. (DV-N)

Regardless of whether these constructions arerooted in ‘truth’, a lack of shared understandingsin who or what is ‘the problem’ is likely to hamperattempts at joined-up working across agencies, andthis has implications for how we might take thingsforward in developing a more coherent frontlineresponse to parent abuse.

Perverse outcomes appear to be a recurrent theme inpractitioners’ accounts of the consequences ofattempting to deal with a problem with which theyare ill equipped. Alongside concerns about social ser-vices’ threats to prosecute parents for child abandon-ment and the blaming of parents for their ownvictimization, practitioners described a number ofcases which were very concerning. For example, onepractitioner described a case where a mother wasassaulted by her son.The mother contacted the policeand her son was arrested, charged, convicted and fined.



However, parents are financially liable for their chil-dren’s fines, and when her son refused to pay his fine, itwas his mother who was threatened with bailiffs. Shevowed that she would never contact the police again. Ina second case described to us, a mother was taken tocourt for her son’s non-attendance at school. Despitethe mother’s many attempts to get him into school –which on one occasion resulted in her son punching herin the face and knocking her down the stairs when sheattempted to get her son out of bed and into school –she received a fine in court.

Ad hoc responses

Different frontline services respond in different wayswhen a parent abuse case appears in their caseload.The lack of formal professional guidance also meansthat there are inconsistencies both across and withinparticular frontline services within the single metro-politan county under research. However, in thisrespect professional orientations and organizationalprotocols do shape responses. Victim support practi-tioners follow a generic protocol, which involves aneeds assessment with the parent somewhere secureand safe. A victim response plan is developed, whichmight include links to appropriate health profession-als, local authorities and other relevant support agen-cies and charities. A safety plan might also be put inplace, emotional support is offered and potential legalremedies, including police involvement, may be dis-cussed with the parent. However, because suchresponses primarily emerge from a ‘domestic violenceframework’, many of the usual options are often notappropriate. For example, civil remedies such as non-molestation orders are not applicable for perpetratorswho are under 18 years (see Piper 2010), while refugeaccommodation is also problematic for parents whohave a parental responsibility to provide safe accom-modation for their children, including those who areviolent towards them.

For YOS practitioners and others who work withyoung people and families, the same models that areused when dealing with offending outside the familyhome are applied, usually involving intervention workwith both young people and their parents. As oneYOSpractitioner explained:

In parent abuse situations, you’d be looking at offending for

the young person and the sort of models used around looking

where that behaviour is coming from and addressing that

behaviour to effect long term change, rather than being overly

punitive. It’s about trying to understand it and giving them

alternative strategies to deal with difficult situation-

s . . . [ . . . ] . . . It might involve getting the parents some

form of parenting advice or some outlet for them if we don’t

feel that they’re managing the escalation of the behaviour very

well. It’s about looking at what they could do to manage that

situation. (CYP-Marat)

There was much recognition that such interventionwork is complex and is likely to uncover a whole hostof interrelated family issues and problems. Many prac-titioners suggested that intervention work with thefamily unit, rather than with individuals, is likely to bemost fruitful in such cases, and may need to continuelong after the abusive behaviours stop. However, localcapabilities and resources dictate the extent to whichthis is possible.

For the police, it was acknowledged that only‘generic’ responses are possible. Thus, responses arelikely to involve a risk assessment and possible policearrest. However, parents may not wish to prosecuteand the Crown Prosecution Service is unlikely tosummons a parent to give evidence against his/herchild. One policing practitioner raised the difficultiesof navigating the policy of ‘positive action’ (see Note4), which may not be appropriate in cases of domesticviolence which feature young people under 18 years ofage. Indeed, there is evidence that, when parentscontact the police because of their child’s violence,they do not want a heavy-handed response and wouldprefer the police gave their child ‘a good talking to’(Holt 2009). One policing practitioner also recog-nized this:

We see incidents where parents call the police – something has

happened and this child, the teenager, has smashed the house

up or actually assaulted them. And when the police get there

and the parents realise that [their children] will be arrested,

very quickly the [parents] don’t want that to happen. What

they want is some alternative solution. I don’t know what their

expectations are, or what the police can do.They’re after help

and when they realise that the only help is to arrest [the young

person] and take them away that’s not what they want to

happen in most cases. (DI-PP)

Another recognized that, in the most severe cases,there is little that they can do in response, and nopolicy guidance for them to follow:

Occasionally we raise a strategy meeting, but when it gets to

that level I don’t think there’s that much out there for them,

other than ‘signposting’ them to parenting courses and some

families have gone beyond challenging behaviour – they’re

actually victims in their own home at the hands of their chil-

dren . . . [ . . . ] . . . We deal with it as it arises but its ad hoc as

to how we deal with it. (PO-PP)

All of the practitioners interviewed commented thata ‘multi-agency approach’ was used in cases of parent



abuse and other agencies, such as health services,YOSand schools, were listed as potential sources. However,there was recognition that some partner agencies didnot have a referral pathways protocol in place in thesame way as their own agency did. This resulted inthem having to amend their own policies whenattempting to work with other agencies, producinginconsistent responses and a lack of leadership, withno agreed ‘contact point’ for a case.The lack of statu-tory governance for dealing with parent abuse wasidentified as a large contributory factor to such incon-sistencies and practitioners frequently commented ona lack of anywhere to refer cases on to.This producedcontinual ‘reactive’ responses to parent abuse, with alack of knowing where families have ended up andwhat support has been made available. This clearlyimpacts on knowledge building with practitionersnever learning what pathways are the most successful.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Although from a relatively small sample, the inter-views from practitioners who work in a range of front-line services all within one metropolitan countyyielded a surprising commonality of themes. All rec-ognize the problem of parent abuse, and all havenoticed an increase of it within their own caseloads.Practitioners were also in agreement that parent abuseis likely to be much more prevalent than present datasuggests, and all practitioners expressed concern thatfrontline service responses may be implicated inparents’ reluctance to seek help and in services’ failureto recognize the signs of parent abuse. Practitionersalso agreed that frontline services were not respondingeffectively because of a lack of awareness of parentabuse as a social problem, and all practitioners agreedthat a programme of awareness raising – for bothpractitioners and families – is crucial for this situationto improve. There was also agreement that a lack ofpolicy guidance regarding parent abuse was prevent-ing practitioners from working together and providingconsistent responses, both within and across agencies.Practitioners also shared a frustration in not havinganywhere to refer such families, and all recognizedthat current frontline services – whether children’ssocial care services, youth offending services,victim/DV support services or police and judicial ser-vices – were, in their own particular way, ill-equippedto cope with the challenges presented by parent abuse.

However, differences between practitioners alsoraise concerns. Different practitioners use differentterminology when talking about parent abuse and

conceptualize the problem in different ways. Somesuggest it should be understood and dealt with as a‘crime’, whereas others situate it within a wider tap-estry of ‘family violence’, which is likely to require aless criminalizing and more welfare-oriented approachto intervention. Other practitioners conceptualize theproblem within a framework of power and control,and the assumption that social and cultural shifts areimplicated in parent abuse implies that responses needto go beyond targeted support towards more universaland more fundamental responses. Differences in ter-minology and conceptual understanding are undoubt-edly hampering service responses and joined-upworking and there is clearly a need for professionaltraining. This would enable a coherent cross-agencyrisk assessment strategy for use by all practitionerswho work with children and families, and wouldenable the development of good practice around howparent abuse might be presented to families to avoidblaming individuals and risking their disengagementfrom intervention work.

Reflecting on their own professional experiences ofattempting to respond to parent abuse in an ‘ad hoc’way, which resulted in perverse outcomes, all of thepractitioners were forthcoming in making a number ofrecommendations:

• The identification of ‘parent abuse’ as a categorycode for use across agencies – this would alsoprovide a mechanism to record the prevalence ofparent abuse

• A specific shared policy for responding to parentabuse across all statutory, voluntary and communityfrontline services

• The identification of a ‘lead agency’ to followthrough each case as a point of contact

• Increased use of discretion by police

• Greater joined-up working across agencies

• Early assessment, referral and universal interven-tion programmes involving schools and their‘healthy relationships’ curriculum

• Increased research about the prevalence of parentabuse, its dynamics within the family home, andeffective interventions, which can lead to specialistsupport interventions and resources specificallydesigned to respond to parent abuse

• Restorative justice as a method of intervention thatcircumvents criminal justice interventions

• The availability of legal remedies beyond criminaljustice sanctions for use with children under 18years

• The mainstreaming of parenting support thatavoids the stigma which ‘targeted’ support brings



However, all practitioners shared a concern thatcuts to funding budgets across all frontline serviceswould make the task of developing effective responsesdifficult just at a time when their caseloads wereincreasing. Yet, the shared frustrations and sense ofparalysis identified across the interview data raisesconcerns about the seriousness of parent abuse whichwe can no longer afford to ignore.

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NOTES

1 An example was suggested of a case where a youngperson presented as homeless following an assaultagainst a parent.2 IDVAs (Independent Domestic Violence Advisor)were developed as part of the wider national multi-agency Domestic Violence Delivery Plan (2005) andinvolve a specialist support worker who is allocated tovictims of domestic violence in cases where perpetra-tors are over 18 years.3 MARACs (Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Confer-ence) are also part of the Domestic Violence Delivery



Plan (2005) and involve regular multi-agency meet-ings coordinated by the police and are used to enableappropriate services to work together to provide asupport plan for victims of domestic violence.

4 The duty of ‘positive action’ directs police to makean arrest in cases of domestic violence, and decisionsnot to arrest suspects need to be justified (HomeOffice Circular 19/2000).



Documents

Practitioner accounts of responding to parent abuse – a case study in ad hoc delivery, perverse outcomes and a policy silence