Aftermath of Violence Special Issue

Responding to adolescent to parent violence: challenges for policy and practice

Violence from adolescent children towards their parents is a complicated

phenomenon incorporating a continuum of behaviour ranging from teenagers

verbally abusing and using threats of violence towards their parents to damaging

parental property and physically assaulting their parents. Literature on the topic

dates back to the 1970s (Harben and Madden 1979) and can be found across a

range of disciplines including family studies, counselling, psychology and

sociology. In the UK, adolescent to parent violence (APV) remains a fairly hidden

form of family violence and it is only in the last decade that a body of literature

has begun to emerge. As a largely unrecognised form of violence in the official

arena, it remains on the periphery of the social policy agenda and there is yet to

develop a co-ordinated strategy to address APV (XXXX 2012, 2014; Hunter et al.

2010; Nixon 2012; Wilcox 2012). Within criminal justice in the UK, it seems that

the problem is increasingly being conceptualised and responded to as a form of

domestic violence (XXXX 2014a).

This article is underpinned by an Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC)

funded research project, ‘Investigating Adolescent Violence towards Parents’,

conducted between 2010 and 2013. This was the first large-scale study of APV in

the UK, which sought to increase knowledge and understanding of this

somewhat silent problem and inform policy and practice on how to best respond

to and support families experiencing this form of family violence. Drawing upon

the findings of this study, the article critically discusses the conceptualisation of

APV as a form of domestic violence vis-a-vis the implications for responses to the

problem. Violence from teenagers towards their parents is a complex problem

involving a multitude of pathways and situational contexts which go beyond

unidimensional explanations of power and control. This presents challenges to

academics attempting to understand and theorise the phenomenon and to

practitioners responding to and supporting families who disclose APV. (XXXX

2012; Holt 2009; Holt and Retford 2012; Hunter et al. 2010; Nixon 2012; Routt

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and Anderson 2011; Wilcox 2012). Historically, there has been resistance to the

very idea of children abusing their parents (XXXX 2012), however, international

research has presented convincing evidence of the existence of this form of

violence and its pervasiveness (for overviews of the literature on this topic, see

Kennair and Mellor 2007; Holt 2012a).

In England and Wales, the issue is slowly gaining recognition within the policy

arena and gaining prominence as a form of domestic violence. In March 2015, the

Serious Crime Act introduced a new criminal offence of ‘coercive or controlling

behaviour in an intimate or family relationship’, which can be applied to anyone

over the age of criminal responsibility (10 years old) and may potentially lead to

the prosecution of adolescents who are abusive towards their parents.

This article does not contest the necessity of some form of official recognition,

but instead asks what a responsive response to a problem that is not yet fully

understood should look like. Although we agree with Wilcox (2012) that there

are clear similarities between domestic violence involving partners/ex-partners

and APV, there are recognised differences, which, we argue, have significant

implications for the required response. A parent-child relationship is vastly

distinctive from an intimate relationship and in most cases there is no desire to

sever the relationship. Many ‘perpetrators’ of APV perceive that they have little

power within the family and have often been primary or secondary victims of

violence and abuse. This makes it very difficult to assign labels of responsibility

and blame and challenges contemporary domestic violence responses which

seek to hold perpetrators to account and pursue criminal prosecution. At the

same time, many parent ‘victims’ of violence from their children are also

experiencing myriad problems within and outside of the family context and

mothers in particular may also have been the victims of abuse from current or

previous partners. This raises questions about the extent to which parents can or

should be responsibilised for the violence and abuse they are experiencing from

their children. We argue that while in some cases a criminal justice response may

be the only appropriate response, for the vast majority of families experiencing

APV a holistic, family-focused response centred around support rather than

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blame is required and this might better take place outside of the criminal justice

system (CJS), or involve the CJS working closely with a number of non-criminal

justice agencies.

The article begins with a brief discussion of the literature on APV. The recent

emergence of a body of research in the UK is discussed (most of which has been

published since 2010), alongside the increasing positioning of the problem

within a broader domestic violence framework. Drawing upon our research

findings from a range of data sources, the conceptualisation of APV as a form of

domestic violence is explained and justified, before outlining some of the key

concerns with responding to APV within a domestic violence framework. The

final section of the article considers what a more ‘responsive response’ might

look like, drawing upon our research findings pertaining to innovative responses

and also developments in domestic violence policy advocating a multi-agency

response to the problem.

Literature on the problem of adolescent to parent violence

It is difficult to estimate the scale of the problem of violence from children

towards their parents as the silence and stigma surrounding the issue means

that parents are unlikely to report the violence to the authorities and so reported

incidents are likely to represent the tip of the iceberg. Studies attempting to

gauge the extent of the problem also vary in terms of their definitions, age and

relationship parameters and their research methodologies, with some

researchers using criminal justice datasets of incidents reported to the police

(e.g. Evans and Warren-Sohlberg 1988; Kethineni 2004; Snyder and McCurley

2008; Strom et al. 2010; Walsh and Kreinert 2007, 2009; Howard 2011; Routt

and Anderson 2011) and others using self-report data from large, often dated,

retrospective datasets (e.g. Agnew and Huguley 1989; Brezina 1999; Calvete et

al. 2013, 2013a; Ibabe et al. 2013; Kratcoski 1985; Pagani et al. 2004; Peek et al.

1985; Ulman and Straus 2003). This means that reported estimates of the extent

of APV vary considerably, for example, from 7% (Peek et al. 1985) to 21% in the

US (Kratcoski 1985) and 21% in Spain (Ibabe et al. 2013).

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In contrast to large-scale quantitative studies, there is also a body of qualitative

research into APV (e.g. Bobic 2004; Cotrell and Monk 2004; Eckstein 2004;

Gallagher 2004; Howard and Rottem 2008; Jackson 2003; Stewart et al. 2007).

Rather than examining the prevalence and characteristics of the problem,

literature from these studies tends to focus on the aetiology of APV and the

impact of the violence and abuse upon parents. Findings from these qualitative

studies indicate multiple contextual circumstances surrounding APV, which go

beyond notions of power and control associated with more conventional

domestic violence theories. For example, Cottrell and Monk’s Canadian based

research (2004) identified a variety of pathways to parent abuse including

socialisation of male power, previous history of victimisation/witnessing

domestic violence, poverty, parenting styles, peer influences, mental health and

substance abuse problems. Gallagher (2004) reported a similar variety of

circumstances surrounding APV in Australia (in addition to the concept of ‘over-

entitlement’, which is potentially an artefact of a private therapy sample),

highlighting that existing theories of family violence are insufficient in explaining

the diversity of contexts surrounding this form of violence.

In the UK, research into APV is under-developed, however, in recent years a

number of studies have reported evidence from interviews and surveys

indicating that many parents experience violence from their children (Biehal

2012; Browne and Hamilton 1998; Holt 2009; Hunter et al. 2010; Mirlees-Black

et al. 1996; Parentline Plus 2008, 2010; Smith et al. 1992). This literature has

recognised the difficulties in locating adolescent to parent violence within an

appropriate policy framework and opened a debate as to how the problem might

best be responded to (Holt 2009, Holt and Retford 2012; Hunter et al. 2010;

Hunter and Piper 2012; Nixon 2012; Wilcox 2012). Wilcox (2012) presents a

convincing argument for conceptualising APV as a form of domestic violence,

given the considerable overlaps in behaviour and impact. Although she

recognises that there are also differences between abusive intimate relationships

and child-parent relationships, Wilcox emphasises that both types of abuse

usually involve female victims, and incorporate a pattern of behaviour requiring

day to day management and which significantly impact upon family life. Wilcox

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(2012) contends that recognising ‘parent abuse’ as a form of domestic violence

would improve services available to families who currently face a lack of support

and intervention. This, as we argue below, is the central premise of emerging

policy responses to the problem in the UK, but one that is in danger of not doing

justice to the complexity of adolescent to parent violence, as revealed by our own

study.

Policy responses to adolescent to parent violence in the UK

The hitherto lack of official recognition of APV means that there has been no

separate category in police statistics and prior to 2013, violence from children

towards their parents was excluded from the cross-governmental definition of

domestic violence, which only applied to perpetrators over the age of 18 (XXXX

2012). However, in 2013 a new cross-governmental definition of domestic

violence came into effect lowering the age parameter from 18 to 16 (Home Office

2013). Under this revised definition, any incidents of APV involving children

aged 16 or over fall under the category of domestic violence and ought to be

responded to as such. The perception of APV as a form of domestic violence is

also evident in the 2014 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC)

report into the police response to domestic violence, which explicitly states that

the domestic abuse definition includes ‘child to parent violence’ (HMIC 2014:

29). Furthermore, the government-led ‘Violence Against Women and Girls’

(VAWG) strategy, which focuses on reducing domestic violence and abuse, has

formally recognised APV under its remit and included in its latest action plan an

objective to improve local services for domestic violence and abuse victims

through developing and disseminating ‘information for practitioners working

with children and families on how to identify and address the risks posed by

adolescent to parent violence’ (VAWG 2014: 27). Accordingly, in March 2015 the

Home Office published an information guide (produced in collaboration with

academics and expert practitioners) for practitioners across a range of public

services on how to respond to adolescent to parent violence and abuse (Home

Office 2015).

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Significantly, the 2015 Serious Crime Act has recently introduced a new criminal

offence of ‘controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family

relationship’. Under Section 76 of this Act:

1. A person (A) commits an offence if:a. A repeatedly or continuously engages in behaviour towards another person

(B) that is controlling or coercive,b. at the time of the behaviour, A and B are personally connected,c. the behaviour has a serious effect on B, andd. A knows or ought to know that the behaviour will have a serious effect on B.

2. A and B are “personally connected” if:a. A is in an intimate personal relationship with B, orb. A and B live together and (i) they are members of the same family, or (ii) they

have previously been in an intimate personal relationship with each other.

This legislation may be applied to perpetrators over the age of ten in England

and Wales and thus introduces a potential new route for criminalising abusive

behaviour from adolescents towards their parents under the broader umbrella

of domestic violence. It seems likely that this move will both increase the

recognition and recording of APV and concretise its official recognition as a form

of domestic violence. In this context, it is pertinent and timely to consider the

likely repercussions of this move in terms of whether a domestic violence policy

framework constitutes a responsive response to the problem of APV, given that it

has developed to primarily address violence in adult intimate relationships.

Domestic violence policy has been vastly improved since the 1980s, following a

series of criticisms that the CJS did not take the issue seriously (Hoyle and

Sanders 2000). Following a number of initiatives, agencies within and outside of

the CJS have subsequently been required to form multi-agency partnerships to

facilitate a co-ordinated response to domestic violence, information sharing, and

more adequate identification and management of high-risk victims (Groves and

Thomas 2014). At the policing level, every police force now hosts a domestic

violence unit and specially trained domestic violence officers who respond to

and manage domestic violence cases. Officers are encouraged to prosecute

perpetrators of domestic violence where at all possible via a ‘pro-arrest’ policy,

whereby perpetrators can be arrested regardless of the victim’s wishes (Hoyle

and Sanders 2000, Gadd 2012). Recent developments have also seen the

introduction of specialist domestic violence courts and a number of tools to

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assist police in responding to reported incidents, including Non-molestation

Orders, Occupation Orders, Restraining Orders, and the Domestic Violence

Protection Order (Hoyle 2008, Groves and Thomas 2014); all of which are geared

towards the protection of victims through removing perpetrators from the home

and restricting contact with victims. Whilst police and community responses to

domestic violence are undoubtedly improved compared to thirty years ago,

questions continue to be raised about the tone of policy, which is highly victim-

focused with little emphasis on perpetrators’ needs or potential capacity for

change (Hoyle 2008, Gadd 2012). Pro-arrest policies have been criticized for

potentially increasing risk to victims, especially where arrest does not lead to a

conviction (Hoyle and Sanders 2000, Gadd 2012). These concerns are

particularly relevant in cases involving APV. As we argue below, our research

findings suggest that the current victim-centric approach is not necessarily

appropriate for a number of inter-related reasons.

It is striking that APV has only emerged onto the policy agenda by ‘piggy-

backing’ the adult-focused domestic violence and abuse agenda. This agenda and

responsibility for addressing it is located within the Home Office, and APV has

become visible in policy through the change in the cross-governmental definition

to age 16 in 2013, the inclusion of APV in the Home Office’s VAWG Action Plan in

2014, and the creation of the Home Office’s Information Guide for Practitioners

in 2015. It may potentially rise even further in prominence with the new offence

in the Serious Crime Act 2015. It is notable that official recognition has come

through this route and not through the pressure of a ‘moral panic’ about violent

youth. Despite a number of high profile cases, including adolescent to parent

homicide cases, and a considerable level of media interest, this has not driven a

public recognition of the problem of APV. As Cohen (2003) states, a moral panic

needs a suitable enemy, a suitable victim, and a concern that this is a problem for

wider society. Violent youth are frequently designated as traditional ‘folk devils’

and youth violence as a problem for society. What is missing, we would suggest,

is a ‘suitable victim’ in the form of a parent experiencing violence from their

child. Parent victims of APV are frequently blamed and made responsible for

their child’s offending and this is firmly entrenched in a policy context of

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parental accountability in youth justice (XXXX 2012). The absence of a moral

panic about APV is not cause for concern in itself – however, the complete

absence of a policy response until this year is somewhat surprising. By drawing

the problem of APV into the domestic violence and abuse agenda there is –

despite a number of dissonances – an existing narrative with which to

understand the parent victim. As we will later consider, this narrative is less

effective at helping us to understand the adolescent perpetrator and we caution

against the dangers of creating ‘folk devils’ in the shape of adolescent

perpetrators of familial violence.

Investigating adolescent violence towards parents

The findings presented below derive from a 3 year ESRC-funded research

project, ‘Investigating adolescent violence towards parents’, conducted between

2010 and 2013. This was the first major criminological study of APV in the UK,

collating data from a range of sources to improve understanding of the extent

and nature of the problem and how it is currently responded to by families and

the agencies they encounter. The research methods included analysis of

Metropolitan police data; and; 100 police APV case files across two police force

areas; and 117 in-depth interviews with parents, adolescents, police officers,

youth justice workers and expert practitioners, all of whom had encountered

APV.

Our statistical analysis of Metropolitan police data revealed that over a one year

period from April 2009 to March 2010, 1,892 incidents of violence from

adolescents (aged 13-19) towards their parents were reported to the police

across the 33 London Boroughs. Briefly, these data revealed that 87.3% of

adolescents reported to the police for APV during this time were male and 77.5%

parent victims were female. The mean age of adolescent perpetrators was 16.4

years and the mean age of parent victims was 43.6 years. In 69.6% of reported

incidents there was a recording of 'no injury' or a 'threat of injury', in 25.4% a

minor injury was sustained, and in the remainder of incidents a moderate (4.5%)

or serious (0.5%) injury was sustained by the victim (see XXXX 2014 for a full

analysis and discussion of the Metropolitan police data).

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The interviews which underpin this article were conducted between 2010 and

2013 and were semi-structured in order to generate detailed narratives from

participants about the nature of APV and how it is responded to. With the

permission of the participants, all of the interviews were tape-recorded,

transcribed, and analysed thematically using Nvivo data analysis software. The

police officer interviews were conducted in two police forces – one London

Metropolitan Borough and one Home Counties force - and included a spectrum of

officers ranging from uniformed officers responding to emergency calls to

specially trained officers working within the relevant domestic violence unit of

each force.

The interviews conducted with other (non-police) professionals, parents and

adolescents spanned the length and breadth of England. Practitioners working

with families experiencing APV were identified through a variety of means

including internet searches, contacts made through conference attendance and

word of mouth. These practitioners were all keen to be interviewed about their

knowledge and experiences, due to the potential for raising the profile and

increasing understanding of the problem of APV. In addition to youth justice case

workers, we interviewed expert practitioners working across a range of

community-based support, training and consultancy services including a

domestic violence helpline, a children’s Independent Domestic Violence

Advocacy (IDVA) service, a clinical psychology forensic service, parenting

support services, training services for domestic violence support workers, and a

number of independent charities specialising in APV and other forms of family

violence.

Every practitioner we interviewed was asked if any of the families they worked

with might also be willing to be interviewed, and provided with information

sheets about the research to pass on to potential parent and adolescent

participants. We also talked to families attending group sessions in order to

explain the research project and ask for potential volunteers. The vast majority

of interviews with parents and all interviews with adolescents were conducted

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at the support service with a support worker available during and after the

interview. A minority of parents who were not currently engaged with a support

service learned of our research through our website, conferences or publicity

and approached us to ask if they could be interviewed, one of whom was

interviewed via telephone.

The study was not without methodological limitations, not least the difficulty in

gauging the extent of the problem. The police data were useful in indicating some

characteristics of APV, however, they were limited to incidents reported to the

police and high proportion of abusive behaviour towards parents is likely

unreported. The interviews provided a rich body of data surrounding the nature

of APV and current responses, but are limited to the experiences and

perspectives of the practitioners we interviewed and undoubtedly subject to

individual biases, perceptions and portrayals of parents and adolescents.

Notwithstanding these compromises, the dataset generated by the multi-method

approach adopted in the study provides a unique and holistic insight into

families experiencing APV and how they negotiate their way through the

violence, including attempts to manage the behaviour and everyday life, barriers

to reporting the problem, and how disclosures of adolescent to parent violence

are currently responded to both within and outside of the CJS.

In this article the focus is on responding to APV, thus the findings presented

below centre around the perspectives of professionals, parents and adolescents

pertaining to the question of what kind of a response might be considered the

most ‘responsive’ response. In light of the recent emergence at policy level as a

form of domestic violence, the discussion is framed around the extent to which

APV ought to be considered within a domestic violence policy framework.

Conceptualising adolescent to parent violence as domestic violence

The recent official recognition and emergence onto the policy agenda of this

traditionally hidden form of family violence is likely to be welcomed by support

workers who encounter APV in their day to day work. In our research,

practitioners working to support families experiencing APV highlighted the lack

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of recognition of APV as a fundamental problem. The public silence surrounding

the problem not only adds to the shame and stigma felt by parents on the

receiving end of violence from their children, meaning that many cases are not

identified; but also impedes the ability of public services to secure funding to

provide support to families who disclose this type of violence.

Practitioners are also likely to welcome the recognition of APV as a form of

domestic violence, as they are often working in a domestic violence support

capacity, and many of those we interviewed also appeared to conceptualise the

problem in this way. All of the practitioners we interviewed had experience of

working with cases of APV in their day-to-day work and it was apparent from

their narrative accounts that they perceived and understood APV as a form of

domestic violence, mainly due to the close similarities in behaviours. As one

practitioner commented, ‘it was very hard to make the distinction usefully

between violence to partners and violence particularly against mothers, but

violence to parents’ (Expert 10).

Indeed, in the many examples of abusive and violent behaviours that

practitioners gave, there were clear overlaps with those associated with

domestic violence in intimate partner relationships:

[Y]ou're looking at the same as a perpetrator of domestic abuse, apart from it's from a child. Cos they've, you know, it's manipulation, verbal, physical intimidation, psychological … the behaviour's exactly the same. (Expert 5)

He has physically head-butted her, bitten her, punched her and pushed her … [he is also] very controlling over Mum and younger brother. He’s very verbally aggressive and verbally abusive to Mum by detrimental names and things like that. He will, he will call her lots of different sorts of names and just emotionally bring, trying to bring Mum down really. (Expert 8)

Like domestic violence between (ex)partners, abusive behaviours described by

practitioners went beyond physical assaults and included verbal, emotional and

financial abuse:

It's not necessarily about, 'I'm not allowed this or that or the other,' but the personal attacks, perhaps on partner choices, on the way they've been parented, on parents' perceived deficits. You know, body, how their bodies look, or, you know... So really quite personal attacks that, you know, parents endure. (Expert 15)

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Sleep deprivation seems to be quite an interesting one. And I don't think, even, it's about young people staying out late and worrying parents, so they're not going to sleep. It's actually physically waking them to do stuff for them at ridiculous hours in the morning. (Expert 15) [O]ne of the things that we have found in the families that we've worked with, that actually there's those kind of issues of betrayal, of kind of sort of secrecy. Those are the ones that are actually kind of similar to adult kind of sort of violence, you know, intimate relationships… (Expert 12)

Several examples involved controlling behaviour from young people towards

their parents, as illustrated in the quotes below:

[I]f mum goes out and spends money on things that he doesn't think she should be spending money on, he'll kick off. Or if he wants something and mum will say “We haven't got the money for that”, then there'll be, he'll start a lot of the verbal abuse. You know “You bought yourself boots yesterday, what kind of effing mother do you think you are?” You know “You can't even look after your kids. You're going out and buying that for tea and this is what we want to eat.” You know, it's all kind of, it's manipulating kind of behaviours that, to get his own way, he wants to get his own way basically. With regards to what mum wears, if, you know “Why are you wearing that?” when his step-dad's away, “Are you trying to get another fella in the house?” And calls her a slag and lots of you know horrendous names that he'll call her. And this is, a lot of it is in front of the younger siblings as well. If the younger siblings are playing up and mum tries to deal with it, he'll completely... he'll completely undermine mum. And because they're afraid of him, they'll end up doing what he says, rather than what mum says. So he'll completely undermine her parenting as well with the younger siblings. (Expert 7)

It's usually very controlling behaviour, that manifests itself in various forms. So controlling behaviour might be … checking mum's phone, asking where she's going. When she goes out, checking where she is. (Expert 9)

The similarity between APV and domestic violence between (ex)partners

extended beyond the types of behaviours observed by practitioners to the

impact of the behaviours upon parents. In many cases described by the

practitioners we interviewed, there was a continuum of behaviour which

ultimately had lead to a parent feeling frightened of their child and therefore

changing their own behaviour to avoid conflict:

[H]e was extremely physically violent to her, threatening to kind of, if she ever put him out he’d put all the windows through … she was really scared of what he was able to do physically to her. She, she was really frightened by that and that’s why she gave him all the money, and ran around after him and did all sorts of things cos she, she was scared about the violence. (Expert 16)

Our analysis of parents’ accounts of their children’s behaviour supported

practitioners’ observations - parents who had previous first-hand experience of

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domestic violence from previous partners drew parallels between their ex-

partner and son or daughter’s behaviour, as illustrated by the quote below:

And all this behaviour and throwing stuff is, that's what his dad used to do, and stuff like that. And in my head, I think to myself, it's like having him back, and my life is, like, controlled the same. So I'm still not free. I'm still not... You know, I can't be relaxed, can't be myself, can't enjoy my life. (Mother aged 48, son aged 13).

And a number of parents highlighted controlling behaviour from their children

that closely resonates with well-documented descriptions of coercively

controlling behaviour in domestic violence:

He tells me who I can be friends with. Or he tries to. If I say that I'm going out, for a night out, it's almost like I have to ask his permission first. ... But then I say I'm going out, he then tries to tell me “Well hang on a minute, you can't go out. You told me you had no money to buy me this. So therefore you cannot go out mum. ... He tries to control, control every situation, even down to the fact of, you know, what time he comes in. (Mother aged 42, son aged 16).

I wasn't allowed to do anything on my own at all. I'd sit in the bath, and she'd come and sit on the toilet. She was sleeping in my bed. If I was on the phone, she'd sit and listen. My mobile would go, she'd pick it up and read all my texts. Anybody at the door... She wouldn't leave my side. (Mother aged 38, daughter aged 15).

In light of these similarities, it seems justifiable that parents and practitioners

appear to understand violence from adolescents towards their parents within a

broader framework of domestic violence. Likewise, at the criminal justice level,

there is good reason to situate the problem within a domestic violence context

and encourage police officers to respond to reported incidents with a similar

approach as they would adopt for a domestic incident involving intimate

(ex)partners. Indeed, one of the problems identified with the current police

response to APV is the failure by some forces and officers to recognise it as a

problem that needs a specialist response (XXXX 2014a).

However, notwithstanding the logical conceptualisation of APV as a form of

domestic violence, we argue below that there are important differences between

violence in intimate relationships and violence from adolescents towards their

parents, and sound reasons for developing responses to the problem that do not

necessarily fit within the current domestic violence response framework.

Challenges of responding to adolescent to parent violence as a form of

domestic violence

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The central distinction between intimate partner violence and APV stems from

the crucial qualitative difference in the nature of the relationship involved.

Unlike intimate partner relationships, parent ‘victims’ maintain a moral and legal

responsibility for their children and rarely wish to sever their relationship. As

with intimate partner violence, there is often a reluctance to call the police. For

the most part, parents are extremely reluctant to involve the CJS as although they

want the violence to stop, they are fearful of further damaging their relationship

with their child and do not want their child to be criminalized, as illustrated

below:

[I]t took me three days before I actually went to the police because I was uhm-ing and aah-ing ... I don’t want him to have a criminal record. (Mother aged 42, son aged 13).

[T]hey see that it's their fault that their relationship with the child is broken. And by ringing the police, they feel that they'll damage it even further. So they're just completely against doing that. (Expert 7) [T]hey’re so scared they don’t want their child to be criminalised because they’ll think about their future prospects if they end up with a criminal record and things like that. (Expert 16)

Parents also frequently expressed their sense of shame and stigma surrounding

the violence and said they were afraid that if they reported their child they

would not be taken seriously or would be blamed and held responsible for their

child’s behaviour:

I'm afraid of being laughed at. Do you know what I mean? I'm afraid of being, you know, ringing them, and, and them saying, 'what?' ... I'm afraid they'll turn round and say, “they're your kids”.' (Mother aged 48, son aged 13).

Parents who had previously reported their child to the police often had negative

experiences which confirmed these fears, as illustrated in the examples below,

where police explicitly accused mothers who did not want their violent children

returned home of poor parenting or neglect:

So the police officer’s stood on the [intercom] and said to me, he says “Are you going to let us in?” I says “No.” I says “I told social worker that he doesn't come in. I am not being assaulted. And actually” I says “if he were eighteen, you wouldn't legally be allowed to bail him back to my house, having assaulted me.”; “Well he's not eighteen is he, and you're his mother.” I says “No, you're not coming in.” He says “What type, what kind of a mother can you call yourself?” This is a police officer. (Mother aged 32, son aged 16).

I've had mums that have been told they'll get done for neglect if they don't come collect their children, or let them home after they've been abused by their children. (Expert 5)

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Ineffective police intervention to reports of APV may also potentially increase

risk to parents, through reinforcing abusive children’s sense of being

‘untouchable’:

[S]he asked for help a few times, and the police just said “You need to get these girls sorted, you know. You need to start to look, you know, be a proper mother to these girls.” And he said that in front of the daughters … which actually gave them more ammunition to continue with no responsibility, you know, for their behaviour. (Expert 1)

On the other hand, in our analysis of police interviews it was apparent that when

police did take reported incidents seriously, they were frequently met with

resistance from parents, who would refuse to make a statement against their

child or make a statement but later withdraw it:

The majority, again, once the situation's been diffused, and they've spent time in custody, their, their, their son or daughter... By the time you contact them, sometimes they have got to a stage where there's been a break, they then think they've spent seven or eight hours in custody in the cell, so they tend to turn around and say, 'I don't want any further action being taken now'. (DV Officer 5, Metropolitan Borough).

The overwhelming theme across the interviews we conducted with police,

practitioners and parents was that while parents do want their victimization to

be taken seriously and often require emergency help from police, most parents

do not want their children prosecuted, but rather, want to receive long-term help

and support in order to facilitate a non-violent child-parent relationship. This is

bound to the recognition that many children who are violent towards their

parents have experienced a variety of difficulties in their childhood. In cases of

adolescent to parent violence there is often a blurring of victim and perpetrator

roles, making it difficult and problematic to assign clear labels of blame and

responsibility. This issue was particularly highlighted in our practitioner

interviews, where it was repeatedly noted that it was fairly common to see a

previous history of domestic violence between the adolescents’ parents, meaning

that many young people who are abusive to a parent may also have been primary

or secondary victims of abuse, and may themselves be vulnerable.

Practitioners also emphasised that in many cases, the violence occurs within the

context of other existing problems, which might include learning disabilities or

15

mental health problems, financial problems, substance misuse, previous

domestic violence, or even ongoing abuse.

[The] vast majority of [young people] have had quite difficult and complex problems in their lives, on an on-going basis for a number of them. And at which point do you, are you able to challenge them around responsibility and accountability for their own behaviour? And that's a real tension in this work really, is that you're working with them, a lot more than you are in adult work, you're working with them both as victims and as abusers, in a sense. And, and finding that balance can be tricky. (Expert 4)

In the excerpt below, a specialist in APV described what she termed a ‘typical’

family experiencing adolescent to parent violence:

A typical family would be a family who have experienced domestic violence over many years. Maybe at this point, the perpetrator has left the family, the child is reaching adolescence, they're going through all the changes associated with being a teenager at that point. There is also a power vacuum that's missing. The child usually has had some sort of traumatic experience, around witnessing or directly experiencing violence and are full of rage and sort of anger towards everything and anything, perpetuated by hormonal, physiological and psychological changes going on during that time; and somehow, you know, this becomes expressed towards the mum. Now mums have in a, I mean this a very kind of broad generalisation, you know, but the mum has had years of experience of domestic violence and that's, you know, affected her self-esteem, affected her confidence as a mother … So you often get this kind of typical dialogue between sort of child saying to their parent, "You're too weak," and you know, being abusive towards mum. (Expert 2)

In other cases, practitioners talked about young ‘perpetrators’ of APV also being

primary victims of violence or other kinds of abuse from their parents or

extended family:

Sometimes it's hard to empathise with a parent who presents as a victim, and then you find out that actually they've hit their child all the way through childhood. So now this parent might be saying “He should not be hitting his mum. He's 6ft 2.” Then you find out that all the way through their childhood until they got too big to hit, they were hit. (Expert 13)

Our interviews with adolescents who were violent towards their parents

supported these accounts and indicated that, far from exercising power and

control, many young people who are violent towards their parents perceived

that they had historically held little power within the family and some claimed

that they were reacting to a variety of direct and indirect forms of victimization.

For example, when explaining why she was violent towards her Mother, one 16

year old girl explained

I think it's 'cause I resent her for something in past. It's basically, when I was younger, my brother raped me daily for about a year. And I told her. It happened between, between the ages of seven and eight. And I told her, when I were, like, seven, it was happening … in my head, if she can't look after me, what's [the] point? If she couldn't

16

stop something like that, that's happening under her own house, happening, is she gonna be able to protect me from all things that's happening outside in real world? (Daughter, aged 16,)

In the following excerpt, a 13 year old girl explains her historic violence towards

her mother, which she narrates as a response to her father’s alcoholism and

witnessing violence between her parents as a young child:

[M]y dad drinking started when I were first born. But like I can remember it like since I were maybe seven, I can remember them arguing. And then they split up for like good they said. And then after a couple of months they started like seeing each other to try and make it work. And I used to hate it because I used to just like think about my mum and dad arguing, and like when he used to hide vodka. And he used to get, not aggressive, but my mum used to get aggressive towards my dad ... And I used to like proper kick off. Like I wouldn't go to bed. I used to bang my head against the wall to like get her attention. So she wouldn't like... so she'd make him go out. And I just used to like, I used to kick her. Like when she'd try calming me down by grabbing me. I used to push her away. And like I'd scream in her face and like we just, we didn't really agree on anything. (Daughter, aged 13).

These accounts indicate that although violence from adolescents towards their

parents may closely resonate with the types of behaviours observed in domestic

violence between intimate partners, the aetiology of the violence may be distinct,

or at the very least family patterns of abuse that have contributed to the violence

are either current or part of a much more recent history

In support of much of the qualitative literature surrounding APV outlined earlier,

there are a variety of pathways to APV which go beyond existing explanations of

domestic violence and raise questions about the extent to which young people

should be held culpable for their behaviour through a traditional domestic

violence policy response. It is important to note the range of pathways to

adolescent to parent violence, and that some families report no history of

violence or abuse and locate explanations for the violence elsewhere. In our

study, there were families with no prior history of abuse who had raised other

children who had not been violent in the home and identified other causes of the

violence such as learning difficulties, substance abuse, and mental health

problems. One mother, for example, explained how there was no history of

violence in her family and located the explanation of her son’s violence in his

drug problem:

17

“But I do not think that he would be behaving anywhere near if it wasn't for the cannabis…And the other drugs. They definitely unhinged him. But you could see, I think you could see the moment, he started to withdraw a bit, withdraw from his friends at rugby club, withdraw from school. Have different thought patterns, express himself differently. And then suddenly, once it had had a big effect that was it. And he admitted when he was fourteen “I feel depressed if I don't take it.” … It's definitely, definitely the drugs that have caused this level of violence.” (Mother 50, son 18)

Concerns about the complex histories of families experiencing APV also feed into

broader concerns with over-criminalising young people. Youth Justice policy

emphasises the need to divert young people away from the criminal justice

system wherever possible. Since the 1980s a raft of diversionary measures have

proliferated within the youth justice system and national policy now encourages

diversion when possible through a new out of court framework (Ministry of

Justice and Youth Justice Board 2013; see Kelly and Armitage 2014 for further

discussion). In March 2015 a HMIC report into the policing of vulnerable

offenders expressed concerns about the use of police custody for under-18 year

olds and criticised police forces employing a positive action policy in cases of

domestic abuse involving perpetrators under the age of 18. Specific examples

cited in the report include cases of adolescents arrested for assaulting their

parents (HMIC 2015: 62-63). This exemplifies a key tension for police in

balancing diversion policies against domestic violence policy; a problem which is

likely to increase with the recent passing of the 2015 Serious Crime Act.

In addition to going against parents’ wishes and potentially leading to the

criminalisation of vulnerable young people, a domestic violence response to APV

focused upon separating victims and perpetrators and severing relationships is

also problematic in practical terms, due to the age of many children who are

violent towards their parents. This issue was particularly identified by the police

officers we interviewed, who recounted examples where they had been unable to

find appropriate accommodation for children outside of their family home,

leaving them with no alternative to returning the child to their home address.

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984), children in custody are

required to be transferred to local authority care and police are under increasing

pressure not to keep juveniles (under 18) in police cells (see HMIC 2015); yet

limited resources mean that local authority care is scarce and often unobtainable

18

(Travis 2014). This means that many adolescents who have been violent towards

their parents could face homelessness if they are not returned home, particularly

those over the age of 16, who are not eligible for local authority care:

If they’re under sixteen then the Council, well not the Council but Social Services have a duty of care towards them and it’s easier because ultimately if I phone them up and say, “Right, I’ve got little Jimmy here who’s fourteen, he’s bashed up his mum and she won’t have him home,” they have to house him, they’ve got a legal obligation to but once they’re over sixteen, there’s no obligation. Send them up to the Homeless Person’s Unit and they say, “We haven’t got anywhere for you, here’s some, here’s some hostels that may or may not be able to have you, if not you’re on your own.” (DV Officer 4, Metropolitan Borough).

The age of APV perpetrators also means that their parents are legally

accountable for their offending behaviour. In recent decades parental

accountability laws have increasingly held parents responsible for their

children’s offences and parents may be legally bound to pay their children’s

court fines and compensation or court ordered to attend a parenting course

(Arthur 2005, 2010; Drakeford and Calliva 2009; Goldson and Jamieson 2002;

Holt 2009). This presents a quandary whereby some parents who proceed to

prosecute their child may end up being effectively punished for their own

victimization (XXXX 2012; Holt 2009). It thus seems that despite the apparent

inversion of power and control in parent-child relationships where there is

violence from the child towards the parent, the assumption remains that parents

should be able to control their child(ren) and simply need to enforce more

boundaries, or improve their parenting skills.

Our research findings strongly caution against parent-blaming, even in cases

where young people had experienced previously troubled backgrounds within

the home. Many practitioners expressed their frustration at the tendency to hold

parents accountable for their child’s abusive behavior towards them, claiming

that this kind of response is both impractical and inappropriate:

You know, it's really easy to condemn parents for not having those boundaries, but with years of physical abuse from your partner, you're a broken person to start with. (Expert 19)

I think that we need to be in a much less taboo society. A lot of the parents we work have been blamed, blamed that they're the bad parents, that their child is acting up because they're, because they're rubbish parents. Which simply isn't the case at all. So I think there needs to be a much larger awareness of what parental abuse is about. (Expert 7)

19

The perceived lack of parenting skills amongst parents whose children are

violent to them means that many parents who report or disclose the violence are

advised or forced to attend parenting classes in order to improve their parenting

and regain control of their child. Again, it was clear from the practitioners we

interviewed that in most cases these courses are inappropriate in the context of

APV:

We're talking to mums who'd been probably assaulted by their father, by their partner and now by their son in a lot of cases, sometimes female children as well you know. And I don't think people really grasping that, what it actually meant then to have that kind of sort of lifetime experience. To have the shame of being you know, hit by your child. And actually people saying “If you just do this... If you just say this or try this strategy, that will stop it.” And I think that's not going to stop it, it's going to make it feel sort of worse really … What's really interesting for me is in the cases that we do tend to see is often the mums in the families are completely burnt out, you know. And so the strategy and what people are trying to teach them to be consistent, to sort of be doing the same thing all the time, to apply the same strategies – they can't do it. They just can't, you know, they get too tired, they just, you know, over time it just degrades to a position where actually the intervention is no longer any use, because they just can't maintain it, you know. (Expert 12)

Responding positively to adolescent to parent violence

For the variety of reasons identified above, some of the experts we interviewed

said that they did not believe a criminal justice response to APV was

appropriate, and that a more family-focused social care model might be more

fitting. This is illustrated in the interview excerpt below, from a clinical

psychologist working for a forensic service:

I can't see the criminal justice system being a solution to this, you know, it's not gonna sort of be able to do it. Because I think the consequences for parents in general, you know, single female parents, you know, the consequences are quite significant. You know, so you then have children's services involved in your life. There's the possibility of having younger children removed. There's the consequences for your child then with the criminal justice system. And I also think there's a deep shame for the parents you know, that they have to come and talk about their own child sort of being physically abusive towards them. And that makes it enormously difficult for it to move forward in any way in relation to criminal justice, not gonna be witnesses to that, you know. And so I do think there has to be some form of kind of social mental health intervention as the primary intervention here, to look at kind of sort of providing services which can re-order families really, you know. (Expert 12)

A similar perspective was expressed by a children’s IDVA worker, who stressed

her concerns with a criminal justice response and emphasised the importance of

working with families in a more supportive and less judgemental environment:

20

[P]articularly the young people that we work with, for them to be engaged with the criminal justice system, to be criminalised and treated as offenders, is almost compounding what they've already been through. So rather than label them as bad, what we do is try to help them to understand how they're feeling, their emotions and how to change their behaviour, and that abusive relationships versus healthy relationships. So it's a more supportive, rather than a judgemental, I suppose on the face of it. (Expert 6)

These sentiments were also echoed by a support worker specialising in APV,

who drew a distinction between adult and child ‘perpetrators’ of domestic

violence and highlighted the need for a more conciliatory approach, which

incorporates the possibility for change:

I think with adult perpetrators, yeah, there are some that you do need to criminalise, and you need to criminalise them for the protection of the victim …Whereas I think, I think if you do that to young people, then you have labelled them for the rest of their lives, actually, as a violent offender. And that seems to be writing off the potential for positive change at way too young an age. (Expert 4)

What, then, might a positive and effective response to APV look like? The exact

response and its location within different services will vary between local

authorities according to the structuring of domestic violence services, children’s

services, and youth justice services within individual areas. However, even with

this local variation, a number of core principles will apply. First, there ought to

be several routes to reaching support for the problem of APV, and it is important

that the criminal justice process does not provide the only route. Parents should

be able to access support services directly and referrals should be possible from

other services such as parenting support or children’s services.

Ideally, all local authorities should have a systematic, tailored approach to

responding to APV, which would include staff with specific training in the

problem of APV and a programme which works with parents and young people

to address the problem directly. As we have noted, generic parenting

programmes are not appropriate in this context. APV is a complex problem and

needs a carefully crafted specific response. There are some excellent examples of

programmes which have achieved this in local contexts using a range of different

methods and tools. These include Break 4 Change in Brighton and Hove which

works with both parents and children in a parallel group work programme, and

Gwent Domestic Abuse Service in Wales (Payton and Robinson 2015) and PAARS

21

in Enfield which both offer one-to-one counselling support. However, at time of

writing, there are many local authorities that have still not stepped up to this

challenge and continue to have a blank slate on provision for families in these

circumstances.

A positive and effective response is likely to be holistic in approach, by which we

mean a focus upon the whole family and working with both parents and young

people, and a primary concern with safety and protection and careful risk

assessment, combined with a positive attitude towards working with families

and a recognition of their potential for change. An approach that does not isolate

the problem of APV and ignores other difficulties that a family might be facing,

while at the same time avoiding stigmatising or labelling a family as ‘troubled’. A

non-judgemental approach which simultaneously holds a clear understanding of

the dynamics of power and abuse and of the gender dynamics of APV (XXXX

2014).

While acknowledging our concerns about the youth of the ‘perpetrator’ in APV

and the need for a holistic approach, much can still be learnt from the

development of responses in the field of domestic violence in recent years. In

particular, the crucial importance of multi-agency working has been stressed

within both child protection and domestic violence fields, with the development

of interagency forums and the recognition of the importance of professionals

from different services working closely together. The use of specialist

caseworkers has been found to be valuable and even specialist courts. Risk

assessment models have developed to try to ensure that cases are allocated the

appropriate level of response, and at the very least do not fall ‘through the net’

(Groves and Thomas 2014). However, we remain concerned about criminal

justice being the first or only response to APV, a concern which is reflected in

some of the wider literature on intimate partner violence which also critiques

criminalisation as the dominant response model (e.g. Hester 2009; Mills 2003;

Robinson 2014; Walklate 2007). As Robinson (2014) argues, the evidence for the

effectiveness of criminal justice reponses is inconclusive and these measures

22

need to be balanced with other types of interventions which reduce harm and

increase health and well-being.

A positive and effective approach to APV will understand the ‘perpetrator’ as an

adolescent. Some degree of child-parent conflict in adolescence is normal, and an

adolescent is by definition changing and maturing and his or her behaviour is

less entrenched than that of an adult offender. As Expert 4 says in the above

quotation, there is potential for positive change, which a holistic approach

should embrace. An adolescent may well remain in the parental home and

restorative approaches may be more appropriate in this context than they are in

adult-perpetrated forms of family violence.

Ultimately, in order to respond positively and what may be considered

‘responsively’ to the problem of APV, it needs to be understood as a unique form

of family violence involving a complex parent-child relationship which is quite

distinctive from other familial relationships. It should not be completely

subsumed under the adult domestic abuse agenda, but at the same time much

benefit can be drawn from the decades of policy and practice and the headway

that has been made in conceptualising other forms of family violence.

Conclusion

The key focus of this article has been to consider some of the challenges in

difficulties in developing a responsive response to APV. Given the close

similarities and overlaps between violence from adolescents towards their

parents and violence between (ex)partners, there are sound reasons for

conceptualising the problem as a form of domestic violence and evidently, official

discourse surrounding this problem is situating it within a domestic violence

policy framework.

Whilst this official recognition of APV is long overdue and it appears logical and

rational to locate this form of violence within the broader framework of domestic

abuse, this article cautions against subsuming adolescent to parent violence

within this agenda. APV is distinctive in a number of ways, most crucially

23

pertaining to the child-parent relationship, which is qualitatively different from

an intimate relationship and thus violence from a child towards their parent

requires a distinctive, sensitive and nuanced response which gives primary focus

to the age of the child. Although we acknowledge that there are positive lessons

to be learnt from the domestic violence policy framework, we argue for a unique

policy response to APV that facilitates a holistic, family-focused response. We

contend that there does need to be a coherent criminal justice response to the

problem of adolescent to parent violence – police will be called to respond to

violent incidents and it is a problem that will appear frequently in youth justice

practice – but the criminal justice system should not be the first or only port of

call. Where a justice response is invoked, it must be guided by principles of youth

justice, focused wherever possible on diversion, and developed alongside a

coherent and long-term support strategy for families outside of the criminal

justice system.

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant

number XXXX].

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