This self-access class provides an overview of child to parent violence and abuse. It will coalesce around the following:
What is ‘Child to Parent Violence and Abuse’?; exploring current definitions and developmental trajectories (e.g. how to identify it, its key signs); Prevalence data and who it most likely affects; and Common pathways (e.g. history of parental IPV/child maltreatment/trauma, mental health/substance misuse, neurodiversity, wider harmful contexts)
What are families’ experiences of Child to Parent Violence and Abuse?; exploring how parents/carersand children/young peopleexperience it (including its impacts, help-seeking behaviours, barriers to disclosure/help-seeking); and issues related to specific groups, including kinship carers, adoptive parents, neurodivergent children, and cases of older parents facing violence from their adult children.
What are the challenges when Working with Child to Parent Violence and Abuse?; exploring some of the conceptual challenges of this issue (such as whether it is ‘domestic abuse’ and the policy/practice implications of this, whether child-instigated abuse is distinct from adult-instigated abuse, and the links to parricide); and what families have found helpful and unhelpful in intervention work (including organisational enablers and barriers to disclosure)
About the Trainer
Dr. Amanda Holt is a Criminologist and Psychologist at the University of Roehampton, London. Amanda’s research broadly addresses issues concerned with families, young people and harm. Much of Amanda’s research in recent years has focused on the problem of adolescent family violence.
Amanda is the author of the UK’s first book on the topic, Adolescent-to-Parent Abuse: Current Understandings in Research, Policy and Practice (Policy Press, 2013) and is also the editor of Working with Adolescent Violence and Abuse towards Parents: Approaches and Contexts for Intervention (Routledge, 2016). Amanda has completed several research projects on adolescent family violence and has worked with the UK Home Office to produce the first UK policy guidance on the issue.
She has also been a keynote speaker at international conferences and has appeared on national radio and television, including Women’s Hour, Channel 5 News and Newsnight. She is a Trustee at Family Lives and an advisory board member at Parental Education Growth Support (PEGS).
