Woman's Hour - Parenting: Children who attack their parents

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

Police forces across the country have found that the number of crimes involving children attacking their parents has doubled in the last three years from 7,000 to 14,000. The figures have been uncovered by BBC Yorkshire after they made a Freedom of Information request. They were invited to attend a course in Doncaster called Getting On. It’s one of a handful of similar schemes around the country which aim to help parents and children find a solution to this type of abuse. Jenni speaks to Emma Glasbey, BBC Yorkshire’s home affairs correspondent.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to this week's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast for parents. Police forces across the country have found that the number of crimes involving children attacking their parents has doubled in the last three years, from around 7,000 to 14,000. The figures have been uncovered by the BBC in Yorkshire after they made a Freedom of Information request.

They were invited to attend a course in Doncaster called Getting On. It's one of a handful of similar schemes around the country which aim to help parents and children find a solution to this type of abuse. I spoke to Emma Glasby, the BBC Yorkshire's Home Affairs correspondent, and asked her about the figures which came from 19 police forces around the country and how seriously are the police taking this? Well, the figures that we've had from these 19 police forces, they do show a very significant increase.

Those police forces recorded more than 7,000 incidents of children attacking parents in 2015 and more than 14,000 last year in 2018. But the reason that we've got information from 19 out of 44 police forces across the UK is because these incidents fall under the domestic violence category. And those 19 police forces are the only ones that actually record the relationship between the suspect and the victim.

So they've recorded the fact it's a son or a daughter attacking a parent. In most cases, these incidents are just recorded as domestic violence so we don't know the true scale of this problem because of the many different ways that police are handling these reports and of course the other issue we have is that some parents may understandably feel reluctant to call the police to report their own children so it's really only in the very extreme cases that this abuse is being recorded by police. Now, the Home Office is referring to this as adolescent to parent violence and abuse, or APVA for short. There's no legal definition of exactly what APVA is, but the Home

Office is saying that it's likely to involve a pattern of behaviour. It can include physical violence, damage to property, emotional abuse and financial abuse. Now, I've been speaking to a mum who we are keeping anonymous for the welfare of the child about what she has experienced. Her 11-year-old daughter went through a very traumatic ordeal in recent years and she started becoming aggressive. Hitting, shouting, things thrown at you, tables picked up, threatened to hit you with scissors, threatened to hit you with knives. I've had police out three times.

It's hard because you don't want them to get a criminal record. At 11 years old, you don't want them to start that in life, but then there's no support, or we had no support from anywhere. And, you know, you're made to feel like it's your fault, like it's your parenting that's wrong. Emma, so she has no support, but generally what sort of support is being given to families who are going through this?

Well, from researching this it seems very little. We were given access to a course that's called Getting On and that's run by Doncaster Children's Services Trust. It was originally developed by the Youth Offending Service in conjunction with Doncaster Council but the original idea came from two women working for the Youth Offending Service in Doncaster. they were visiting the homes of young people and they were noticing holes in the walls or doors that had been punched through. This was often in the homes of single mums and they just couldn't explain it. Then as they gradually built up some trust with the mums over time, the mums were explaining that their son or daughter had become abusive. I went to see the Getting On course in action.

It was in a training centre, like an education centre, just outside Doncaster Town Centre. In one room, there were just two teenage boys. There are often up to eight boys, but that day there were only two, and there were two facilitators running the course. Now, they started by asking the boys to create a character, to draw the character, any character they wanted on a sheet of paper. So the boys called him Bob and they decided Bob was 15 and he lived with his mum but his dad had walked out on them when Bob was a baby.

Bob was being bullied at school and he was struggling to cope. It was really interesting because gradually one of the boys stopped talking about Bob, stopped using the word he, and he started using the word I and talking about himself. And you could see that drawing Bob, Bob the character, that was a way for this boy to find the confidence to start talking about what he was going through. There was another really interesting exercise with a balloon. Rob, the facilitator of the course, is placing a balloon close to the teenage boy's heads and they don't know if or when it might burst. Yeah, close your eyes. So I'm going to pop it just to know when. So who's it going

to pop on? When is it going to explode? You flinch in when that balloon's about to pop in your ear. Maybe that's how mum feels when you're intimidating her. She might remember that one time when she has been hit. Not a nice feeling to have to live with, is it? Now in a room just a few doors down the corridor, the boys' mums are also taking part in the getting on course. They're talking to each other about what they've gone through that week, how they've dealt with any abusive behaviour,

and they all had to say something positive they wanted to share about their son or daughter, something good that had happened that week. Again, there's another exercise, and this time, one mum clenches a fist and another mum wants to get something out of that mum's hand, wants them to unclench the fist. So you see the mums are there trying to pull the fingers apart. And afterwards, the course facilitator asks the question, did anyone just ask the other person to open up their hand? Did they make the request rather than trying to force the hand open? And the idea is it's changing the parents' approach.

Why do the police, Emma, think there's been such an increase in the reporting of these assaults? Well, the National Police Chiefs' Council is saying that this increase is because of changes to the way that these incidents are being recorded and that over recent years police have been putting more emphasis on domestic abuse. So in the past they say many verbal arguments would not be recorded as a crime but now they would be recognised as common assault or a threat of violence. The figures that we have from these police forces show that whilst the number of these APVA incidents has been increasing, the number of prosecutions has fallen by a third and the number of cautions has more than halved over that time. Again, the Police Chiefs Council is saying that in cases like this, the victim is often unwilling

to support a prosecution and so it's very difficult for the police to proceed. There are other views, though, in particular from the mental health charities and the social workers we've been speaking to as part of researching this, many of whom believe that we are now seeing the impact of a lack of resources for mental health services for young people. This is Tom Madders from the Young Minds charity. Based on what we hear every day on our parents' helpline, we are seeing an increase in these kinds of incidents reported by parents and parents seeking help for them. The increase isn't necessarily related to mental health,

but when a young person is acting in this way, behaving in this way towards their parents, there is a high likelihood that there is some kind of mental distress involved and that young person is communicating that they do need some support and too often that support is too hard to access. Emma, how successful do you reckon the courses like the one you've been to are? Well, it's difficult to measure the success because there are just a handful of these courses like like the one in Doncaster the getting on course has been running

for five years I did speak to a mum and son who took part in the course two years ago and they believed it had transformed their relationship the boy like many of those who take this course had experienced a very difficult childhood when he started being abusive towards his mum. He didn't want to go on the course. He was very embarrassed about it. But he says now that he needed to be there. And in particular, his mum felt the course had really helped her take a new approach to being a parent, to try and stay calm, to give her son more time to calm down and to talk to him more. And she told me they now have a more loving relationship.

The problem is, of course, with just a handful of these type of courses across the country, it's very difficult for families to get this type of support. I was talking to Emma Glasby, and if you have an idea for what we should be covering in the Woman's Hour podcast for parents, do get in touch by all the usual ways, email or tweet. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.