“I Knew Exactly How to Break Her”: Accounting for Child-to-parent Abuse in the Context of Men’s Violence in the Home

Child-to-parent abuse (CPA) is an under-recognized form of family violence that, a number of scholars note, occurs in the context of experiences of adult-perpetrated family violence (APFV). This article examines how those with intimate experiences of CPA attribute its manifestation to fathers’ violence towards children and mothers.

Through a feminist philosophical lens combined with attribution theory, this article analyses two types of qualitative data. The first is interviews with family members who have experienced CPA (n = 12), and interviews and focus groups with practitioners who work in this field (n = 20). The second type of data collected was online anonymous message board narratives from young people, siblings, and mothers with experiences of CPA (n = 144).

Participants attribute CPA’s manifestation to APFV in several distinct ways. In two-parent households, young people’s violence towards fathers was (1) often constructed as a protective response to fathers’ physical violence towards the family and (2) was exercised towards mothers when young people displaced blame onto them. Among separated parents, (3) fathers’ continued degradation of mothers to their children was construed as an underlying cause of CPA. Separately, (4) participants attributed increased CPA, around the time of contact with fathers, to fathers’ ongoing abusive behavior and unreliability, which resulted in distressed and anxious children.

The findings suggest that early and meaningful intervention for fathers’ violence towards mothers and children may present an opportunity to reduce the likelihood of CPA emerging.