Responding to Adolescent Violence in the Home – A Community Mental Health Approach

Abstract

Family violence perpetrated by adults is increasingly understood as a health issue, and we argue that this pertains even more strongly to violence by adolescents. The co‐dependence of the parent–child bond, lack of maturity in the adolescent, and often related issues of disability or mental illness make these young people both complex and also vulnerable. This research paper reviews the current literature relating to adolescent violence in the home, identifies known best practice, and evaluates the importance of taking a family‐focused, therapeutic approach to adolescent family violence, in place of a punitive one. It describes the use of a co‐design workshop to unpack gaps in service provision and develop a potential family focused model of care to address the needs both of young people who use violence, and their families. The findings indicate that an inclusive family approach is a key element in addressing adolescent violence in the home across a spectrum of behaviours and mental health care needs. The use of a coordinated, family‐inclusive response through mental health care services is recommended to address the complexity of this issue, as well as to provide support both to adolescents and to their families and carers.

“My [Search Strategies] Keep Missing You”: A Scoping Review to Map Child-to-Parent Violence in Childhood Aggression Literature

“…From the review, 35/55 papers were based on the 'psy' field and its related underpinnings. Outside of the 'psy', there was one paper from the field of occupational therapy [47]; one from speech, language and hearing sciences [49], three from education [33,40,41], six from social work [35,52,64,73,84,85], one from youth justice [44], two from the law [36,42], four from criminology [13,53,56,82], and one from sociology [65].…”

“…The majority of terms were only used in singular papers, rather than being adopted and repeated. The most commonly used term was 'child-to-parent violence', being used across 21 papers [13,14,37,46,47,52,54,56,57,[60][61][62][63]65,67,70,73,75,76,82,84]. CPV was also used by the largest amount of fields and had the widest variety of data.…”

“…It is likely that the inclusion criteria made this terminology most likely to appear, as terms needed to be directional and descriptive, however, it may also be due to the breadth of fields and data sources. Parent abuse is the second most commonly used term, with 10 references [39,46,47,58,60,61,72,79,81,82]. References to 'abuse' of parents throughout the review were most likely from psychology and specifically criminal psychology; there were also references from the law, criminology, occupational therapy, and social work, although the latter four fields had fewer articles overall than the former [14,36,37,39,40,46,47,52,58,60,61,72,74,78,79,81,82,84].…”

“…Parent abuse is the second most commonly used term, with 10 references [39,46,47,58,60,61,72,79,81,82]. References to 'abuse' of parents throughout the review were most likely from psychology and specifically criminal psychology; there were also references from the law, criminology, occupational therapy, and social work, although the latter four fields had fewer articles overall than the former [14,36,37,39,40,46,47,52,58,60,61,72,74,78,79,81,82,84]. Twenty-six out of 55 papers directly referred to the phenomenon of interest as a form of violence from a child to a parent, meaning 29 papers did not.…”

Evaluation report of Early Intervention Program in Situations of Youth-to-Parent Aggression: What happens one year after?

“…There is a lack of community awareness about the extent of YPA (Campbell et al, 2020). Thus, an awareness campaign on YPA, similar to that regarding adult family violence is needed to educate the community (Kehoe et al, 2020). These interventions and campaigns could subsequently reduce the chances of family breakdowns and associated downstream problems such as youth homelessness, disengagement from schooling, unemployment, substance abuse, and increased risk of offending for youth (Kehoe et al, 2020).…”