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alcohol for comfort, while others couldn’t stand the sight of it. Some
perpetrators seemed to enter rages fuelled by drugs or alcohol,
while one or two were described as even worse when sober. ‘You
mention the word monster… that’s what I call my son – the
monster,’ a mother said.
All these factors contributed towards a profound
shame felt by many parents who did not feel comfortable
sharing their experiences with professionals, and
sometimes even friends and family. ‘You can’t talk to your
own family – I get too upset. My twin sister doesn’t know
my son is a drug addict – he’s been an addict for 20
years and she doesn’t know. I want to tell her but I don’t,
I feel ashamed.’ This sense of shame and stigma was
also reinforced by some of the reactions parents got
from people who should have been potential sources of
support, with one mother being told ‘it’s because you’re a
one-parent family’ by one of her friends.
With all this stigma to face, it’s unsurprising that many
parents didn’t immediately ask for help, but instead did
their best to deal with the situation themselves. Even
when help was available they were often not aware
of the network of excellent family support groups
that exist around England for families affected by
drugs and alcohol. ‘I didn’t know there was
support for us… I was talking to a friend and
the friend told me that there was support out
there for me, which I knew nothing about,’ a
parent reported.
Unfortunately, when parents did make that
step and ask for help, many of the responses
they received were not satisfactory. A mother
told us that there ‘seemed to be a problem with
social services when it’s the parent or family
requiring help, rather than the child. There
seems to be some sort of mental block where
they can’t understand, or don’t want to
understand, that possibly the family are not able
to deal with the child.’
We summarised everything parents told us in
the report
Between a rock and a hard place
and
made a series of recommendations for policy
makers which we believe can improve
recognition of CPV and, crucially, the support available for parents. You can read
more of the moving, but often inspiring, stories the parents shared at
www.adfam.org.uk/news/265
and if you’d like to know more about the project
email me at o.standing@adfam.org.uk or call 020 7553 7656.
Oliver Standing is policy and projects coordinator at Adfam
Adfam and DDN are holding a ‘Families First’ conference for family members and
professionals on 15 November in Birmingham. Details at www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
In the last quarter of 2011
I travelled around England
with the director of domestic violence agency AVA, Davina
James-Hanman, meeting parents whose children had
drug and alcohol problems. This in itself was not
unusual – many of Adfam’s projects are based on
focus groups and consulting families affected by
substance use. What made this project different,
however, was that these parents were victims of
domestic abuse perpetrated by their children.
‘I’ve had knives at my throat off him,’ one
mother told us. ‘He said to me, “you better move
now ’cos I’ll use it”, so I said, “do me a favour and
do it because I can’t take it anymore, you’re
destroying me”.’ Like victims of intimate partner
violence (IPV), though, victims of child-parent
violence (CPV) suffer more than acts of physical
violence – domestic violence is usually manifest as
a process of coercive control where the perpetrator
uses emotional, psychological and sometimes physical
abuse to exert power and control over a victim.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the experiences of
victims of CPV mirrors those of IPV in their breadth. ‘My
experience is… to do with mental harm,’ another parent
told us. ‘He has just damaged me so much, I am so
tired that I wonder sometimes how I can keep going.’
Many parents reported a common theme of being
worn down by their children, bullied, deliberately
targeted when at their weakest and financially
exploited. ‘I’ve had text messages saying he’ll have
his legs broken if we don’t pay £500 by this Friday,
and we’ve got ourselves into serious debt,’ one
parent told us.
For anyone to deal with this is, of course,
immensely hard, but consider the two extra factors
at work here. Firstly, the perpetrator of the abuse is
the child of the victim. This reversal of the normal
power relationship touches on a major taboo in
most societies, which generally assume that the
parent has control over the actions of the child and
that any behavioural issues are the result of lax or
inefficient parenting.
Even if a parental victim reaches a point where he
or she attempts to sever ties with the perpetrator, they are still a parent responsible
for their child in the eyes of society, the law and, often, themselves. One mother we
spoke to regretted the firm stance she’d taken – ‘I wish I hadn’t thrown my son
out… that goes against the grain… a mother to chuck her son out’.
Secondly, drugs and alcohol complicate the picture even more. The relationship
between substances and domestic violence can be very complicated, reflected in
the variety of stories shared with us. Some parents had themselves turned to
12 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| October 2012
Families |
Child-parent abuse
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘My twin sister doesn’t
know my son is a drug
addict – he’s been an
addict for 20 years and
she doesn’t know. I want
to tell her but I don’t...’
More support – and understanding – is needed for victims of violence
and abuse perpetrated by their children, says
Oliver Standing
The last taboo