Introduction

This chapter examines the theoretical explanations that have so far been put forward by researchers to explain parent abuse. The chapter includes explanations that draw on the roles of psychopathologies, personality/behavioural traits, substance misuse, the learning of violence through observation, parenting practices, family communication patterns and the role of social isolation, peers and deprivation. Throughout the discussion, the chapter assesses the current evidence that supports each explanation and offers a critique of its limitations. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of how parents understand their own experiences of parent abuse, and reflects on how empirically based theoretical models, which carry the power of ‘scientific authority’, are intrinsically linked to parents’ own explanations of what is happening to them.

From identifying ‘factors’ to developing explanations

Despite the relative infancy of research exploring parent abuse, theoretical models have, in the main, been refreshingly resistant to single-factor causes. Given the complexity of the problem and the number of correlational factors so far identified (see Chapter One), many researchers have emphasised the need to combine a range of explanations. Most comprehensive has been Cottrell and Monk's (2004) ‘nested ecological model’, which identified substance misuse, mental health issues, parenting styles, peer influence, poverty and the socialisation of male power among the factors that contribute to the commission of parent abuse. However, it is important to move beyond the identification of factors that appear more or less frequently in cases of parent abuse to explain how each contributory factor is implicated. This requires a more fundamental analysis. For example, some contributory factors, such as mental health disorders and personality traits, constitute intrapersonal explanations in that they locate the cause wholly within the child or young person. Other factors, such as parenting practices or previous exposure to family violence, constitute interpersonal explanations in that they locate the cause of parent abuse within the child–parent dyad. Yet other contributory factors, such as family communication styles, constitute intrafamilial explanations, which locate the cause as not within one or two individuals but in the space between family members. Fourth, contributory factors such as poverty and social isolation constitute structural explanations, in that they locate causes within wider social and economic systems of power that structure the lives of families and communities. Finally, factors such as the dominant societal norms that devalue motherhood and tolerate violence constitute sociocultural explanations.