Abuse Between Young People

A Contextual Account

Carlene Firmin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138932227
• eBook ISBN: 9781317394013
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Awareness of peer-on-peer abuse is on the rise and is a matter of increasing international concern. Abuse Between Young People: A Contextual Account is the first book to offer a contextualised narrative of peer-on-peer abuse that moves beyond recognising an association between environments and individual choice, and illustrates the ways in which such interplay occurs.

Using both sociological and feminist perspectives, Firmin reshapes the way that peer-on-peer abuse is perceived and investigates the effect of gendered social context on the nature of abuse between young people. This text also uses an in-depth case study to explore associations between abusive incidents and young people's homes, peer groups, schools and neighbourhoods, in addition to broader societal influences such as pornography and politics. National and international policies are woven into each chapter, along with insights from parenting programmes, the troubled families' agenda, and bullying and community safety policies.

Abuse Between Young People presents a clear insight into the various contexts that affect the nature of peer-on-peer abuse, providing a thorough analysis into the debates on this issue. In so doing, Firmin creates a vital contextual approach to safeguarding young people affected by this issue. It is invaluable reading for students and researchers in social work, education, criminology, sociology and psychology, as well as practitioners and policymakers concerned with the protection of young people.

Section II
The contexts associated with peer-on-peer abuse

4
‘I Blame the Parents’

When it comes to identifying the social contexts associated with peer-on-peer abuse, the family is often at the forefront of both government and media debate. As David Cameron, the then prime minister, stated in 2015:

For me, families are the best welfare system there is – so I have never been shy about supporting them in the work they do. Marriage is now recognised in the tax system. Shared parental leave is now available for parents in the first year of their child’s birth … if we really want to extend opportunity in our country, we need to intervene more directly to help the most vulnerable families in our country. Our troubled families programme, under Louise Casey, has changed lives. By radically changing the way we deliver services to the hardest-to-reach families in our country, we have tackled worklessness, addiction, truancy and anti-social behaviour. And I can announce today that almost all of the 117,000 families which the programme started working with have now been turned around – in terms of either school attendance or getting a job or both.

(Prime Minister’s Office, 2015)

Such rhetoric implies that a range of social issues stem from the nature of families and therefore by intervening with families governments can prevent social harm – a position that has been maintained across the political spectrum. In 2008 the then Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, stated that ‘the first responsibility when a child is in trouble or at risk of getting into trouble rests with the parents – “We must hold parents responsible”’ (The Telegraph, 2008). Four years later, David Lammy, MP, one of the 2015 Labour candidates for the mayor of London, attributed young people’s involvement in knife crime to a lack of a relationship with their fathers:

Most knife-wielding young killers in London have absent fathers, Tottenham MP David Lammy said today. He issued the grim warning in the wake of the fatal stabbing of 14-year-old Kevin Ssali as he stepped off a bus in Lee, south-east London, last month … Mr Lammy … said many single mothers on estates were ‘yearning’ for help to try to keep their children out of trouble’s way. ‘I have sat with too many parents, usually mothers, who have lost their children to knife crime … Usually the child that has committed the offence comes from a background where the father has been absent’.

(Evening Standard, 2012)

These political positions are supported by a media and public discourse that routinely emphasises the roles of parents, or their absence, in determining young people’s involvement in crime and violence. In early 2017 the UK media reported that the head of London’s murder investigation team in the police had claimed that ‘it’s up to parents to tell their children to stop carrying knives’ (Evening Standard, 2017). A YouGov survey in 2013 found that 41 per cent of parents and 44 per cent of professionals believe parents are partly to blame for grooming and child sexual exploitation (Channel 4, 2013). While five years earlier, Daily Mail columnist Amada Platell claimed that ‘Britain’s endemic culture of single-parent homes and fractured communities is the principal reason why violent crime is spiralling’ (Mail Online, 2008). These sentiments were echoed by Sir Alan Steer in his review of behaviour in UK schools, when he said that:

You wonder what has gone wrong in these children’s lives. Of course, the kids have a responsibility, but there are questions about what’s going on at home. Parents have a huge responsibility. Government doesn’t bring up children; parents do.

(The Guardian, 2008)

Seven years on and similar attitudes prevailed when a judge who presided over a sexual exploitation case in 2015 summed up by stating that ‘the combination of inadequate parenting leading to rebellious children lacking supervision provided an opportunity’ for young people to be abused (Mail Online, 2015).

If these accounts are accurate, then approaches to prevent peer-on-peer abuse should focus on the nature of family environments and the relationships that form within them. Are there particular family environments that protect young people from peer-on-peer abuse while there are others that increase the risk? The current parameters of the child protection system in England and Wales have created processes that are set to investigate peer-on-peer abuse through this lens (Firmin, 2017). It is designed to assess and intervene with young people’s families in a bid to keep them safe (Parton, 2014). Should we do what Gordon Brown, Sir Alan Steer and others have suggested and question what is going on in a young person’s home in order to understand why they experience, or engage in, violence at school, on the street or amongst their friends?

Returning to the case of James, Melissa and Lara introduced in Chapter 3, and exploring their experiences of family life with reference to international literature and findings from the cases I reviewed, this chapter does as the political discourse suggests. By exploring the evidenced relationship between family dynamics and incidents of peer-on-peer abuse, it investigates both the extent to which ‘family matters’ to the phenomenon in question and the extent to which the ‘I blame the parents’ narrative is over-simplistic. In doing so this chapter begins to illustrate why it is critical to understand young people’s contextual experiences beyond their families in order to truly appreciate both the importance of family dynamics and their experiences of peer-on-peer abuse.

To begin with, let’s revisit the case of James, Melissa and Lara – and consider whether their family environments suggest that the responsibility for what happened between them lay with their parents.

Returning to the case study: the family and home environments of James, Melissa and Lara

As detailed in Chapter 3, Lara was raped by James, and Melissa initiated the incident. In the buildup to this event, James’ behaviour had been getting progressively challenging for his parents, his teachers and other professionals. He would go missing from home and wouldn’t come back when his parents tried to call him; he was rarely in school, had robbed other young people of their phones and had carried weapons before. Both Melissa and Lara had also been arrested in recent months, but their offending record was far less prolific than James’. Lara had started to truant as well, whereas Melissa had an excellent attendance record at school. But to what extent did their home environments and family relationships contribute to the incident they were involved in or the behaviours they displayed in the escalation towards it? In keeping with the policy and public discourse outlined previously, the first question we need to ask is: what were their parents doing in the lead-up to the incident?

James	Melissa	Lara
James lives with his mum, dad and older sibling James’ older brother, who doesn’t live with him, is associated with a street gang There is no record of any familial child protection issues in James’ home environment (neglect, physical, sexual or emotional abuse) James’ mother has raised concerns with his school about a change in his behaviour over the past year, stating that he repeatedly goes missing and does not answer his phone when she tries to call him	Melissa lives with her mum and two younger siblings She was exposed to domestic abuse from early childhood. She witnessed her father physically and emotionally abuse her mother and his later partners Melissa’s father has a criminal record and has spent time in custody Melissa’s mother has attempted suicide and has persisting mental health concerns Melissa was on a child protection plan for neglect in early childhood but this was no longer in place at the time of the incident	Lara lives with her mum and younger sibling She was exposed to domestic abuse in early childhood when her father abused her mother Her parents later separated when she was 8 years old Lara has been unable to establish a relationship with her father since He has had children with another partner since and doesn’t want contact with Lara When Lara’s behaviour begins to change, her mother contacts her school and comes in to see them to ascertain what she can do to support her daughter

James’, Melissa’s and Lara’s families had a complex association with the incident in question. While James’ mother had been raising concerns about a change in her son’s behaviour, there doesn’t seem to be anything about his home environment that related to his assault on Lara. His older brother had been involved in offending as part of a street gang, but he didn’t live with James. We might wonder what influence James’ older brother had on him. We could also ask how it could be that no concerns were raised about their family environment given that James and his brother were involved in crime. All of these issues are explored in this chapter and throughout this book – but at this stage it seems that James was relatively safe, protected and cared for when he was at home with his parents.

Melissa’s family was quite different from James’. She had been exposed to domestic abuse at home, her father had a criminal record and her mother had experienced mental health issues when Melissa instigated the rape of Lara. These factors contributed to the fact that she had been on a child protection plan for neglect when she was younger. But at the time of the incident, professionals weren’t as concerned about Melissa’s home environment as they had been. She was no longer on a child protection plan, and her father wasn’t living in the family home. But to what extent did her past experiences or her current family situation influence the decisions she made on the day that Lara was raped? Were they the reason she had started to commit offences despite her regular attendance at school? If Melissa had experienced a different family life, would she have still been involved in the incident in question?

Lara, like Melissa, had also been exposed to domestic abuse when she was younger. While her father no longer posed a risk in that regard (he was no longer living with, or abusing, Lara’s mother), his reluctance to have a relationship with Lara negatively affected her well-being. But to what extent was any of this related to what happened to Lara on the day that she was raped? Did being exposed to domestic abuse or being rejected by her father make her vulnerable to what James and Melissa did? If Lara had been raised in a different family setting, would she still have been assaulted? Was the judge who presided over the 2015 sexual exploitation trial referenced earlier in this chapter right? Was it Lara’s background that made her vulnerable to being abused?

If we were to apply the UK policy discourse and child protection frameworks outlined at the start of this chapter to the lives of Lara, Melissa and James, then we would look to 1) Lara’s family to protect her from what happened and 2) James’ and Melissa’s parents to prevent them from abusing Lara. We would argue that Lara was raped by James and Melissa, in part, because: James and Melissa were exposed to criminality at home; Lara and Melissa had both witnessed domestic abuse; Melissa’s mother had mental health issues that prevented her from adequately parenting her daughter; and James’ parents (because of their own limitations and deficiencies) had clearly lost control of him. But does international research and case review evidence support this argument?

The extent to which ‘family matters’

From the moment they are born, the nature of a child’s home environment is central to their physical and mental development. It is within their family unit, both immediate and extended, that they first form and learn about relationships. Through this process children form attachments, learning how to trust, rely on and care for others and develop a sense of self and identity (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008; Warr, 2002). By building relationships with parents, carers and wider family members, and observing the relationships they have with one another, children learn social norms and values (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008). To this extent the type of family environment in which children are raised will inform the nature of the relationships that they form with their peers.

If, however, positive and protective family environments do much to equip children in their encounters with others, then what is the consequence for children who live in abusive, harmful or unprotective households? International research suggests that abusive home environments can negatively affect the ability of young people to identify and form healthy and safe relationships (Catch 22, 2013; Gadd, et al., 2013; Hackett, 2014; Nieuwbeerta & van der Laan, 2006; Vizard, 2006) – and in this way they have been associated with young people’s experiences of peer-on-peer abuse. A total of 160 households featured in the nine peer-on-peer abuse cases I reviewed. Of the 145 young people who were associated with these homes, at least 33 per cent (n = 48) were exposed to, or experienced, harm in their families such as Melissa and Lara did.

Experiences of physical, sexual and emotional abuse in their families and exposure to domestic abuse between their parents and carers have been associated with abuse in young people’s relationships. A broad range of other issues, from parental substance misuse, mental ill health and criminality within families, have also been found in the backgrounds of some young people who have been abused by, or who abuse, their peers. Such experiences have been associated with psychological dysfunction, trauma, detachment and a lack of empathy in young people (Aisenberg & Herrenkohl, 2008; Allenye, et al., 2014; Cassidy & Shaver, 2008; Gadd, et al., 2013; Vizard, 2006). These experiences within homes have also been found to undermine the ability of families to protect young people from other factors beyond the home, which may be negatively influencing their lives and relationships (Losel & Bender, 2006; Tremblay, et al., 2004). Beyond issues that may emerge within their biological families, children who are living in the care of the state are also thought to be at increased vulnerability to peer-on-peer abuse (Beckett, 2013; HM Government, 2016; Shuker, 2013a).

Each of these matters requires detailed exploration before a clear account can be provided of the relationship amongst families, individual young people and their experiences of peer-on-peer abuse. International research bolstered by the cases I reviewed provides a detailed evidence base with which to interrogate the persistent practice of intervening with families in order to prevent abuse between young people.

Exposure to domestic abuse and harmful gender norms

A number of young people who have abused, or who have been abused by, their peers have, like Lara and Melissa, been exposed to domestic abuse in their homes (Boswell, 2006; Catch 22, 2013; Gadd, et al., 2013, Hackett, Phillips, et al., 2013). Compared with young people living in non-abusive households, young people who have witnessed abuse between their parents have been found to have ‘increased adolescent aggressive behaviour’ (Herrera & Stuewig, 2011) – but the reasons for this, and the wider association between living with domestic abuse and being involved in peer-on-peer abuse, are complex.

Domestic abuse was the most consistently identified source of harm within the families that featured in the cases I reviewed – recorded in at least one household in eight of the nine. In at least half of the 48 households where harmful behaviours were documented in case files, young people were exposed to domestic abuse, for example:

Sean’s and Michael’s mother … got into an argument with the father and has also been hit … During an argument between his parents, [Sean’s] father grabbed his mother, causing her to hit her head. She then hit the dad over the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• SECTION I Setting the scene: peer-on-peer abuse and contextual investigation
• SECTION II The contexts associated with peer-on-peer abuse
• SECTION III The implications of a contextual account of peer-on-peer abuse
• References
• Appendix: case file data collection template
• Index