In the Introduction to this book, I talked about the ‘scientific authority’ that researchers carry when producing knowledge, particularly about provocative issues that can shape people's lives so profoundly. The responsibility of this weighed heavily on me throughout the writing of it, and I am concerned about the risks of particular research findings being misused to develop policies or to reinforce stereotypes that may further disempower, stigmatise and alienate parents, young people and families. I hope that this book has highlighted the complexity of the problem. In particular, I hope that the book has emphasised that neither parents nor their children can be easily categorised into ‘victim’ or ‘perpetrator’ roles, nor can they be easily slotted into adversarial positions of ‘powerful’ versus ‘powerless’, and the ensuing allocation of blame that often follows. I hope that the book has highlighted how both parents and their children are powerful and powerless in all sorts of different ways, in different contexts and at different times, while simultaneously exercising power against considerable personal, emotional, structural and cultural constraints.

Given such complexities, this final chapter aims to provide a brief overview of what steps are now necessary in policy making, practice and research to move the debate on and begin to address the problem of adolescent-to-parent abuse. However, before we do, I would like to explicitly frame this chapter in terms of a key question that implicitly framed every chapter of this book, and which represents a particular challenge to our thinking about this issue: whose responsibility is it?

Whose responsibility?

Perhaps the underlying reason why we have so far struggled to understand and respond appropriately and consistently to parent abuse is because at its heart lies the unresolved issue of responsibility. To allocate responsibility we require a clear dichotomy of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ and in most abusive interactions, whether inside or outside the family, this binary is available to us. However, the ‘parent abuse dynamic’ produces no such clarity, since it is characterised more by recursion than by a linearity of cause and effect. If we conceptualise parent abuse as ‘an incident’ (as criminal justice agents have to do), the issue is clear. But a closer exploration of family contexts and histories both shifts and blurs these lines.