Introduction

The idea that all interactions, including abusive ones, are culturally and historically situated is a key theme in this book. This chapter focuses specifically on this issue by exploring the ways that power is organised through particular social structures and is complicit in how parent abuse is practised, experienced and responded to. The chapter begins by discussing how notions of ‘parenthood’, including ideas about its emotional terrain, are currently constructed in Euro-American cultures. The chapter then examines how the organisation of power relations between children and parents outside the family home might shape the interactional dynamics within the family home. Gender and age are important systems on which these power relations are organised and their role in adolescent-to-parent abuse is given particular attention in this chapter.

The social construction of the child–parent relationship

A male and a female together provide the biological basis for a child and, in those child–parent relationships where this biological basis remains, parenthood involves an ‘embodied, visceral experience’ (Miller, 2005, p 108). However, this corporal aspect of parenthood is not equal for mothers and fathers: as Strathern (2011, p 255) observes, the visibility of motherhood through the birth process itself means that ‘[motherhood] is constituted in her connection with the child, where fatherhood is constituted in his relationship to the mother’. Furthermore, the salience that different cultures ascribe to biology in defining family relationships differs across contexts. For example, in Euro-American cultures today, scientific ‘facts’ about sexual procreation are central to parentage (Strathern, 2005). This gives a certain clarity to the defining parameters of parenthood, with the legal rights (and responsibilities) of ownership assigned to two (or even one) individuals in their entirety. However, such an individualistic approach has been contested by many feminist thinkers who, in highlighting how such assignations have enabled women to become subjected to particular forms of regulation, have suggested alternative ways of constructing and assigning ‘parenthood’. For example, Rich (1976) suggests the concept of a ‘mothering continuum’ while hooks (1984) promotes the term ‘childrearing’ (rather than ‘parenting’).1 Such suggestions have aimed to highlight the fluidity of the parenting role and the childcare work of those who are not ‘blood parents’ – for example teachers, social workers and babysitters. In many non-Euro-American cultures, many community members – including other children – take responsibility for the care and supervision of children (Rogoff, 2003).