Nikki Rutter, Recipient of the 2025 ESC Young Criminology Award

Filial harm is an umbrella terminology in which parents experience sustained harm from their child. In many cases, this involves an adult child harming an elder parent due to the adult child having significant mental health and/or substance misuse issues and the mother being in close proximity during a crisis, leading to tragic outcomes (Miles et al., 2023). However, many parents report that the harm they experience first starts in the early years, which can evolve and escalate over time if the child does not receive appropriate support and intervention (Rutter et al., 2025). Whilst filial harm is often referred to as a “hidden” form of harm, parents do report that they seek support from the early years, but it is often unclear how to find the correct intervention pathway (Rutter et al., 2025).

To understand how families conceptualise the ‘real problem’ of filial harm, I opted to investigate it in its earliest form, child-to-parent violence instigated by pre-adolescent children, applying a Glaserian Grounded Theory. 34 parents were involved in diary-based methods and iterative interviews, and 21 children participated in participatory workshops. The article produced from this investigation was the winner of the ESC Young Criminologist of the Year Award 2025, and highlighted the language used by families experiencing this form of harm in the earliest stages, and the unmet needs underpinning these explosive and harmful impulses in children (Rutter, 2024).

A clear issue in families presenting to support services at an appropriate time was that very few of them conceptualise their experiences as “violence” or “abuse” when children are under the age of 12. Rather, both parents and children utilise more descriptive language such as “explosive”, “hitting”, “throwing” or “hurting”. Thus, services that hope to reach families with their support offer should be mirroring this language in an attempt to prevent it escalating to crisis, where children may be at risk of criminalisation, or removal from the home (Rutter et al., 2025), or when there is a risk of parricide (Miles et al., 2023).

Through the Glaserian Grounded Theory approach, I worked collaboratively with the parents and children to develop the ‘PRAR’ framework of understanding this form of harmful behaviour. ‘PRAR’ refers to proactive, reactive, affective, and relational impulses, which captured all forms of harm described by both parents and children over the course of this research. By being able to identify the underlying reasons for the behaviour, we were then able to explore alternatives for the children, recognising that the harm was a maladaptive approach to them, attempting to meet their needs rather than an intentional desire to cause harm or control.

By developing the new language of ‘explosive and harmful impulses’, which can be understood through the ‘PRAR’ framework, this paper outlines how services can both increase the number of families accessing appropriate interventions, rather than being considered ‘hidden’ from services. Furthermore, the types of interventions can be made more appropriate because a holistic understanding of what needs are being met through the harmful behaviour, thus replacing them with non-harmful options.

References:

Miles, C., Condry, R., & Windsor, E. (2023). Parricide, mental illness, and parental proximity: the gendered contexts of parricide in England and Wales. Violence against women, 29(2), 87-111.

Rutter, N. (2024). Explosive and harmful impulses: A subset of child and adolescent-to-parent violence and abuse. Journal of interpersonal violence, 39(23-24), 4722-4747.

Rutter, N., Garvey, D., Hetherington, K., & Miao, L. (2025). Children who Cause Harm Are People Too: A Participatory Action Research Project To Understand Families help-seeking for child-to-parent Violence, and the (un) helpful Responses. Journal of Family Violence, 1-18.