Understanding perceptions of severity and reporting of child-to-parent family violence

Abstract

It is widely understood that family violence (FV) is underreported, and research — predominantly on intimate partner violence (IPV) — suggests that the perceived severity of FV is one of the many factors important in decisions about whether to report to police. Previous research has identified several factors that affect perceptions of IPV severity (e.g., gender, type of harm, and history of violence), and the types of appraisals that contribute to perceived severity (e.g., victim fear and hurt, the harmfulness, aggressiveness, ordinariness and justifiability of aggressor behaviour; and victim responsibility for aggressor behaviour). But less is known about factors that contribute to perceptions of severity and reporting decisions for other types of FV, including child-to-parent violence (CPV), where children are the aggressors against their parents. Therefore, the overarching aim of this thesis was to gain a better understanding of whether perceived severity is associated with the likelihood of reporting CPV, and to identify factors that may affect the perceived severity of CPV. We set out to achieve this aim with two survey studies. In the first study, we examined whether participants’ perceptions of CPV severity were related to the likelihood they would report CPV to the police, and analysed the effect of aggressor gender and developmental stage, and parent gender on perceptions of severity. The results indicated that perceived severity was moderately associated with participants’ likelihood of reporting CPV, and that parent gender — rather than aggressor gender or developmental stage — affected those perceptions of CPV severity. In the second study we set out to identify the appraisals that may contribute to perceptions severity and investigate the effect of context about previous use of CPV on perceived severity. We found that perceptions of severity appeared to consist of judgements about the extent to which the victim was impacted by the aggressor’s harmful behaviour, with the items for victim fear and hurt, the harmfulness and aggressiveness of aggressor behaviour, and severity forming a coherent index for perceived severity. We also found that overall, context about previous use of CPV did not affect the perceived severity of CPV. Taken together, the findings presented in this thesis have contributed to the growing body of research on CPV, as well as furthering our understanding of factors related to perceived severity and reporting decisions for FV in general. The results could be used to inform efforts to increase FV reporting to police and improve the support offered to families experiencing CPV.