Het zal je kind maar wezen

It would be your child. Parental abuse and restorative justice In the (international) literature not much is found on parental abuse. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to imagine that violence by children against parents can be highly disruptive to family life. We need to know more about the developmental paths and profiles in which parental abuse can manifest itself. Factors such as the children’s living situation (at home with their parents or not), cultural views on family, relatives and violence, (mental) health and previous experiences with perpetration and victimization of family members, should be taken into consideration. The way in which the violence against the parent(s) manifests itself (e.g. mainly psychological or physical or constructively from psychological to physical) should also be an important part of these development paths and profiles. When discovering different patterns of parental abuse, it may also turn out that there is not one intervention that works in every situation. This does not alter the fact that a recoveryoriented approach seems to have very favourable cards in advance, because of the attention paid to the relational aspects.