We live in an era where transparency is prized. From religious faith to neurodiversity, openness is the norm for Millennials and Gen Z. Against this background, the taboo surrounding child–parent abuse is uniquely oppressive. In my experience, families visiting child and adolescent mental health services find it easier to talk about self-harm, suicide and hallucinations than the abuse perpetrated by a child toward other members of the family.

The second edition of Amanda Holt’s book for practitioners and policy makers provides an illuminating guide to the key issues surrounding child–parent abuse, which can be obscured by shame, silencing and ambiguity. Holt, a Professor of Criminology at the University of Roehampton, is particularly persuasive when discussing social drivers of child–parent abuse, the criminal justice system’s responses to it, and the risk of children’s rights frameworks exacerbating it. For clinicians, the chapter describing parents’ experiences of child–parent abuse may already be familiar, but it serves to starkly elucidate the interplay between financial, legal and sexual abuse against parents as well as verbal and physical abuse.

The malignant patterns of intimate partner violence are well-recognised today and perhaps present the best model for un-silencing parents experiencing child–parent abuse. Holt identifies both similarities and interplay between child–parent abuse and intimate partner violence. Yet, by the end of this book, I felt unsettled by the fundamental differences.

Simple axioms about abuse often fall short. ‘You can leave your abuser.’ ‘Don’t expect perpetrators to change.’

In child–parent abuse these notions are particularly inadequate. Parents typically cannot, and may not want to, leave their children. Parents may need to change their responses to their children’s abuse (e.g. through non-violent resistance programmes), which may be interpreted as allocating blame. And unlike in intimate partner violence, where the emphasis is on the survivor’s exit, child–parent abuse requires the child to take responsibility for change, supported by the very people they have harmed.

The disturbance of kneejerk responses to abuse in the home underlines how child–parent abuse is a unique phenomenon. This book certainly does not offer easy answers, but it makes a necessary contribution by foregrounding a problem much of society struggles to face.