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The number of violent offences involving an adolescent attacking their parents or step-parents has increased by more than 60% in the past decade, according to figures recorded by the UK’s biggest police force.
Data released by Scotland Yard reveals that there were 1,886 such offences recorded in 2015 but this increased to 3,091 in the first 10 months of 2025 alone.
The offences involved a suspect aged between 10, the age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 17 who had been recorded as being the child or stepchild of the alleged victim.
The Metropolitan police figures suggest a major surge in recorded incidents amid the Covid pandemic, although the numbers had been edging up over the previous four years and have seemingly plateaued in the past two years.
There were 1,886 offences recorded in 2015, 1,804 in 2016, 2,068 in 2017, 2,290 in 2018 and 2,292 in 2019.
In 2020, when Covid hit the UK, there were 2,454 recorded incidents of filial violence.
This was followed by 2,395 in 2021, 2,792 in 2022, 3,052 in 2023, 3,030 in 2024 and 3,091 between 1 January 2025 and 31 October of that year.
Jane Atkinson, the chief executive at Capa First Response, a charity that works with families where there is child-to-parent aggression, suggested the figures reflected the national picture, with her organisation seeing a 90% increase in referrals in the past two years compared with the previous norm.
Atkinson said part of the explanation could be an increase in awareness of available help but that a number of other factors could be fuelling the violence.
She said: “I spoke to a woman recently with a fractured jaw and a fractured finger from her daughter and she said that, you know, this has been going on for a long time, and it’s only when things are starting to escalate that I’m thinking, actually, maybe there’s more of a problem.
“We did an internal data grab and we found spikes of parents referring to us, and those spikes were at six years old, eight years old and then 12 years old. So people are recognising it earlier and trying to say: ‘Right, OK, hold on, this is more than just childhood stuff.’”
Atkinson said an increase in child poverty in the UK and a perceived failure of parents to live up to expectations could be factors behind the increase in recorded violence.
She said: “More and more families are struggling to meet expectations, maybe of children and what peers are getting.
“People are finding it really hard and struggling. When you struggle externally, you struggle within the systems of your family, relationships start to suffer.”
A study by academics at the universities of Oxford and Manchester in 2020 examined the impact of the Covid pandemic on filial abuse.
One parent whose testimony was included in the study said her son “beat me so badly that if the police did not come when they did, I would not be alive”.
Explanations for an apparent surge in violence varied from the change in structures and routines to the pressures brought about by home schooling and the loss of external help during lockdowns.
Helen Bonnick, the author of Child to Parent Violence and Abuse: A Practitioner’s Guide to Working with Families, said she hoped the new figures were a sign that the stigma about reporting such abuse was fading.
She said: “Some will argue that changes in society and stresses, eg pandemic, led to an increase, but it is difficult to state categorically because of all the other things that happened to provide context.
“Since 2010 the increase in knowledge and understanding has been massive – 15 years ago hardly any one was talking about it publicly and we had no sense of data.”
Bonnick said there had been “research across the world but [there had been’] a very big focus in Britain” and that a new “understanding of trauma and neurodiversity, for instance, has altered the way we understand what is happening in families”.
She added: “[An] increase in bespoke services available means more people encouraged to reach out for help. Less shame attached perhaps?
“Cuts to services such as adolescent mental health and children’s services [also] led to a drop in early help and support which might have helped keep things safer for some families.”
Child-to-parent violence is considered by experts in the field to be the most hidden and stigmatised form of family violence, with the recorded numbers likely to only hint at the true scale of the problem.
Studies suggest that abuse towards parents can begin from an early age but typically peaks between the ages of 14 and 16.
There is a lack of firm research on its prevalence although such filial violence is internationally regarded as a growing problem.
A storyline about this issue featured in EastEnders in 2024 as the character Kat Slater struggled with the increasingly violent behaviour of her teenage son Tommy.
A report published in 2021 by the domestic abuse commissioner highlighted studies in the US, Canada, UK and Spain that indicated more serious physical violence towards parents was “likely to sit somewhere between 3% and 5% [of families] with multidimensional definitions including patterned physical and psychological aggression sitting around 10%”.
Violence cited ranged from punching, kicking, pulling hair, pushing, throwing or pinning, trapping, biting, throwing or hitting with objects to strangling, using weapons such as knives, the use of poison/gas, and burning/scalding.
