Abstract
Child-to-parent abuse (CPA) research struggles to differentiate between disrespectful and abusive behaviour, leading some to conclude that 90% of children abuse their parents and rendering the concept essentially meaningless. The Abusive Behaviour by Children-Indices (ABC-I) was developed with the aim of differentiating abusive and non-abusive youth using a novel scoring procedure created from parents’ norms about abuse. The ABC-I was developed with parents of young people aged 14–25 years (N = 201) using index-development procedures. The structure of the ABC-I was validated with young people aged 14 to 25 (N = 587) using partial least squares-structural equation modelling. Using the parents’ sample, 40 items derived from the literature were reduced to 10 behavioural descriptors. Parents who identified their children as abusive were 89% more likely to have higher ABC-I scores than non-abused parents. The structure of the ABC-I was further reduced to nine items in the youth sample. The ABC-I identified a 12-month CPA incidence rate of 16%. The ABC-I is the first CPA measure to provide an evidence-based threshold for abuse that incorporates both frequency and severity of abuse to improve upon the identification of abuse involving psychological aggression or coercion.
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Simmons, M.L., McEwan, T.E., Purcell, R. et al. The Abusive Behaviour by Children- Indices (ABC-I): a Measure to Discriminate between Normative and Abusive Child Behaviour. J Fam Viol 34, 663–676 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-019-00071-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-019-00071-1