Child-to-Parent Cyber Violence: What Is the Next Step?

Abstract

Child-to-parent violence (CPV) presents important correlations with other forms of violence in the adolescent stage such as bullying and dating violence. The evolution of these forms of violence in recent years has followed a path from offline to online, although there is a high correlation between the two modalities of abusive behavior: Is it the same case with CPV? Based on the opinion of a group of experts, this original brief report reflects on the existence of child-to-parent cyber violence (CPCV) and proposes some preliminary indicators to identify it. A Delphi method was applied with a sample consisted of 12 experts in CPV (psychologists, social educators and social workers) with at least 5 years of experience (M = 7.32, SD = 4.21) and from both sexes (50% women). In the results, 8 indicators of CPCV have been identified. Two of them are related to the control of communication by adolescents and the need to obtain reinforcers immediately. Four other indicators are related to the damage of parent image in their social network sites. Finally, we found two indicators of violence exerted by adolescents oriented to get the economic resources to do online shopping and maintain their regular activity on the internet. There is unanimous agreement among experts on the existence of some behaviors that can be defined as CPCV. This study provides novel information on CPV and raise some questions that could help researchers interested in cyber violence to enter this emerging field.