The important work of foster care needs to be reflected in more support for caregivers in critical areas, including for carers who might face frequent violence from their children.
New research led by Flinders University, with funding from the Australian Research Council, investigates difficult questions around making physical and verbal abuse of carers by children in out-of-home care a form of family and domestic violence.
"Describing children's behaviour as abusive is uncomfortable, but necessary to examine the personal and socio-cultural factors underpinning it," says Professor of Psychology Damien Riggs, from the College of Education, Psychology and Social work at Flinders University.
"Australian foster and kinship carers often feel unheard, and feel forced to be compliant with their own vicarious traumatisation."
In many families, adolescents and young people trying to assert themselves may lash out against their parents, occasionally leading to intentional harms by children to their parents. In children in foster care, this behaviour may be aggravated by trauma and other complex experiences in their past.
"We don't want to focus on the individuals but on the surrounding potential for this kind of family and domestic violence in foster homes, and shape support and advice for foster families accordingly," says Professor Riggs.
The extent of parental abuse includes figures suggesting that parental abuse occurs in 7% to 18% of two-parent families in the USA, with rates higher in single-parent families and for families where there are gender differences between children and parents (with violence by boys towards their mothers being especially high).
In Australia, two-thirds of children who are removed into care due to abuse or neglect are placed in long-term care with foster or kinship carers. A total of over 45,300 children live in out-of-home care (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare AIHW 2024).
But what happens when foster or kinship carers who face abuse from young people? Who do they turn to in the child protection systems, particularly when children in their care counterclaim they are victims?
"These areas should be further investigated to make sure both the children - and those parenting them - are equally supported and looked after in our foster and kinship care systems," says Professor Riggs, lead author of a series of new academic journal articles on the topic.
Two of the articles, published in the journals Children and Youth Services Review and The British Journal of Social Work, interviewed 28 foster carers about their experiences with violence in the home to assess what more could be done to provide better protection and structural support in foster care families.
Strategies to tackle include giving caregivers insights into recognising and minimising parental abuse and understanding triggers in order to mitigate abuse and avoid escalation in abusive behaviour. Setting barriers and conciliation interventions may also help.
Overall, researchers stress that foster carer systems should implement increased accountability and transparency of all processes so parents don't themselves end up traumatised by strict state regulations and the system itself.
'The whole system is designed to create more trauma than is solves': Australian foster and kinship carers navigating child protection systems' (2025) by Damien W Riggs, Ben Lohmeyer, Shoshana Rosenberg, Yvonne Clark (University of South Australia) and Clemence Due (University of Adelaide) has been published in the Children and Youth Services Review - DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2025.108401.
'But isn't that normal?': Australian foster parent's experiences of parental abuse by children in their care' (2025) by Damien W Riggs, Ben Lohmeyer, Shoshana Rosenberg, Yvonne Clark and Clemence Due has been published in The British Journal of Social Work - DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bcaf090.
Acknowledgement: Funding for this research was provided by the Australian Research Council DP230100107
