A new course for Galway parents and carers who are experiencing violence and abuse from their children, will begin in the Westside Resource Centre next week. It’s in response to a trend, highlighted by the parent support group Parentline in its most recent report.

Anger or aggression was the clear, principal reason for calls to Parentline last year, which represented a more than doubling of the share of calls where anger or aggression was cited as a principal reason in 2020.

Worryingly, a quarter of those calls came from parents fearful of abusive and violent behaviour towards them from their child.

In a year when there was almost double the number of calls to the volunteer support service – from 4,144 in 2020 to 6,078 –  Parentline describes this as a highly significant trend.

“It may be related to the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions and the increase in the share of calls made about boys,” its annual report states. Two-thirds of the calls related to male children, a big jump on the previous year when nearly 42 per cent of calls related to female children.

Carol Burke, Drug and Alcohol Family Support Worker with the Western Region Drug and Alcohol Task Force (WRDATF), is all too familiar with the trend.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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