New reports of children assaulting adults were just “the tip of the iceberg,” the parliamentary Family Affairs Committee was told on Wednesday by the Commissioner for Domestic Violence, Simone Azzopardi.
Ms Azzopardi spoke of the psychological difficulty which parents faced in reporting abuse by their own children.
She attributed the current situation, in part, to some parents’ having abdicated the responsibility of child-rearing. Parents were increasingly putting this responsibility on the education system and on other care-givers, she said.
Some children were being babysat by the Internet and left alone for hours on end.
The Commissioner for Children, Pauline Miceli, said that adolescents increasingly found it easy to take out their frustrations on their parents – more often than not, their mothers – as they were loaded with academic burdens and underwent drastic hormonal changes.
She said such children often were unable to express emotions about what they had suffered. These children and adolescents had often borne witness to or experienced domestic violence – physical or psychological – themselves, by parents who believed that they were instilling a sense of discipline in…