My research journey stems from my direct, personal experience of educational practices. Even before I started my PhD, my work in residential facilities for young people led me to meet families affected by deep wounds, hard-to-reach teenagers and complex, fragile stories that needed to be heard above all else. It was in this context that child-to-parent violence emerged as an extreme form of expression for individual suffering that is difficult to articulate.
I first became aware of the phenomenon when I met Alessandro Rudelli, an honorary judge at the Milan Juvenile Court. He was one of the first people in Italy to conduct quantitative research on the subject, based on reports from the Juvenile Court, together with his colleague Raffaele Bianchetti.
It was this connection that inspired the idea of a doctoral research project in education, investigating child-to-parent violence from a qualitative and pedagogical point of view. When I began to look into it systematically, I immediately encountered a research gap: although growing, the Italian literature on the subject is still scarce, with little pedagogical input. My research therefore stems not only from this gap, but also from a desire to give pedagogy a mediating role,
translating between different worlds and accompanying people through the complexities of family relationships.
The doctoral project developed through three main contexts:
- The Juvenile Court of Milan, where I analysed documents relating to cases of child-to-parent violence.
- The ‘Le Querce’ project of the Fondazione Gruppo Abele, the only Italian initiative explicitly dedicated to providing psycho-educational support to parents who are victims of this form of violence. Here, I conducted mediated interviews with parents and psycho-educational professionals.
- The online platform Quora was observed through a netnographic perspective to understand public discourse and social representations related to the phenomenon.
The triangulation of institutional documents, mediated interviews and digital conversations gave rise to a multiple case study analysed through the lens of Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach.
Two questions were at the core of this study:
- What contribution can pedagogy offer to the theoretical understanding of child-to-parent violence?
- What educational tools, methodologies and/or approaches can support preventive interventions in this field?
Alongside my academic research, I founded "incatraAmare", a blog created to address the lack of accessible content for parents, professionals and the general public, in April 2025. The name comes from a mother's story of feeling "incatramata" (tarred): entangled and, at the same time, bound by a deep love for her child. The blog aims to build a bridge between research, local practices and everyday narratives.
My work is centred on the idea that violence is never just an isolated incident; it is not solely the concern of the individual or the family unit, but rather an expression of a specific cultural and social scenario. Rather than providing immediate answers, pedagogy can create spaces for thought, enabling families to rediscover words, meanings, and possibilities, and encouraging them to engage with a widespread educational community. The title of my research precisely expresses this intention: shifting the focus away from the margins and marginality of extreme behaviour, and moving towards constructing a networked, systemic interpretation of it. This allows every difficult narrative to be accepted as part of a larger story and become a place of possible transformation — not only familial, but also educational and social.
Publications by Monica Facciocchi (Bicocca Open Archive)