ABSTRACT
This chapter examines violence against parents and its history in two European case studies. The chapter discusses how the understanding of triggers for violence against parents has changed as society changed, and how violence against parents relates to socio-economic factors such as living arrangements or to concepts of masculinity and authority between generations. It also focuses on the everyday politics of family authority in its historical development to highlight the changing explanations for parricide and violence against parents as a response to the changes in political regimes and the relationships between authority and the people. These explanations include ‘unfortunate incidents’ (for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), ‘degeneracy and mental illness’ (for the nineteenth century), and ‘lack of socio-economic resources’ (for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries).
