Michelle John, founding director of the UK social enterprise PEGS, surveyed 188 parents who approached the group for help and found 17% — predominantly mothers — reported sexual harm from their own child [1]. Alongside it, Amanda Holt, a criminology professor at the University of Roehampton, published what is thought to be the first academic paper on the subject, "Understanding Harmful Sexual Behaviour Towards Parents." She analysed data from about 2,000 parents who sought help from a UK support service in 2023 and found 13% had experienced harmful sexual behaviour from a child; of those, 96% were mothers and 4% fathers, and the children ranged in age from five to 31 [1].

Both numbers describe people already reaching for help — referral and survey samples, not a measure of how common this is across the population. That distinction is where the online conversation is likeliest to slip, converting help-seeking data into a national epidemic or collapsing the cases into a single villain: pornography, AI, or neurodiversity. John noted parents reporting children "making indecent images using ChatGPT," but Holt's paper links the abuse to prior domestic-abuse exposure and childhood trauma, not one cause.

The consequence the framing obscures is service design. A mother the Guardian calls Lucy, assaulted in her sleep by her adult son, said therapists left her feeling misunderstood and that she feared being accused of abusing her own child. "It's a torture. It's lifelong punishment," she said [1]. Police, mental-health and safeguarding services need trauma-sensitive responses that protect parents without treating every diagnosis or family history as interchangeable.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, London