A group has been set up to tackle the “unseen problem” of parents who are abused by their children.

Joe Lettieri, Karen Hunter and Ayse Adil, who work as mentors and parental support workers at schools in Brimsdown, won £10,000 in lottery money to set up a not-for-profit group called Parent Abuse and Reconciliation Service last month.

The group is preparing to find its first clients.

The trio says the grant is a vote of confidence in its belief there is little support for parents who are beaten by their children, as a result of being in gangs or having drug problems.

Mr Lettieri, 52, said: “It came from professional experience after we had a really bad time with one of the pupils in a school we worked at.

“There’s very little support out there. I’ve been meeting students in school for ten years and you feel the work you do here can fall down a bit without tackling problems in the family home.”

The group has written to Enfield Council, the Metropolitan Police and other agencies to create a network of support for affected families, which support worker Ms Adil, 31, said were mostly in the east of the borough and from ethnic minorities.

She said: “We are developing a system of help for parents of children who are taking drugs, in gangs, and abusing their parents. We give them one-to-one support and try to encourage them into work or education.

“We work with the kids to help them with anger management and, if necessary, send them away to a boot camp for a week.

“Between us, we’ve been working in schools for 28 years and have always been concerned this issue needed more attention that it was getting. It felt like an unseen problem.

“So we’re trying to be the connection between schools and local authorities to try to resolve it.”

She argued there were few statistics that revealed the extent of the problem, because families were often ashamed to report abuse to the police or ask for help.

For more information, visit the group’s website by clicking here.