Children and Families

Child abuse and neglect are serious social problems. Preventing maltreatment from occurring and, when prevention fails, intervening to protect children, are vital concerns for policy makers, the public, and professionals in social work, mental health, medicine, nursing, law enforcement, and law. Millions of dollars are spent on the child protection system. Yet, maltreatment continues. To appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of today's child protection system, it is important to understand the historical development of child protection. Part I traces the history of child protection in America from colonial times to the present. With the history in place, Part II begins with an analysis of the numerous causes of child abuse and neglect. Once the causes of maltreatment are revealed, the discussion shifts to roadblocks to reducing maltreatment. Despite roadblocks, progress is possible, and Part II outlines broad strategies for reducing the amount of maltreatment. The book ends with specific recommendations to improve the child protection system, including proposals to strengthen foster care and reform the juvenile court.

This book engages the first-person narratives of a group of Roman Catholic clergy in depth and detail, offering a thorough analysis of the perpetrators' accounts of how and why they sexually abused minors. It develops a new way of conceptualizing the problem of sexual abuse by clergy, one that is not rooted exclusively in individual pathology but that fully accounts for systemic and context-specific factors, such as the very institution of priesthood itself, the Catholic take on sexuality, clerical culture, power relations, governance structures of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the process of formation for priesthood and religious life, and the complex manner in which these factors coalesce to create serious institutional risks for boundary violations, including child sexual abuse. This book weaves together the stories of abusive priests, church history, and recommendations for institutional change that confront the Church's inadequate response to scandal after scandal.

This book presents a vision of childhood victimization, one that unifies the conventional subdivisions like child molestation, child abuse, street crime, bullying, and exposure to community violence. It shows how children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, with over one-in-five facing multiple, serious “poly-victimizations” during a single year. Developmental Victimology, the book’s term for this new integrative perspective, looks at how victimization changes across the span of childhood and offers insights about how to categorize juvenile victimizations and how to think about risk and impact developmentally. It presents new data about unexpected declines in childhood victimization during the 1990s and early 2000s and suggest some of the reasons for this drop. The book also provides a new model of society’s response to child victimization — the Juvenile Victim Justice System — and a fresh way of thinking about barriers that victims and their families encounter when seeking help.

Familicide involves the killing of a current or former spouse or partner and one or more of their children, followed, in many cases, by the suicide of the perpetrator. These killings are limited to the modern era and seem to be on the rise in late modern times, deeply disturbing the communities in which they occur. Familicidal Hearts explores the emotional styles of 196 male and 15 female perpetrators of this shocking offence, situating their emotional styles on a continuum with livid coercive killers at one end and civil reputable murderers at the other. The analysis identifies the pivotal roles of socially situated emotions such as shame, rage, fear, anxiety, and depression in the lives of perpetrators and in particular the way perpetrators mismanage these emotions, fail to acknowledge or recognize them, and mask them. The author identifies modern era figurations of feeling and familial atmospheres of feeling as being conducive to the rise of familicide. In particular, most perpetrators see themselves as failing to live up to the demands of modern era gender expectations, as fathers, lovers, and, much more rarely, as wives or mothers. In spite of the plethora of case details used, the author contends that at some level, familicides are inexplicable and reflect the haunting effects of modern emotional formations that defy scientific analysis.

Little is known about the effects of having a loved one on death row, and alternative visions of punishment that offer the possibility for forgiveness and recovery are also underrepresented in our system of justice and within the academic literature. In the Shadow of Death uses narrative accounts of individuals affected by the death penalty and crime to explore what it means to have a loved one on death row. The in-depth examination of this under-studied population adds to the literature on loss, trauma, grief, and recovery. In addition to theory on trauma and loss, the book also uses restorative justice theory, which holds offenders accountable while searching for ways to mend communities and lives torn apart by crimes, and explores options for the offenders' family members to be brought into the justice equation and the process of healing and recovery. The book uses myriad interviews with offenders' and victims' families, legal teams, and leaders in the abolition and restorative justice movement, as well as court documents that include in-depth psychosocial histories of offenders, in order to help ground a vision of justice rooted in the social fabric of community.

Interviewing children who may have been sexually abused is a daunting task fraught with far-reaching consequences for the children, families, institutions, and professionals involved. With no room for error, forensic and clinical interviewers must navigate the complex and often contradictory evidence that informs their decision making. This book critically analyzes the research on assessing child sexual abuse. Noting that issues such as memory and suggestibility, questioning techniques, the use of media, and false allegations remain hotly contested, the chapters advise on applying available research to professional judgment while drawing also on best practice guidelines and conceptual, clinical, and consensus-based writings. The book covers the entire interview process, showing professionals how to structure, document, and follow up on children’s responses in interviews; work with children who are very young, have special needs, or come from diverse backgrounds; use standardized tests and measures; formulate conclusions about sexual abuse; and defend those decisions in a courtroom or clinical setting.

What is the best way to work with fathers who have a history of abusive behavior toward their intimate partners? This question is among the thorniest that social service and criminal justice professionals must deal with in their careers, and this book examines the host of equally difficult issues that surround it. Beginning with the voices of mothers and fathers who speak about men's contact with and parenting of their children, the book then examines court and mental health services perspectives on how much involvement violent men should have in their children's lives. The second half of the book showcases programs such as the Boston-based Fathering After Violence initiative and the Caring Dads program in Canada, which introduce non-abusive parenting concepts and skills to batterers men who batter women and have developed useful guidelines for intervention with these fathers. This book distills the most relevant policy issues, research findings, and practice considerations for those who coordinate batterer programs or work with families, the courts, and the child welfare system. It guides professionals in understanding men who batter, assessing their parenting skills, making decisions about custody and visitation, and modeling treatment programs that engage fathers in their children's lives while maximizing safety.

Despite significant accomplishments over the past 35 years, antiviolence activists know that justice for most abused women remains elusive. Most victims of violence against women do not call the police or seek help from the courts. Are there new ways that survivors might find justice? This book examines new alternative justice practices for victims. These informal, dialogue-based practices, referred to as “restorative justice,” seek to decrease the role of the state in responding to crime, and increase the involvement of communities in meeting the needs of victims and offenders. Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women considers both the dangers and potential benefits of using restorative justice in response to these crimes. The contributors include antiviolence activists and scholars from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. A range of perspectives on these alternative justice practices is presented. This book also contains rich descriptions of new programs that combine restorative justice with feminist antiviolence approaches. The hope is that this will inspire survivors, advocates, community activists, and scholars to create new ways for abused women to find justice.

The book explores and differentiates the many manifestations of school violence, such as verbal, social, threats, bullying, physical, sexual harassment, and weapons possession, as well as staff-initiated violence against students. It presents a socio-ecological model of school violence in context, and explores the role of culture, religion, neighborhood, family, school characteristics (such as size), age, and gender. The model outlines how aspects of school climate, including anti-violence policies, teacher-student relationships and student participation mediate the effects of the outside context and influence levels of victimization, feelings of safety and fear. The book presents a large scale nationally representative study of school violence conducted among Jewish and Arab students in Israel. A nested design (students within schools) was used to gather data from the multiple perspectives of students, teachers, and principals. Hierarchical regressions, multi-level analyses (HLM), and structural equation models (EQS) are used to assess the relative impact of culture, religion, poverty, school characteristics, and student gender and age. Finally, the book outlines a series of detailed recommendations to advance theory, research, monitoring of schools, and violence prevention policies and interventions.

Society has instigated diverse responses in an attempt to end domestic violence in intimate relationships, which has plagued our society and deeply hurt our families and children. Helping professionals are constantly in search of effective ways to provide treatment for domestic violence offenders, although such a search is haunted by hope, promises, and controversies. This book describes and evaluates a solution-focused group treatment program for domestic violence offenders. This is a goal directed, solution-based, group treatment program that utilizes goals to create a context for participants to identify, notice, rediscover, and reconnect with their strengths and resources in addressing problems with domestic violence. Building on a strengths perspective, a solution-focused approach holds a person accountable for solutions instead of focusing on problems. Without minimizing or denying the destructiveness of violent behaviors, such an approach aims at empowering a person so that she or he can discover and/or reconnect with his or her strengths and resources to build a more satisfying life that excludes violence in intimate relationships. Such a treatment approach uses the language and symbols of “solution and strengths” as opposed to the language of “deficits and blame.” Treatment focuses on identifying exception and solution behaviors that are then amplified, supported, and reinforced through a solution-building process. This book describes a pragmatic, step-by-step, “how-to” description of what helping professionals can do in treatment to create positive changes in domestic violence offenders. This is a treatment guide from intake to termination, capitalizing on participants' strengths and goal accomplishment to encourage and assist their efforts to eliminate and exclude violence from intimate relationships.