NCJ Number
130404
Editor(s)
D D Knudsen,
J L Miller
Date Published
1991
Length
248 pages
Annotation
Sociologists, psychologists, public health nurses, social workers, and legal analysts present papers on the conceptualization and empirical study of domestic violence, the effects of child-abuse and spouse-abuse victimization, the social response to the batterers and their victims, and legal responses to family violence.
Abstract
The five papers in Part I address methodological and theoretical issues that are critical for the investigation and understanding of all aspects of family violence. Topics covered include basic and applied questions in family violence research; the incidence, rates, causes, and trends in physical violence in American families; public health conceptions of family abuse; variations in defining family mistreatment; and the criminal justice processing of violent and nonviolent offenders. The three papers in Part II summarize work on three distinct family violence problems. Each addresses the possible long-term consequences of intrafamilial abuse or violence. Each paper also discusses methodological issues and challenges that are critically important to the field of family violence. Three papers on social intervention strategies for batterers and their victims consider such questions as the extent to which social services or counseling should be available to batterers, whether the courts should mandate therapy, what social service agencies should do in response to substantiated cases of child sexual abuse, and whether verbal aggression is related to the severity of spouse abuse. The five papers in Part IV focus on the legal responses to family violence. These papers consider the effectiveness of the investigation and prosecution of child sexual abuse cases and spouse abuse cases, the impact of criminal sanctions in preventing wife battery, and ways to improve the criminal justice response to family violence. 415 references and a subject index