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It is well known that many victims of domestic violence do not follow the conventional advice of the advocacy community. They do not call the police. They do not go to shelters or if they do go to shelters, they leave "early" and return to their batterers. The conventional wisdom says that this is an indication that there is something wrong with these women. It is the thesis of this book that there is something wrong with this deficit-focused paradigm. Battered women protect themselves in many ways. The stereotypes of battered women as passive and in denial are based on a mistakenly narrow view of battered women's lives. Women who have been battered show impressive resilience and strength. The goal of this book is to present a strengths-focused paradigm for understanding battered women and their responses to violence.

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.

The United States has uncritically exported its law and policy on gender violence without regard to effectiveness or cultural context, and without asking what we might learn from efforts to combat gender violence in the rest of the world. This book asks that question. Surveying the legal regimes from countries in which the legal response is just developing to countries that have had law and policy in place for decades and informed by the international human rights framework, the book documents the scope of the problem of gender violence around the world, the policy successes and failures, and the grassroots efforts to ensure a robust and proactive response in countries from China to Chile. From the work of activists to stem the tide of sexual and intimate partner violence after the Haitian earthquake of 2005, to the efforts to eradicate dowry-related violence in India, to the public education campaigns to prevent domestic violence in Scotland, the book offers a comprehensive vision of global efforts to eradicate gender based violence. Featuring the work of leading gender violence academics and activists around the world.

This book provides an introduction to socio-legal forms of mitigation in capital sentencing. It examines scientific formulations, concepts, and frameworks for structuring social history investigations and assessments of moral culpability. A fundamental aim of this book is to provide mitigation professionals not only with an understanding of the context of mitigation in criminal justice thinking, but also ways of contextualizing issues of blame and culpability. Cases are used to illustrate how to identify, evaluate, and present mitigation evidence in assessing issues of culpability in the mitigation of punishment in death penalty cases. It also exposes mitigation professionals to recent developments in the social sciences with implications for assessing issues of practical rationality, diminished volition, unfortunate forms of socialization, criminal propensities, socio-cultural deprivation, and gang involvement. These topics are linked with legal and philosophical conceptions of moral culpability that offer mitigation professionals new ways of thinking about both proximal and remote forms of mitigation. These socially oriented lenses, used in examining these concepts and legal issues, offer alternative ways of thinking about issues of capacity, choice, and character in assessing diminished forms of moral culpability. The book concludes with recommendations for future research and other strategies for promoting the improvement of practice in the field of capital mitigation.

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.

Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage, and Social Change in Global Context presents the first analysis of rape in marriage in cross-cultural perspective. Previous scholarship on marital rape has been limited compared with research on battering, acquaintance rape, and child sexual abuse and it is largely US focused. This volume represents the collaboration of an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational group of scholars and activists. It addresses important conceptual issues, including the evolution of the notion of marital rape and the ideology of permanent consent. Further, it examines the different disciplinary and methodological approaches that can be brought to bear and includes contributions from sociologists, criminologists, legal scholars, and human rights and public health advocates. Importantly, this volume presents the first anthropological research focused on rape in marriage and includes findings from Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Great Britain as well as the United States. The evidence is clear that marital rape is widespread and affects millions of women across the globe. However, the rich, ethnographic work of the anthropologists reveals that forced sex in marriage and other intimate relationships is not defined, experienced, or sanctioned the same way cross culturally. Still, regardless of how intimate sexual violence is understood in a particular cultural context, women everywhere experience it as a violation that undermines their health and well-being. The volume concludes with public health, legal, and human rights approaches to intervention in this most intimate—and most culturally and legally condoned—form of violence against women in the world.

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.

This book analyses poverty and battering and the conventional wisdom that poses incentives to waged work as the best way to remedy women’s vulnerability in the economy and in relationships. The book presents findings from her multi-method approach to poverty, battering, and work in the policies and practices of the U.S. welfare and law-and-order states. The book draws from interviews with welfare recipients to distinguish conflicts about work and conflicts that interfere with work from conflicts that take place at work. It uses administrative data about earnings, welfare, and protective order to calculate the costs of taking a beating. It presents the narratives and analyses written by participants in a community literacy project to expand the possibilities for poor women to contribute to democratic deliberation about the policies and practices that most dramatically shape their lives. The book’s findings form the empirical basis for articulating a principle for reconciling the apparent contradiction between conventional and progressive ways of thinking about the role of work in U.S. policy and programs to end poverty and violence against women: Poverty and battering are both issues of human rights and social inclusion. A social justice approach includes safety and solvency among the social, civil and political, economic, and human rights that must be underwritten and guaranteed by democratic governments, without regard to marital status, immigration status, or employment status.

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.

Social Work, Criminal Justice, and the Death Penalty aims to prepare undergraduate and graduate students to take an active role in the contemporary death penalty discourse in the United States by providing key insights from professionals who are engaged as legal, forensic, academic, and social work experts. In this textbook, contributing authors write accessibly from their own experiences and expertise in death penalty cases and related social issues from a critical, social justice, and human rights perspective—all intended to better inform the burgeoning social work and criminal justice professional. To this end, the present textbook is comprised of three sections: Criminal Justice Considerations, Sociopolitical Considerations, and Applied Social Work Considerations. Across the three sections, each chapter provides explicit implications for the social work profession in the criminal justice setting. Examples of the various roles that social work professionals can and do take up related to the death penalty, including working directly with death sentenced persons and their families; participating in mitigation work; contributing to the field of research devoted to the intersections of mental health and the criminal justice system; as clinically licensed social workers, by engaging in the critical discourse that is being had between the psychiatric and psychological professions and the legal profession when death eligibility hinges on a clinical determination; and, finally, using social advocacy and policy practice to take up the death penalty from a social justice framework.

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.

This book is about juvenile and adult sons and daughters who kill their parents. The book moves far behind the statistical correlates of parricide by synthesizing the professional literature on parricide in general, matricide, patricide, double parricides, and familicides. The book explains the reasons behind the killings and includes in-depth discussion of issues related to prosecuting and defending parricide offenders. The book is enriched with its focus on clinical assessment, case studies, and follow-up of parricide offenders, as well as treatment, risk assessment, and prevention.

This book offers a critical appraisal of research and theory focused on violence in youth, families, and communities. Chapters examine the ways in which violence is defined and understood; how risk and protective factors promote and inhibit violence in families and in communities; and how violence and related behaviors differ by gender, race, and ethnicity. Work reviewed throughout the book examines overlapping forms of violence, the impact of violence on families, and resilience in child victims. Current evidence and advances in preventing violence are also noted and discussed. Emphasis is placed on understanding key social influences, environmental factors, and the role of larger systems in the etiology and prevention of violence. The book provides a comprehensive overview of published studies, limitations of research findings, and a thoughtful discussion of the ways in which future research can build on what is currently known about the causes, consequences, and prevention of violence in different settings.

Violence in the home is one of the most damaging and widespread of social problems. It is an issue that cuts across all socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, gender, and age boundaries. Abuse and neglect can be found in all types of families and interpersonal relationships, and can take many forms including emotional, physical, financial, and sexual abuse. This book brings together the scholarly research and professional experience of numerous disciplines and reviews theoretical explanations. Taking a unique approach to defining family, it examines the complex, multidimensional phenomena of family violence. To further broaden an understanding of interpersonal violence, the book addresses violence against pseudo families, animals, siblings, and parents. It investigates the evolution of systems and institutions that interact with families and are mandated to provide protection and services, and explores the current debates surrounding public policy. In addition, the book explores the role of power in abusive relationships and considers the short- and long-term consequences of abuse. Also discussed are potential solutions for violence prevention.

This book presents research unique in its breadth, depth, and detail and uses both quantitative and qualitative evidence from Casefiles and Interviews with men convicted of murder. The focus is on three types of murder of women by men—intimate partner murder, sexual murder, and the murder of older women. Each type is examined in a separate section containing three chapters addressing the knowledge, the murder event, and the lifecourse of the perpetrators. The findings are used to explore the context and circumstances of the murder event and to describe the lifecourse of the perpetrators from childhood to adulthood and into prison. Particular attention is given to previous physical and/or sexual violence against women and against the woman they murder. The findings are organized conceptually and progressively in order to reveal the dynamic aspects of murder events, the lives of the men who murder women, and their reflections on the murder including denial, empathy, and remorse. The evidence indicates that men who murder women specialize in using violence against women and demonstrates the importance of gender and gendered relationships in understanding when men murder women.