Child Abuse Review Vol. 4: 303-305 (1995)

Ending the Cycle of Violence: Community Responses to Children of Battered Women edited by Einat Peled, Peter G. Jaf€e and Jeffrey L. Edleson, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1995,306 pp. ISBN 8039-5368-2 (Hbk), $36.95; 8039-5396-0 (Pbk), $17.95

The development of the literature on child abuse and other forms of family violence in recent years has been extraordinary. Less than 15 years ago, when I was undertaking my first research project, the total literature seemed manageable and accessible. Now, with major journals devoted to problems of family violence and all relevant professional journals regularly carrying articles, the literature threatens to overwhelm even the most diligent reader.

Quantity does not necessarily equate with quality, however. I have long felt that significant advances in knowledge about and responses to family violence will come when links are made between what too often appear to be entirely separate research and programme trends. This book presents us with one of those small but significant links.

The book opens with a chapter by Myriam Miedzian, ‘Learning to be violent’, a thoroughly depressing picture of violence in the USA. Miedzian draws on her book Boys Will Be Boys to demonstrate that logic should encourage America to pay more attention to violence at home. She reports that a staggering 400 000 people have been murdered in the USA in 18 years, while fewer than 60000 Americans have died in wars from Vietnam onwards. In spite of these figures, the military budget is US $270 billion a year.

While the book is firmly set in a North American context, there is much to appeal to other readers. Miedzian’s thesis, that the behaviour of human beings is ‘malleable’, and that action to reduce the incidence of violence is possible, is taken up in three major parts of the book: shelters and domestic violence counsel- ling; child protection services and the criminal justice system; and prevention and education in schools and communities.

There is a great deal to reflect upon in every section of the book. The chapters on assessment of children exposed to family violence, and on providing individual and group therapy for children of abused women, take up some very important issues. One major point is that children of women who have been abused usually only get direct intervention when their behaviour becomes problematic. Such responses amount to too little being offered too late.

A key chapter for many will be that by Echlin and Marshall, ‘Child protection services for children of battered women’. The authors emphatically stress that the child witnesses to woman abuse are themselves abused children and, as such, require the assistance of child protection services. In Canada and the United States, however, the responses of protective services are described as inconsistent. I have a sense that matters are little different in the UK. Corby (1993), for example, in his Child Abuse: Towards u Knowledge Base, makes the concerning suggestion that a child accidentally injured in a fight between his or her parents would be unlikely to be registered as abused unless the injury was serious.

@ 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Book Reviews Edited by David Gough

‘Logic should encourage America to pay more attention to violence at home’

304 Book Reviews

The final section of the book describes efforts to educate about violence and prevent its occurrence. The penultimate chapter, written by an aboriginal activist in Canada, will be of particular interest to readers struggling with similar problems in countries like Australia and New Zealand.

This book is to be highly commended for its unequivocal espousal of the tenet that a child who witnesses the abuse of his or her mother is an abused child. In my first, small research project 15 years ago, violence between the parents of abused children was reported more than four times more frequently than in the families of the contrast group of non-abused children. Perhaps some children would have been spared some direct injury if that guiding principle of this book had been accepted then. My belief is that it is the coexistence of different forms of violence that will eventually allow us to distinguish between those children who can be protected and those that cannot. This leads logically to the final message of this text: that coordinated response to the problems of family violence require the commitment of all systems involved. And, perhaps, a small reduction in military spending.

Chris Goddard Dept of Social Work t3 Human Services

Monash University Australia

‘A child who witnesses the abuse of his or her mother is an abused child’

‘Campaigns against such evils as child labour . . . leave one feeling how powerless such organizations are’

Child Protection and Care: Trends and Prospects edited by Dimitra Kondyli, Papasissis Publishers, Athens, 1994, 221 pp. ISBN 960-02-1039-X (Pbk), drachmas 4000.

This is a colIection of papers originally presented to a European conference in Greece in 1992 put on by the National Welfare Organisation. It contains a wide variety of papers, in English or French, on the subject of child welfare in the broadest sense. Inevitably when papers are written for oral presentation, they tend to be short, and one would often like to read more on the topic in question. Writers come from all over Europe, apart from one American, though the largest group are, not unnaturally, Greek.

The papers can be divided into groups covering the work of international organizations; child care policy and such topics as responses to poverty; the way in which children’s needs can be reflected in developments; and papers more specifically on aspects of child protection.

Papers on the work of international organizations describing their campaigns against such evils as child labour, child prostitu- tion or the use of children in armies tend to leave one feeling how powerless such organizations are, although one by Naskou- Perraki on the European Convention on Human Rights, sets out on a case-by-case basis how the law of several countries has been changed by, or in anticipation of, decisions of the Court of Human Rights. These include not only ones with which British readers will be familiar, such as the prohibition of corporal punishment in schools, but cases in which other countries have been involved relating to sex education, immigration and the rights of children born out of wedlock.