Innovative Approaches to Family Violence

Journal Special Issues

Innovative Approaches to Family Violence

By Margot J Schofield, Rae Walker

Overview

Editors:

Lawrie Moloney PhD
Counselling and Psychological Health, School of Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Margot J SchofieldSchool of Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Rae Walker
School of Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Organised into sections on understanding the experience and impact of family violence, systemic and government responses to family violence, and therapeutic responses to family violence, this comprehensive double issue of Journal of Family Studies addresses pressing public health priorities of interpersonal family violence, in 16 innovative research articles across several cultures.

Violence within families continues over long periods, and its effects are likely to increase with severity and duration. While such violence is widely under-reported, best estimates suggest that millions of women globally experience family violence or are living with its consequences (Krug et al 2002). Given the key role of women in caring for children, there are serious flow-on effects on family life and wellbeing, for children in particular.

Does our failure to recognize the complexity of family violence contribute to an institutional or perhaps a personal malaise?

Men inflict considerably more damage on women than vice versa, although they inflict even more damage on each other. Thus, most of the articles in this collection focus on men as clearly defined perpetrators and women and children as clearly defined victims.

A growing body of research based on population studies rather than clinical samples, has recently pointed to the existence of widespread female-initiated violence, as well as widespread reciprocal violence between men and women (Ver Steegh & Dalton 2008).

Do most researchers, practitioners and policy makers remain locked in to too narrow a view of the nature of family violence and abuse?

Half of the articles in this collection address institutional or systemic failures to respond adequately to family violence and child abuse. We must continue to challenge institutions and bureaucracies where they fail adult, elderly and child victims of violence and abuse.

Violence is unacceptable, whether it is perpetrated in pursuit of wealth, on the sporting field, in the schoolyard, or inside the family. But not all violence is the same, and as Gourevitch and Morris (2008) compellingly argued in Standard Operating Procedure where, in the notorious US Army Abu Ghraib prison, not all violence is as it seems.

In this collection, the WHO typology of violence (2002) is employed to consider causes and consequences of family violence linked from self-directed into collective forms of violence. It focuses first on understanding the experience and impact of family violence, then on a range of innovative preventive and therapeutic responses to family violence.