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Physical violence in American families: Risk factors and adaptations to violence in 8,145 families
ChtidAbwe& i-A-g&t, Vol. 16, pp. 143-149. Printed m the U.S.A. Ail rights reserved.
0145~2134/92 $5.00 + .oo Copyright 0 1992 Pergamon Press pk.
1992
BOOK REVIEWS
Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families. Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, Christine Smith and Colleagues. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ. 1990.622 pp. $32.95. Led by Murray Straus, Director of the Family Violence Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, a team of 14 researchers who co-author this book have conducted two national surveys in the U.S. on the manner in which family members handle conflict situations with a spouse, with a child, or with a sibling. The Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) developed for measuring these strategies does not specify clearly who initiated any particular conflict, how hard or where any particular blow, kick, or stab was directed, or whether any particular physical violence was a direct response to physical violence initiated by another. Only one early study is reported on the behavioral validity of the CTS, in which students and their parents tended to converge in their accounts of the degree and types of verbal and physical violence used in their families. But agreement on types of “reasoning” strategies was low. The authors admit that social desirability may effect responses to the CTS (many individuals will conceal from a stranger the fact of their violence against a partner or a child), but this also means that the estimates of within-family violence reported must be conservative. It is likely that the estimate from the 1985 national, random survey of 6,002 hou~hol~, which found that 13.9% of women aged under 25 had been subjected to physical assault by a spouse or partner in the past 12 months must be an underestimate. Whether social desirability effects men and women differently is not known, and this might explain the controversial finding of high rates of female to male violence reported in earlier work. Straus and his colleagues discuss this controversy (aired in previous publications) in detail, but fail to address this issue satisfactorily. The fact that the CTS may not measure violence initiated by a partner simply because he is a violent person or because he is drunk also means that the estimated rates of male on female violence may be serious underestimates. There is good concurrent or face validity for the CTS: High rates of family violence reflect families and areas with much inequality between spouses, especially male dominance; poverty and unemployment; social stress and isolation of families; heavy drinking; and poorer mental and physical health in the persons toward whom violence is expressed. Six of the 28 chapters are directly related to child abuse issues. The large majority of American families inflict physical pain on their children for a variety of reasons and degrees of rationalization. Children under 10 are those most likely to receive “normal” beating; but about 8% of adolescents receive severe or very severe assaults (punching, kicking, strapping, stabbing et al.). And these, of course, are conservative or minimal estimates. Straus argues from his data: Over 97% of American children experience physical punishment . . . such widespread use of ordinary physical punishment is one of the factors accounting for the high rate of child abuse and wife beating. . . the more parents are violent toward their children, the more violent these children are to their siblings. . . The more violent husbands are toward their wife, the more violent the wife is toward her children. Wives who were victims of violence that is sufficiently severe to meet the popular conception of wife beating had the highest rates of child abuse. . . Victimization in the family starts in infancy and, for half of all American children, continues until they leave home. Moreover, for one out of seven chifdren the violence is severe enough to be classified as child abuse. (p. 42 1)
The data from the two national surveys (conducted in 1975 and 1985) indicate that children subjected to a high amount of physical violence at home are significantly more likely to have temper tantrums, and 143
144
Book Reviews
trouble making friends; fail grades in school; act out in school contexts; are physically assaultive in school and elsewhere; have poorer self-esteem; have higher rates of vandalism, theft, and arrest; and indulge in drinking and drug abuse. The persuasive evidence from this book indicates that family violence is widely prevalent, intergenerational and a deep-seated structural problem in American society. However, in a final chapter Straus and Smith do propose some possibilities for primary prevention after identifying what they see as causes of family violence: poor problem-solving skills within families; male dominance in family and society; cultural norms permitting family violence; socialization ofchildren in family contexts for later violence; and the pervasiveness of violence in all areas of American society. Perhaps what is also needed now are more experimental and small scale community studies which can show how particular types of intervention can reduce the prevalence of family violence, the abuse of children, and the transmission of violence to new generations. In measurement terms, too, one would like to see the CTS expanded to include violence which was independent of any particular type of conflict resolution, more studies on behavioral validity (including laboratory work), and the extension of a new measure of family violence to include sexual violence against women and children. A number of the chapters in this book have been published previously, but there is much new data and interpretation of the two national surveys. This book is an essential acquisition for all academic and college libraries. CHRISTOPHERBAGLEY
Learning to be Strong: Developing assertiveness ing Perspectives Ltd., UK, 1990. 39 pp.
with young children. Pen Green Family Centre. Chang-
This is a modest though informative large soft-back report, illustrated with children’s drawings of Pen Green Family Centre’s experience during 1988-1989 of developing an aspect of the nursery curriculum, stemming from a shared staff and parental concern, to help children make sense of their social environment in order to learn further ways of protecting themselves and being assertive in a variety of situations. The Centre, founded in 1983 in a Midlands Industrial town suffering from social turmoil following the closure of its massive steel factories, is jointly funded by the County’s Education and Social Services Department with working links with the local Health Authority. Its progressive, non-directive philosophy, strong community orientation and high level of parental participation is described in considerable detail, but unfortunately is not matched by a detailed description of the families of children involved in the program activities or any reference as to whether disclosures of abuse resulted. All members of the nursery staff group were involved in the planning of the four fifteen-minute sessions on learning to be strong at school, outside school, how to prepare children to deal with strangers, and with different kinds of abuse. Anxieties about the latter in particular were high and staff sensibly arranged three preliminary confidence building sessions for themselves with an experienced external consultant. Subsequently they produced a list of thier own guidelines for the work, e.g., only children in their final year at nursery to be included and to be placed in mixed sex groups of four or five allowing for established friendship patterns and similar developmental stages. Each group was organized by two staff members with a third familiar person in an observer role. Only members of staff who had received police clearance were to be directly involved in the sessions and were to wear a rainbow badge as a way of showing children which adults were “safe.” Two parent support meetings were arranged beforehand and parental consent sought. A brief account of each session is provided. In the first two, considerable emphasis was placed on handling bullying (bearing in mind that these children were soon to make the transition to primary school) using role-play by workers and children. The third session ran into typical difficulties about defining strangers which for some children do not sound to have been satisfactorily resolved. The fourth discusses how children can look after themselves and the kind of touch they liked and disliked, using clothed anatomically detailed dolls. A potentially abusive scenario was set up by the
0145~2134/92 $5.00 + .oo Copyright 0 1992 Pergamon Press pk.
1992
BOOK REVIEWS
Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families. Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, Christine Smith and Colleagues. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ. 1990.622 pp. $32.95. Led by Murray Straus, Director of the Family Violence Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, a team of 14 researchers who co-author this book have conducted two national surveys in the U.S. on the manner in which family members handle conflict situations with a spouse, with a child, or with a sibling. The Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) developed for measuring these strategies does not specify clearly who initiated any particular conflict, how hard or where any particular blow, kick, or stab was directed, or whether any particular physical violence was a direct response to physical violence initiated by another. Only one early study is reported on the behavioral validity of the CTS, in which students and their parents tended to converge in their accounts of the degree and types of verbal and physical violence used in their families. But agreement on types of “reasoning” strategies was low. The authors admit that social desirability may effect responses to the CTS (many individuals will conceal from a stranger the fact of their violence against a partner or a child), but this also means that the estimates of within-family violence reported must be conservative. It is likely that the estimate from the 1985 national, random survey of 6,002 hou~hol~, which found that 13.9% of women aged under 25 had been subjected to physical assault by a spouse or partner in the past 12 months must be an underestimate. Whether social desirability effects men and women differently is not known, and this might explain the controversial finding of high rates of female to male violence reported in earlier work. Straus and his colleagues discuss this controversy (aired in previous publications) in detail, but fail to address this issue satisfactorily. The fact that the CTS may not measure violence initiated by a partner simply because he is a violent person or because he is drunk also means that the estimated rates of male on female violence may be serious underestimates. There is good concurrent or face validity for the CTS: High rates of family violence reflect families and areas with much inequality between spouses, especially male dominance; poverty and unemployment; social stress and isolation of families; heavy drinking; and poorer mental and physical health in the persons toward whom violence is expressed. Six of the 28 chapters are directly related to child abuse issues. The large majority of American families inflict physical pain on their children for a variety of reasons and degrees of rationalization. Children under 10 are those most likely to receive “normal” beating; but about 8% of adolescents receive severe or very severe assaults (punching, kicking, strapping, stabbing et al.). And these, of course, are conservative or minimal estimates. Straus argues from his data: Over 97% of American children experience physical punishment . . . such widespread use of ordinary physical punishment is one of the factors accounting for the high rate of child abuse and wife beating. . . the more parents are violent toward their children, the more violent these children are to their siblings. . . The more violent husbands are toward their wife, the more violent the wife is toward her children. Wives who were victims of violence that is sufficiently severe to meet the popular conception of wife beating had the highest rates of child abuse. . . Victimization in the family starts in infancy and, for half of all American children, continues until they leave home. Moreover, for one out of seven chifdren the violence is severe enough to be classified as child abuse. (p. 42 1)
The data from the two national surveys (conducted in 1975 and 1985) indicate that children subjected to a high amount of physical violence at home are significantly more likely to have temper tantrums, and 143
144
Book Reviews
trouble making friends; fail grades in school; act out in school contexts; are physically assaultive in school and elsewhere; have poorer self-esteem; have higher rates of vandalism, theft, and arrest; and indulge in drinking and drug abuse. The persuasive evidence from this book indicates that family violence is widely prevalent, intergenerational and a deep-seated structural problem in American society. However, in a final chapter Straus and Smith do propose some possibilities for primary prevention after identifying what they see as causes of family violence: poor problem-solving skills within families; male dominance in family and society; cultural norms permitting family violence; socialization ofchildren in family contexts for later violence; and the pervasiveness of violence in all areas of American society. Perhaps what is also needed now are more experimental and small scale community studies which can show how particular types of intervention can reduce the prevalence of family violence, the abuse of children, and the transmission of violence to new generations. In measurement terms, too, one would like to see the CTS expanded to include violence which was independent of any particular type of conflict resolution, more studies on behavioral validity (including laboratory work), and the extension of a new measure of family violence to include sexual violence against women and children. A number of the chapters in this book have been published previously, but there is much new data and interpretation of the two national surveys. This book is an essential acquisition for all academic and college libraries. CHRISTOPHERBAGLEY
Learning to be Strong: Developing assertiveness ing Perspectives Ltd., UK, 1990. 39 pp.
with young children. Pen Green Family Centre. Chang-
This is a modest though informative large soft-back report, illustrated with children’s drawings of Pen Green Family Centre’s experience during 1988-1989 of developing an aspect of the nursery curriculum, stemming from a shared staff and parental concern, to help children make sense of their social environment in order to learn further ways of protecting themselves and being assertive in a variety of situations. The Centre, founded in 1983 in a Midlands Industrial town suffering from social turmoil following the closure of its massive steel factories, is jointly funded by the County’s Education and Social Services Department with working links with the local Health Authority. Its progressive, non-directive philosophy, strong community orientation and high level of parental participation is described in considerable detail, but unfortunately is not matched by a detailed description of the families of children involved in the program activities or any reference as to whether disclosures of abuse resulted. All members of the nursery staff group were involved in the planning of the four fifteen-minute sessions on learning to be strong at school, outside school, how to prepare children to deal with strangers, and with different kinds of abuse. Anxieties about the latter in particular were high and staff sensibly arranged three preliminary confidence building sessions for themselves with an experienced external consultant. Subsequently they produced a list of thier own guidelines for the work, e.g., only children in their final year at nursery to be included and to be placed in mixed sex groups of four or five allowing for established friendship patterns and similar developmental stages. Each group was organized by two staff members with a third familiar person in an observer role. Only members of staff who had received police clearance were to be directly involved in the sessions and were to wear a rainbow badge as a way of showing children which adults were “safe.” Two parent support meetings were arranged beforehand and parental consent sought. A brief account of each session is provided. In the first two, considerable emphasis was placed on handling bullying (bearing in mind that these children were soon to make the transition to primary school) using role-play by workers and children. The third session ran into typical difficulties about defining strangers which for some children do not sound to have been satisfactorily resolved. The fourth discusses how children can look after themselves and the kind of touch they liked and disliked, using clothed anatomically detailed dolls. A potentially abusive scenario was set up by the