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What children can tell us
Book
Reviews
603
in whom sexual abuse was suspected and about whom they were consulted by attorneys. As in their prior book, Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse, they affect a scientific and rational approach; however, a strong bias pervades this work. The title itself uses the term “interrogations” with its implication of coercion rather than the neutral term “interviews” which would be preferred by most workers in this field. The same approach is carried through to the chapter headings where we find “Training to be Psychotic,” “Training to Hate Father,” “Training Children to Produce Detailed False Accounts, ” “Training Children in Deviant Sexuality,” and other alarming phrases. The authors’ bias is revealed in these headings. The experience of these authors is small in relation to the numbers of children being reported as possibly sexually abused in any large community today. They provide no evidence of any kind that the cases referred to them represent common or standard practice in the interviewing of children. Thus their argument that their sample reflects a “real world” is unsupported by facts. Thirty-six of their 330 cases have been systematically analyzed using a scoring system which may in itself introduce bias since it allows raters to record certain behaviors and not others. (Children’s statements which are spontaneous or which contain confirming detail are not recordable in their scoring system.) Nine interviews are presented in detail, each to support the hypothesis contained in a chapter heading such as “Training Children to be Psychotic.” No data are presented which indicate that any child has ever been rendered psychotic by being interviewed about sexual abuse. The interviews presented in the other chapters also fail to prove the hypothesis implied in the alarming chapter headings. The authors fail to mention any consent process which would allow them to ethically study and publish interviews. They appear to be in possession of a number of interview tapes, but whether this possession is authorized by courts or by the adults or children shown or discussed in the tapes is never revealed. Professionals seeking to learn about the “real world’ of interviews of children suspected of being sexually abused will find little to assist them in this book. Supervised experiences in interviewing may be obtained in a number of child abuse centers, and in such training programs professionals can judge for themselves if children are being trained to be psychotic or trained in sexual deviancy. In addition, there are now a number of texts which provide credible descriptions of how assessments about sexual abuse are carried out. DAVID L. CHADWICK Center for Child Protection Children’s Hospital San Diego, CA
What Children Can Tell Us. James Garbarino, Frances Stott, and Faculty of the Erikson Institute. Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1990. 3 17 pp. Hardcover $24.95. THIS IS A CAREFULLY RESEARCHED and timely volume on communicating with children. The fourteen chapters have been written by different members of the Erikson Institute in Chicago, but the principal authors, psychologists Garbarino and Stott, have made an excellent job of coordinating these contributions, and this does not have the disjointed quality of many edited collections. The unifying theme is that children can be important sources of information ifwe are prepared to listen to them and if we have the appropriate skills to elicit and then understand their communications. The authors’ basic premise is that for adults to communicate effectively with children, they require an understanding of child psychology, coupled with a degree of self awareness, and appropriate interviewing and observation skills. The book could be loosely divided into three parts: an up-to-date review of the relevant developmental literature; a comprehensive discussion on interviewing and other assessment procedures; and thirdly, a detailed examination of the problems of communicating with children in a number of specific situations. While this is not a developmental textbook, the summaries of the literature relating to children’s self-esteem, coping, cognition, language, and cultural factors are pertinent and of practical value. Adult biases and expectations are examined in the light of a number of interesting new
604
Book Reviews
studies, and this is good material for reducing complacency in “experienced professionals.” Four chapters deal expertly with different kinds of interviews and assessments, and the various procedures advocated for gathering information from child abuse victims receive a suitably critical appraisal. Specific interviewing situations examined in detail include children in care (including daycare), children receiving medical treatment, and children required to give evidence as witnesses or victims. These chapters are clearly written and are topical information sources both for professionals working with children and for those teaching developmental psychology who wish to find good examples of practical problems. One of the strengths of the book is the insertion of brief “Practice Guidelines” in every chapter. These are sensible and well-founded pieces of advice, which represent a laudable attempt to translate theory into practice. What Children Can Tell Us is an important addition to the literature on both child development and professional interviewing practices. The authors are to be commended for their skill in meeting their stated aims of writing neither a developmental textbook nor an interviewer’s cookbook, and yet they have managed to synthesize the essential elements of both.
RHONAFLIN
Robert Gordon’s Institute qfTechno1og.v Aberdeen. Scotland Children of Battered Women. Peter G. Jaffe, David A. Wolfe, and Susan Kaye Wilson. Park, CA, 1990. 132 pp. Hardcover $19.95, Softcover $12.95.
Sage, Newbury
THIS BOOK IS PART of the Sage series in Developmental Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry. As such, it is a compact volume aimed at improving the practitioner’s grasp of the theoretical and practical issues he or she will face in dealing with children who are part of abusive families. This issue-the effects on children of living with and witnessing the maltreatment of their mothers by their fathers or father-surrogates-has risen to a prominent position in our field in recent years. This rise is part of the maturation of the field, in which we have come to recognize the interconnections of family violence phenomena. There exists a theoretical continuum of family violence. At one end is the situation in which violence is perpetrated in the context of a well-functioning family system. At the other end of this continuum is violence in the context of total family breakdown. While neither “pure type” accounts for a great deal of the real world phenomena, the intermediatry points do. This book is a useful attempt to describe the whys and hows of families where the focal point of concern is spousal violence-mostly violence against mothers: The phrase “. .children of battered women refers to children who have repeatedly witnessed severe acts of emotional and physical abuse directed at their mother by her intimate partner” (p. 17). It is encouraging that the authors include psychological maltreatment in their definition. The growing recognition that any discussion of abuse without psychological maltreatment is incomplete is a sign of our fields maturation. By and large, battered women are battered mothers (nearly three quarters of women seeking shelter from programs have children with them). The book does a good job of reviewing research and clinical practice with these families, based in part upon the authors’ first hand experiences with them. They offer an interesting array of service possibilities and strategies. One of the interesting “cutting edge” issues addressed in the book is the need to prepare professionals to interact effectively with children in the diagnostic and treatment stages ofintervention. Children must serve as important sources of information in many cases-information that serves forensic and programmatic purposes. This requires that professionals improve their competence in eliciting and interpreting information from children. This is no easy matter, particularly in dealing with emotionally and socially charged issues with children who quite rightly may be skeptical of the ability of adults to manage things well. The book points to this need, but the reader-user will need to go beyond it for more in-depth preparation to achieve the needed competence as a communicator with children. However, a small book
Reviews
603
in whom sexual abuse was suspected and about whom they were consulted by attorneys. As in their prior book, Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse, they affect a scientific and rational approach; however, a strong bias pervades this work. The title itself uses the term “interrogations” with its implication of coercion rather than the neutral term “interviews” which would be preferred by most workers in this field. The same approach is carried through to the chapter headings where we find “Training to be Psychotic,” “Training to Hate Father,” “Training Children to Produce Detailed False Accounts, ” “Training Children in Deviant Sexuality,” and other alarming phrases. The authors’ bias is revealed in these headings. The experience of these authors is small in relation to the numbers of children being reported as possibly sexually abused in any large community today. They provide no evidence of any kind that the cases referred to them represent common or standard practice in the interviewing of children. Thus their argument that their sample reflects a “real world” is unsupported by facts. Thirty-six of their 330 cases have been systematically analyzed using a scoring system which may in itself introduce bias since it allows raters to record certain behaviors and not others. (Children’s statements which are spontaneous or which contain confirming detail are not recordable in their scoring system.) Nine interviews are presented in detail, each to support the hypothesis contained in a chapter heading such as “Training Children to be Psychotic.” No data are presented which indicate that any child has ever been rendered psychotic by being interviewed about sexual abuse. The interviews presented in the other chapters also fail to prove the hypothesis implied in the alarming chapter headings. The authors fail to mention any consent process which would allow them to ethically study and publish interviews. They appear to be in possession of a number of interview tapes, but whether this possession is authorized by courts or by the adults or children shown or discussed in the tapes is never revealed. Professionals seeking to learn about the “real world’ of interviews of children suspected of being sexually abused will find little to assist them in this book. Supervised experiences in interviewing may be obtained in a number of child abuse centers, and in such training programs professionals can judge for themselves if children are being trained to be psychotic or trained in sexual deviancy. In addition, there are now a number of texts which provide credible descriptions of how assessments about sexual abuse are carried out. DAVID L. CHADWICK Center for Child Protection Children’s Hospital San Diego, CA
What Children Can Tell Us. James Garbarino, Frances Stott, and Faculty of the Erikson Institute. Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1990. 3 17 pp. Hardcover $24.95. THIS IS A CAREFULLY RESEARCHED and timely volume on communicating with children. The fourteen chapters have been written by different members of the Erikson Institute in Chicago, but the principal authors, psychologists Garbarino and Stott, have made an excellent job of coordinating these contributions, and this does not have the disjointed quality of many edited collections. The unifying theme is that children can be important sources of information ifwe are prepared to listen to them and if we have the appropriate skills to elicit and then understand their communications. The authors’ basic premise is that for adults to communicate effectively with children, they require an understanding of child psychology, coupled with a degree of self awareness, and appropriate interviewing and observation skills. The book could be loosely divided into three parts: an up-to-date review of the relevant developmental literature; a comprehensive discussion on interviewing and other assessment procedures; and thirdly, a detailed examination of the problems of communicating with children in a number of specific situations. While this is not a developmental textbook, the summaries of the literature relating to children’s self-esteem, coping, cognition, language, and cultural factors are pertinent and of practical value. Adult biases and expectations are examined in the light of a number of interesting new
604
Book Reviews
studies, and this is good material for reducing complacency in “experienced professionals.” Four chapters deal expertly with different kinds of interviews and assessments, and the various procedures advocated for gathering information from child abuse victims receive a suitably critical appraisal. Specific interviewing situations examined in detail include children in care (including daycare), children receiving medical treatment, and children required to give evidence as witnesses or victims. These chapters are clearly written and are topical information sources both for professionals working with children and for those teaching developmental psychology who wish to find good examples of practical problems. One of the strengths of the book is the insertion of brief “Practice Guidelines” in every chapter. These are sensible and well-founded pieces of advice, which represent a laudable attempt to translate theory into practice. What Children Can Tell Us is an important addition to the literature on both child development and professional interviewing practices. The authors are to be commended for their skill in meeting their stated aims of writing neither a developmental textbook nor an interviewer’s cookbook, and yet they have managed to synthesize the essential elements of both.
RHONAFLIN
Robert Gordon’s Institute qfTechno1og.v Aberdeen. Scotland Children of Battered Women. Peter G. Jaffe, David A. Wolfe, and Susan Kaye Wilson. Park, CA, 1990. 132 pp. Hardcover $19.95, Softcover $12.95.
Sage, Newbury
THIS BOOK IS PART of the Sage series in Developmental Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry. As such, it is a compact volume aimed at improving the practitioner’s grasp of the theoretical and practical issues he or she will face in dealing with children who are part of abusive families. This issue-the effects on children of living with and witnessing the maltreatment of their mothers by their fathers or father-surrogates-has risen to a prominent position in our field in recent years. This rise is part of the maturation of the field, in which we have come to recognize the interconnections of family violence phenomena. There exists a theoretical continuum of family violence. At one end is the situation in which violence is perpetrated in the context of a well-functioning family system. At the other end of this continuum is violence in the context of total family breakdown. While neither “pure type” accounts for a great deal of the real world phenomena, the intermediatry points do. This book is a useful attempt to describe the whys and hows of families where the focal point of concern is spousal violence-mostly violence against mothers: The phrase “. .children of battered women refers to children who have repeatedly witnessed severe acts of emotional and physical abuse directed at their mother by her intimate partner” (p. 17). It is encouraging that the authors include psychological maltreatment in their definition. The growing recognition that any discussion of abuse without psychological maltreatment is incomplete is a sign of our fields maturation. By and large, battered women are battered mothers (nearly three quarters of women seeking shelter from programs have children with them). The book does a good job of reviewing research and clinical practice with these families, based in part upon the authors’ first hand experiences with them. They offer an interesting array of service possibilities and strategies. One of the interesting “cutting edge” issues addressed in the book is the need to prepare professionals to interact effectively with children in the diagnostic and treatment stages ofintervention. Children must serve as important sources of information in many cases-information that serves forensic and programmatic purposes. This requires that professionals improve their competence in eliciting and interpreting information from children. This is no easy matter, particularly in dealing with emotionally and socially charged issues with children who quite rightly may be skeptical of the ability of adults to manage things well. The book points to this need, but the reader-user will need to go beyond it for more in-depth preparation to achieve the needed competence as a communicator with children. However, a small book