This book is about the experience of individuals who have been abused or who have abused others, but it also traces the way an abusive experience can organize a family or professional system so that changes are difficult to achieve. The author has been in the forefront of the child abuse field for many years, and he discusses in this volume the way his thinking has changed to incorporate the ideas from the feminist movement and the constructionist family therapists. He looks at the way victimizing actions and the traumatic effects of abuse combine to create a trauma-organized system, which includes the individual, the family, the professional helpers, the community, and the cultural values. The author describes the characteristics of these systems and a diagnostic procedure to help the workers plan the treatment.
Editors Foreword , Foreword , Introduction , The family as a violent
institution: a sociological perspective , Family violence: explanatory models
to describe violent and abusive families , Developing a
social-interactionalsystemic account of family violence , Family
victimization processes and social-interaction explanations for family
violence , A systematic account of the different trauma-organized systems in
various forms of family violence , Trauma-organized systems: breaking the
denial process by externalizing , A focal model to encompass the descriptions
of the trauma-determined family system , Treating the trauma-organized system
, The treatment process in trauma-organized systems
Arnon Bentovim
