The Clinical Assessment of Child-Abusive Families

Abstract

In previous chapters, we considered a number of different characteristics and parent skill deficits that appear capable of producing child-abusive behavior. It should be evident, however, that an important clinical task is determining which specific factors are responsible for the abusive actions in a given family. For example, child-management deficits, lack of knowledge about children, anger-control problems, joblessness or socioeconomic stress, and child-developmental handicaps have all been found to occur disproportionately more often among abusive families. (However, these factors are based on group “mean differences” and they do not tell a clinician what variable, or set of variables, are the antecedents of abusive conduct for a given family seeking treatment.) The first task of a therapist intervening with an abusive family is to determine carefully the critical factors which lead to child maltreatment in that particular family.