Violence in families: an overview.

Wife-beating, child battering, sexual abuse, parricide ... these are some of the manifestations of violence in families. There are many others, including emotional violence as well as physically destructive behavior shown by one family member to another or to others outside the family. Is such violent behavior on the increase, or are we just more clearly aware of its existence because of better means of communication and because we have instituted beginning methods for dealing with such behavior in our society? Newer laws are passed to deal with the battered child and to require the reporting of child abuse. Increasingly, we read of killings within families and of the ever-present rise in violent behavior by our adolescents, both individually and in gangs. Some have blamed television. Rothenberg reported recently, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, on his study of 146 articles in behavioral science journals representing SO studies involving 10,000 children and adolescents from every background, showing that violence viewing produces increased aggressive behavior in the young and that "immediate remedial action in terms of television programming is warranted."l Others, such as Heller and Polsky,2 have taken a more cautious view in interpreting these data. Does in fact the adage "violence begets violence" hold up from parent to child? Those who have studied the child abuse problem have indicated that this is so. In fact, a high proportion of parents who abuse children have histories of themselves having been abused as youngsters. In his paper, "The Lethal Situation: Transmission of Urge to Kill from Parent to Child," Dr. Douglas Sargent3 documents two separate cases of children who killed siblings. He focuses the presentation on the murderous wishes of adults that were communicated to and acted upon by their children. In a previous paper that I had presented on parricide,4 two cases indicated-an indication supported by the literature-that the parents who were victims of killing by their adolescent sons had brought about their own deaths by encouraging their children to kill them. Violence may be seen as any destructive act, physical or emotional, that occurs between people. Within families, it means destructive behavior among members or to others outside the family. Because of the changing family structure in our society from the extended family of the past to the disrupted or broken family more prevalent today, we may note varying degrees of emotional and physical violence. There is no one family structure any more in America; there are single-parent families, parent-less families, several families with grandparents and a few remaining family communities within large cities or in corners of small towns. The family basically has changed throughout the century and has abandoned a number of its previous functions and responsibilities to its members. Community institutions have been established to take up the slack by fulfilling these functions. In his monograph, "Mental Health and the Law: A System in Transition,"S Alan Stone offers the following idea as the recurring theme of his presentation: "The provision of