Women as Ritual Experts reveals how in gender segregated religions like Orthodox Judaism women develop their own autonomous religious sphere and activities that sacralize female roles. Until recently, this female world of religion has been all but invisible to both anthropologists and scholars of religion, who typically speak as though the male sphere of religion were the only definition of religion or the sacred. By exploring this separate sphere of women's religion and demonstrating its variety, depth, and dynamism, Susan Sered here attempts to expand the definition of religion, ritual and the sacred. Sered's research was conducted among uneducated, illiterate Kurdish women. She uncovers the strategies these women have used to circumvent the patriarchal institutions of Judaism, the techniques by which they have made their lives meaningful within an androcentric culture, and how they have developed their own `little tradition' within and parallel to the `great tradition' of Torah Judaism.

While social work practice with child abuse is a well-documented topic, this revised edition of "Social Work and Child Abuse" actually challenges and changes the focus of existing literature. Instead of concerning itself with the ways in which the task of preventing and detecting child abuse can be more effectively undertaken, it presents a critical analysis of the task itself.
There has been much new guidance and regulation since the first edition of "Social Work and Child Abuse" was published in 1996, making this a timely new edition. With a brand new introduction and conclusion, this fully revised text discusses:
- the implications of Victoria Climbie Inquiry, the Laming Report, the Green Paper Every Child Matters and the 2004 Children Act
- the 1989 Children Act and the conflicting duties of the social worker to prevent and intervene in child abuse and also to promote 'the family'
- the emergence of official discourses of prevention, treatment and punishment
- the 1975 Children Act and the role of moral panic
Concluding with a call for the full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to strengthen the child protection system by giving children and young people a much stronger voice, this book is essential reading for all professionals in social and probation work, and for students in social work, social policy and criminology.

Although child neglect is the most common form of abuse, the extant research literature has mostly ignored this form of child maltreatment. Now editor Howard Dubowitz and an outstanding group of leaders in the field of child abuse and neglect offer perspectives on a range of important issues pertaining to the neglect of children. Neglected Children is the first book to focus on this most common type of child maltreatment, presenting a comprehensive and critical portrait of the phenomenon of neglect, based on theory, research, and clinical practice experience. This extensive work includes the following topics:

-Causes and contributors

-Definitions and measurement research

-Cultural issues

-Short and long-term outcomes

-Evaluation and risk assessment

-Prevention and intervention

-Prenatal substance abuse

-Fatal neglect

-Policy issues

Neglected Children conveniently captures much of what is known about child neglect and offers recommendations for future research. Researchers, clinicians, students, and policy makers in the fields of social work, child maltreatment, interpersonal violence, family studies, psychology, sociology, and public health will find this broad view of the subject essential to addressing the complex and pervasive underpinnings of child neglect.

Children throughout the world are engaged in a great number of activities classifiable as work. These range from relatively harmless, even laudable, activities like helping parents in their domestic chores, to morally and physically dangerous ones like soldiering and prostitution. If we leave out the former, we are left with what are generally called "economic" activities. Only a small minority, less than 4 percent of all working children, are estimated to be engaged in what ILO defines as the "unconditional" worst forms of child labour. The absolute number of children estimated to be engaged in the latter is, however, a stunning 8.4 million. Should we only be concerned about the worst forms of child labour? Most forms of child labour other than the worst ones have valuable learning-by-doing elements. Furthermore, child labour produces current income. If the family is credit rationed, child labour relaxes the liquidity constraint and increases current consumption. There is thus a trade-off between present and future consumption. To the extent that current consumption has a positive effect on future health (hence, on the child's future earning capacity and, more generally, utility), this trade-off may be lower than one might think. This book provides a blend of theory, empirical analysis and policy discussion. The first three chapters develop a fairly comprehensive theory of child labour, and related variables such as fertility, and infant mortality. Chapter 4, concerned with the effects of trade, contains both theory and cross-country empirical evidence. The remaining chapters are country studies, aimed at illustrating and testing different aspects of the theory in different geographical contexts. These chapters apply the latest developments in microeconometric methodology for dealing with endogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and the evaluation of public intervention.

Know what signs indicate a child molester! Revealing the secret but successful strategies used by child molesters allows adults to intervene long before children are abused. The Socially Skilled Child Molester: Differentiating the Guilty from the Falsely Accused identifies how socially proficient molesters successfully ingratiate themselves into families and communities. The book closely examines their techniques and strategies while detailing the tools for prevention. The difficult issue of false accusation is tackled by learning the distinctions that clearly differentiate the actions of the guilty from those who are innocent. Practical recommendations for accurately assessing danger and managing safety are provided. The Socially Skilled Child Molester focuses on the sexual deviants who 'groom' family, friends, and their community to allow their activities, though arousing suspicion, to go on without restriction. This essential source reveals their tactics. Using composite representations of various types of child molesters, the author illustrates through case history and detailed research how these offenders succeed, while providing recommendations on how communities can stop enabling and protecting such individuals. The Socially Skilled Child Molester discusses in depth: 'groomers' versus 'grabbers' common misperceptions about child molesters the groomer profile-the different types groomer strategies for manipulation correctly differentiating between pedophiles and the falsely accused predicting risk the key concerns when interviewing child molesters the three levels of child molesters recidivism for the sexual deviant. The Socially Skilled Child Molester comprehensively brings together helpful strategies and vital information essential for parents, lawmakers, police, teachers, and therapists.

How can professionals build constructive relationships with families where the parents dispute professional allegations of serious child abuse? How can meaningful safety for children be created in these families? How can professionals work together constructively in such cases? Situations where parents refute child abuse allegations made against them are often deemed to be impossible or untreatable by statutory and treatment professionals. These cases can consume enormous amounts of professional time and energy and frequently become bogged down by ongoing professional-family mistrust and dispute. Often, the decision to close such cases comes about not because the children are safe, but rather because the professionalsrun out of ideas, time and energy.

"Working with 'Denied' Child Abuse" presents an innovative, safety-focused, partnership-based, model called Resolutions, which provides an alternative approach for responding rigourously and creatively to such cases. It describes each stage of this practical model and demonstrates the approach through many case examples from therapists, statutory social workers and other professionals working in Europe, North America and Australasia. The book is key reading for legal, health and social care professionals working in the area of child protection.

The past few decades have brought to light increasing evidence of systemic and repeated institutional abuse of children and young people in many western nations. Government enquiries, research studies and media reports have begun to highlight the widespread nature of sexual, physical and emotional abuse of vulnerable children and young people. However, while public attention has focused on 'episodic-dramatic' representations of institutional abuse, comparatively little emphasis has been given to the more mundane, routinized and systemic nature of abuse that has occurred. This book documents comprehensively a full range of abuse occurring in 'caring' and 'protective' institutions, with particular reference to the Australian case. The dominant theme is 'betrayal' and in particular the ways in which agencies charged with the care and protection of children and young people become the sites of abusive practices. The authors draw on a range of theoretical frameworks to explore issues of trust and betrayal in the context of the professional and ethical obligations which workers have to those in their charge. The authors argue that it is not sufficient merely to report on accounts of institutional abuse or the consequences of particular practices; rather it is necessary to locate the prevalence of institutional abuse in the wider context of institutional practices as they relate to the 'governance' of particular sections of the population.

Get the tools to coordinate a plan in your community! The highly anticipated Ending Child Abuse: New Efforts in Prevention, Investigation, and Training presents an exciting vision: to end or significantly reduce child abuse. Respected social scientists and legal scholars discuss empirically sound short- and long- term multidisciplinary strategies that can be implemented in our society. Innovative and well-established concepts and approaches are clearly presented, such as specialized education, rational preventative methods, effective investigation and prosecution strategies, and the analysis of factors that influence law enforcement investigations and child abuse prevention efforts. Several obstacles stand in the way of the elimination of child abuse, such as the failure to investigate most child abuse reports, inadequate training of frontline child protection professionals, lack of financial resources, and the dilemma that child abuse is not addressed at the youngest ages. Ending Child Abuse: New Efforts in Prevention, Investigation, and Training tackles these problems and others with practical guidelines and aggressive creative strategies that can be applied to every community in the United States. This collection is impeccably referenced and soundly supported with research. Ending Child Abuse: New Efforts in Prevention, Investigation, and Training discusses: implementation of a model curriculum in child advocacy for undergraduate and graduate institutions forensic interview training extensive education of the nation's child protection professionals development and funding of prevention programs at the community level educational reforms of Montclair State University in New Jersey designed to better prepare professionals who advocate for children research-based interview techniques with best practice guidelines possible broader social and system-level reforms vertical prosecution of child abuse caseswith a model for its operation Ending Child Abuse: New Efforts in Prevention, Investigation, and Training is an ambitious eye-opening source perfect for social services professionals, mental health professionals, practitioners, researchers, educators, students, and medical and legal professionals who deal with child abuse and children's welfare.

Taking into account ambiguities in the relationship between childhood abuse experiences, formation of self- destructive personality styles, and subsequent psychotherapy, the author presents a working model that is useful without limiting the practitioner.

Building upon the theoretical work of Ferenczi, Fairbairn, and Berliner, the author describes four basic relational patterns in the lives of abused children: the reliving of abusive relationships, either as victim or as perpetrator; identification with the aggressor; masochistic self-blame; and the seeking of object contact though sex or violence. The interweaving of these patterns creates what Dr. Prior calls "relational dilemmas." According to him, these four basic relational patterns are held in place by the child's profound fear of falling into primitive states of unrelatedness and consequent annihilation anxiety. For example, the abused child believes that victimization by or identification with the bad object, no matter how horrible that may be, is preferable to the psychic disintegration that complete nonrelatedness creates. Dilemmas of this nature tear apart the child's psyche, leading to unstable and tormented models of self, other, and relationship. Object Relations in Severe Trauma provides sensitive understanding of childhood traumatization and a conceptual and technical framework for the treatment of patients both children and adults who have suffered from it."

Written by a psychologist who has worked with families and foster children for 11 years, Treating Families and Children in the Child Protective System is designed for therapists, social workers, family preservationists, court officers, attorneys, judges, and others caught up in the interplay of child protection. Using theory and compelling case studies, the author posits child abuse as an ultimate form of family injustice, requiring intervention at every level of the system. The author proposes a critically optimistic stance, approaching each case as a family-friend with practical and powerful tools to direct the overwhelming power of the system into a force for the restoration of family justice.

More than 40,000 children die daily in the developing world from avoidable sickness and disease. Tens of millions of children labour in mines, mills and sweatshops, or scavenge for a living on city streets and dumps. In the so-called developed world, children's lives are similarly blighted by drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and violence. Children of the rich are unhealthily obsessed with consumerist desires while children of the poor suffer from lack of opportunity. The global market is responsible for both of these ills. In Children of Other Worlds Jeremy Seabrook examines the international exploitation of children and exposes the hypocrisy, piety and moral blindness that have informed so much of the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook insists that the whole question of protecting children's rights must take into consideration the structural abuses of humanity that are inherent in globalisation.

Helping teens to work through trauma resolution and emerge as healthy survivors can prove frustrating for therapists who find there is so little material or references available for this age group. By adolescence, boys and girls have already identified themselves with the role of victim and skilled support is required if they are to move beyond their perceived helplessness to achieve a real sense of empowerment and control of their lives. As an outgrowth of their own professional struggles with this issue, Cheryl L. Karp, Traci L. Butler, and Sage C. Bergstrom have compiled Treatment Strategies for Abused Adolescents and the accompanying activity manual, which together provide a practical and accessible package of theory and hands-on activities, specifically designed for use by practitioners in either individual or group settings. Case studies are included in each chapter of the treatment manual to demonstrate just how some of the activities have been used in actual therapeutic situations and the authors highlight their four-phase approach to recovery that covers building the therapeutic relationship, processing the abuse, repairing the sense of self, and becoming more "future oriented." Providing the major tools needed to successfully work with this age group as they journey toward healing, Treatment Strategies for Abused Adolescents and its companion activity manual are truly a must-have package for mental health practitioners as well as advanced students and interns who work with physically, sexually, and emotionally abused teenagers.

The turn of the 1990s saw a number of high profile public inquiries into the handling of child sexual abuse cases in Great Britain. Governing Child Sexual Abuse examines the implications of these inquiries on the regulation of relationships between families and the state. In so doing, Samantha Ashenden brings a number of contemporary debates in social and political theory to bear upon the governance of child sexual abuse. In particular, drawing on the work of Foucault and Habermas, she looks at:

*how to analyze the boundary between public and private spheres
*the legal and scientific determination of legitimate intervention
*the relationship between democracy and expertise in the governance of social life.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, the sociology of law, and social policy.

It is conservatively estimated that one in every seven boys will be sexually abused before the age of eighteen. Since mental health care providers are faced with treating the victims of these statistics, there is a real and continuing need for this book. Also, the number of courses focusing on abuse and violence are rapidly increasing in schools across the country. Sexual Abuse of Males is one of the first books to explore the sexual abuse of boys, in all its complexity, within a psychosocial context of multiple vantage points. It is based on the life histories of hundreds of sexually abused boys and adult men with histories of sexual abuse. It incorporates the perpetrator in order to develop a multi-dimensional understanding of dynamics and effects, the model itself guided and informed by practice and research.

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Child pornography, particularly that available via the Internet, has become a cause of huge social concern in recent years. This book examines the reality behind the often hysterical media coverage of the topic. Drawing on extensive new research findings, it examines how child pornography is used on the Internet and the social context in which such use occurs, and develops a model of offending behaviour to better help understand and deal with the processes of offending. Detailed case studies and offenders' own accounts are used to illustrate the processes involved in offending and treatment.
The authors argue that we need to refine our ideas of offending, and that while severe deterrents need to be associated with possession of child pornography, a better understanding is needed of the links between possession and committing a contact offence. Only by improving our understanding of this complex and very controversial topic can we hope to deal effectively with offenders and with their child victims. This is a book which will become an essential read for anyone involved with offenders or victims from a psychological, judicial or social background.

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This groundbreaking book presents a new model for working with survivors of abuse and other trauma. The Healing Tasks Model, based on developmental stages of healing with specific tasks for each stage, offers the clinician new support for threading through the sometimes overwhelming complexities of the survivor's experience. At the same time, Kepner's model helps to avoid some of the common pitfalls and risks of work in this most challenging of clinical areas, such as pushing clients to express and remember before they have developed the capacity to manage such intensity, or encouraging confrontation and interpersonal interactions that the survivor doesn't yet have the developmental underpinnings to support.

Using the Healing Tasks Model the clinician will find techniques for helping clients develop emotional and systemic supports, manage feelings, and set appropriate boundaries. Readers will also find a guide to dealing with the difficult and troubling issues of memory: how to approach abuse memories, when and how to take action based on abuse memories, when to defer action pending the development of more supports and capacities for the survivor, and then how to develop those essential supports and capacities.

Written for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, pastoral counselors, and adult survivors of childhood abuse, Healing Tasks provides a therapeutic model that can be used to help abuse survivors develop the emotional skilles to lead richer and more fulfilling lives.

Beginning in the 1990s, the contentious "memory wars" divided psychologists into two schools of thought: that adults' recovered memories of childhood abuse were generally true, or that they were generally not, calling theories, therapies, professional ethics, and survivor credibility into question. More recently, findings from cognitive psychology and neuroimaging as well as new theoretical constructs are bringing balance, if not reconciliation, to this polarizing debate. Based on presentations at the 2010 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, True and False Recovered Memories: Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate assembles an expert panel of scholars, professors, and clinicians to update and expand research and knowledge about the complex interaction of cognitive, emotional, and motivational factors involved in remembering-and forgetting-severe childhood trauma. Contrasting viewpoints, elaborations on existing ideas, challenges to accepted models, and intriguing experimental data shed light on such issues as the intricacies of identity construction in memory, post-trauma brain development, and the role of suggestive therapeutic techniques in creating false memories. Taken together, these papers add significant new dimensions to a rapidly evolving field. Featured in the coverage: The cognitive neuroscience of true and false memories. Toward a cognitive-neurobiological model of motivated forgetting. The search for repressed memory. A theoretical framework for understanding recovered memory experiences. Cognitive underpinnings of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Motivated forgetting and misremembering: perspectives from betrayal trauma theory. Clinical and cognitive psychologists on all sides of the debate will welcome True and False Recovered Memories as a trustworthy reference, an impartial guide to ongoing controversies, and a springboard for future inquiry.

This thought-provoking volume defines child abuse and neglect as a public health crisis, both in terms of injuries and mental health problems and as a link to poverty and other negative social outcomes. The author identifies key factors contributing to this situation-in particular juvenile ageism, the pervasive othering of children and youth-coupled with the assumption of parental competence until severe abuse or neglect proves otherwise. The book's practical answers to these complex issues involve recognizing and balancing the rights of parents and children, and responding to the diverse needs of new, competent, and dysfunctional families. To this end, a comprehensive prevention model is outlined, featuring primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions. Included in the coverage: * Child abuse and neglect in the United States * The impact of juvenile ageism on individuals * The devaluation of parenthood * The rights and needs of newborn babies and young children * Overcoming our crisis-recoil response * Barriers to change and hope for the future Dealing with Child Abuse and Neglect as Public Health Problems should engage professionals in the public health, healthcare, and social services sectors. It should also attract parents in struggling families as well as other laypersons, such as policymakers and child advocates, interested in improving current social conditions.

from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders... The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account...