Richard Gelles

University of Pennsylvania | UP · The Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence

This study applies the ecological conceptual model in examining the rates and risk factors of both severe and minor physical assault perpetration and victimisation among university students in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China. Data were from the International Dating Violence Study. The analysis employed a generalised mixed effect model. Finding...

Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat offer new means of communication, networking, and community building. Social media are mechanisms by which millions of people spread, share, and exchange information—ranging from sports and politics, to health and illness. Twitter users, in particular, also build communities on topi...

The study examines the similarities and differences between China and the United States with regard to rape myths. We assessed the individual level of rape myth acceptance among Chinese university students by adapting and translating a widely used measure of rape myth endorsement in the United States, the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance (IRMA) scale....

This online title is a fascinating mix of historical beginnings, current developments, representative subspecialties of psychiatry, and several allied disciplines and their impact on forensic psychiatry. Furthermore, it also includes neuro-scientific research and how it translates to civic and criminal case work. Judges, attorneys, law professors a...

Police intervention is a primary response to intimate partner violence (IPV) but does not guarantee a victim's future safety. This study sought to identify factors associated with IPV survivors' perceptions of safety and risk of revictimization following police intervention. One hundred sixty-four women completed a questionnaire, and 11 of those wo...

Data are presented from a pilot study that tested the initial effectiveness of the Dialectical Psychoeducational Workshop (DPEW) in reducing the potential risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). A randomized controlled trial (RCT) of an experimental intervention (DPEW), and a control condition, the first session of an eight-week anger management...

Current programs aimed at reducing intimate partner violence (IPV) have demonstrated little effect on at-risk males, who may potentially engage in acts of IPV. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) provides the conceptual and empirical foundation for the dialectical psychoeducational workshop (DPEW). The DPEW offers a targeted preventative interventio...

Mattering is the extent to which people believe they make a difference in the world around them. This study hypothesizes that adolescents who believe they matter less to their families will more likely threaten or engage in intrafamily physical violence. The data come from a national sample of 2,004 adolescents. Controlling for respondents’ age, ge...

The Main Organizational Task is Decision MakingGate 1: ScreeningGate 2: InvestigationsGates 3 and 4: Placement and ServicesConclusions References

Intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization is typically not a one-time event and, in many cases, a victim experiences multiple incidents of victimization from the same offender over time, sometimes even after an offender has been arrested. The purpose of this study was to identify the factors associated with female IPV survivors' perceptions of...

In this article, we review the ethical and legal dilemmas regarding the admission of convicted felons and study the practices used by American schools of social work. An important finding is that schools that are proactively engaged in asking for and processing felony conviction information are also more ethically engaged.

This study examined how child protective services (CPS) systems respond to initial and subsequent reports in the context of child maltreatment rereporting and to what extent CPS system factors are associated with the risk of rereporting after controlling for abuse type and child and family factors. This study followed 67,243 families who were repor...

This study investigated the patterns and risk factors of multiple child maltreatment recurrence compared to single recurrence and no recurrence. The sample was drawn from all the records of Child Protective Services (CPS) in seven Florida counties covering 5.4Â years, resulting in a study population of 32,163 families with one or more substantiated...

The child welfare system in the United States is in crisis. Despite funding and staffing increasing, and despite legislative changes and reforms, the system still cannot meet the mandate to protect children from harm and assist caregivers and families. This paper argues that one of the key factors limiting the effectiveness of the child welfare sys...

As states struggle to secure resources for the child welfare systems, they continue to face the on-going fact that more than half of child abuse and neglect investigations result in no finding of abuse or neglect. In addition, funding for services for those families and children substantiated for abuse or neglect is primarily provided by local or s...

Combining theoretical and ethnographic material, this paper outlines why time is an important vehicle for analyzing the social organization of television news work and the social construction of television news. The paper investigates major events with problematic features—unscheduled “hard news”—as a means of understanding basic beliefs and organi...

This study examined the extent that abuse type and substantiation recur as the same type or different type of abuse; as well as the factors that differentiate the risk of each type of recurrence. The sample was drawn from all the records of Child Protective Services (CPS) in ten Florida counties covering 5.4 years, resulting in a study population o...

Too few studies have assessed the relationship between youth risk behaviors and religiosity using measures which captured the varied extent to which youth are engaged in religion. This study applied three measures of religiosity and risk behaviors. In addition, this study ascertained information about youths' participation in religious activities f...

This article examines the issue of how research is utilized, abused, and misused in policy and practice in the area of intimate partner violence (IPV). The article reviews and critically analyzes facts set forth for the purpose of claiming that IPV is a significant social problem and finds that many of these facts lack empirical support. The lack o...

In “Child Maltreatment and Foster Care,” Richard J. Gelles, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, reports what is known about the incidence of child maltreatment and foster care placement rates since welfare reform. He relies on four major sources of data: Current Trends in Child Abuse Reporting and Fatalities: Result...

Martin Guggenheim, What's Wrong with Children's Rights Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 320.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed an inadequate local and national response system to major disasters. More important, the inadequate preparation and response to the hurricane disproportionately impacted on the poor and disadvantaged who, having no means to flee, were left behind in a flooding city to fend for themselves. The plight of tw...

Mattering is the belief that one makes a difference in the lives of others. We explore the effect of mattering on adolescent suicide ideation. The data source is the 2000 Youth At Risk Survey, composed of interviews with 2,004 youths, age 11–18 and screening interviews with their parents. Our analysis reveals that those who matter more are signific...

The development of empirically based behavioral and psychological typologies provides clear evidence that offenders vary across types. A review and synthesis of the literature reveals three types of batterers common across current typology research-a low, moderate, and high-risk offender. Examination of these types demonstrates that most male offen...

Violence against family caregivers by their adult relatives with severe mental illness is a taboo area of public discourse and scientific research because of fears of further stigmatizing this population. Yet, these families experience violence at a rate estimated to be between 10% and 40%, which is considerably higher than the general population....

Using the secularization theory and the Marxistnotion of religion as masking class conscienceone would expect the importance of religion andreligious involvement today to wane and belimited to lower class members. To challenge thisexpectation, using a representative nationaltelephone survey of 2004 youth (ages 11–18) andtheir parents, we attempt to...

Im letzten Viertel des 20. Jahrhunderts wandelte sich das Thema Gewalt in der Familie von einer privaten Frage, die sich zudem infolge selektiver Nichtbeachtung als wenig bekannt erwies, zu einem sozialen Problem, das verstärkt in den Blickpunkt der Fachwelt, Öffentlichkeit und der Politik geriet. Wie wir heute wissen, ist Gewalt im sozialen Nahrau...

Programs for men who batter their intimate partners were developed in the late 1970s. Since that time, mandatory and presumptive arrest policies have increased the number of men arrested for domestic violence. Diversion into programs for batterers evolved into a standard part of a coordinated community intervention for domestic violence. Recently,...

Family preservation programs are not new. They go back at least to the turn of the 20th century with the settlement house movement, Hull House, and Jane Addams. Family preservation programs are designed to help children and families, including extended and adoptive families, that are at risk of abuse or delinquency, or are in crisis.

This paper examines the controversies over the use of family preservation policies to prevent and treat child abuse and neglect. Policies that aim to preserve families in which child maltreatment has occurred are at least a century old. However, there is renewed interest in such policies, given the dramatic rise in child abuse and neglect reports a...

The Transtheoretical Model of Change offers a promising stage-based approach to client–treatment matching to increase the efficacy of batterer treatment. This paper describes the development and validation of the URICA–Domestic Violence (URICA-DV), a four-dimensional stage measure assessing batterers' readiness to end their violence. Two hundred fi...

Examines the key assumptions that support the family reunification/family preservation policy and discusses the shortcomings of these assumptions. A child-centered policy of child protection is advocated as a more appropriate policy for child welfare agencies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Reviews the book, Family Sexual Abuse: Frontline Research and Evaluation edited by Michael Quinn Patton (see record 1991-97473-000 ). This volume is a collection of 12 chapters that report the results of various research projects focusing on sexual abuse, its nature, and effects. Six chapters provide evaluations of various treatment and interventio...

This paper presents a profile of violence toward children in the United States, based on the results from the Second National Family Violence Survey. A national probability sample of 6,002 households was surveyed by telephone in 1985, of which 3,232 households had at least one child under 18 years old living at home. Minor violence, or physical pun...

This article examines public attitudes toward specific parental discipline practices, the incidence of specific parental practices, the public's support for and involvement in child abuse prevention efforts, and the public's perceptions of the causes of child maltreatment. Data were collected from a nationally representative sample of 1,250 adults...

The study of child abuse and child homicide has been based on the often implicit assumption that there is a continuum of violence ranging from mild physical punishment to severe abuse and homicide. Empirical data supporting this assumption are sparse. Existing data can be shown, however, to support an assumption that there are distinct forms of vio...

Analyses of data on a nationally representative sample of 3,346 American parents with a child under 18 living at home found that 63% reported one or more instances of verbal aggression, such as swearing and insulting the child. Children who experienced frequent verbal aggression from parents (as measured by the Conflict Tactic Scales) exhibited hig...

This article uses data from the Second National Family Violence Survey to examine whether nongenetic caretakers are more likely than genetic caretakers to use violence and abuse towards their children. The data reveal no significant differences between genetic and nongenetic parents in the rates of severe and very severe violence towards children....

This article reviews research on family violence and sexual abuse of children in the 1980s. The first section focuses on research on changing rates of family violence, the intergenerational transmission of violence, the effects of violence on children and women, and assessments of the effectiveness of intervention strategies. The second section rev...

this chapter presented the rates of spouse abuse and child abuse from the 1985 National Family Violence Resurvey and compared those rates with estimates from other studies definition and measurement of violence and abuse violence between spouses / violence against children and by children / couple violence rates (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 20...

Descriptive and clinical accounts of wife abuse consistently report a high incidence of depression and anxiety among samples of battered women. However, these studies all suffer from methodological shortcomings such as nonrepresentative samples, small sample size, and lack of comparison groups. This study corrects many of the methodological shortco...

A national survey of six thousand households found single parents to be more likely to use abusive forms of violence toward their children than are parents in dual-caretaker households. Abusive violence appears to be a function of poverty in mother-only homes but unrelated to income among single fathers.

This article compares the rates of physical violence in black families from the First National Family Violence Survey, conducted in 1975, with the rates from the 1985 replication. It also compares these rates to the rates for white families in the same surveys. Both studies used nationally representative samples (2,143 families in 1975 and 6,002 in...

Family disturbance calls, many of which involve violence between spouses, constitute the single largest category of calls received by the police each year. In the last few years, the method of police intervention has changed from apparent indifference or compassionate mediation to firmer control and mandatory arrest. The change has occurred even th...

first half of this chapter examines the extent of violence in American families / second half of the chapter is designed to explain the paradox that the family is also the most loving and supportive group by showing that a large part of the explanation for the high rate of violence inheres in the very nature of the family and the society as it is p...

From child-battering and wife-beating to sexual abuse and marital rape, from abuse of the elderly to violence between siblings, "Intimate Violence" combines horrifying and heart-rending case studies with detailed sociological analysis of new findings that separate public myth from private reality. Gelles and Straus show that violence and abuse are...

This study compared the rate of physical abuse of children from a 1975 study with the rates from a 1985 replication study. Both studies used nationally representative samples (2,143 families in 1975 and 3,520 families in 1985), and both found an extremely high incidence of physical assaults against children which were severe enough to constitute ch...

This paper applies a structural family systems perspective to clinical intervention in violent families. The goal of the paper is to bridge the gap between theory and research and clinical intervention. The bridge is a structural family systems perspective. The paper reviews theoretical and empirical work on family violence that has employed a syst...

This article compares the rate of violence toward children from a 1975 study with the rates from a 1985 replication. Both studies used nationally representative samples (1,146 families in 1975 and 1,428 in 1985), and both found extremely high incidence of severe violence against children. However, 1985 rates, although high, were substantially lower...

This article compares the rate of physical abuse of children and spouses from a 1975 study with the rates from a 1985 replication. Both studies used nationally representative samples (2,143 families in 1975 and 3,520 in 1985), and both found an extremely high incidence of severe physical violence against children ("child abuse") and a high incidenc...

This paper reports the results of a cross-cultural comparison of violence towards children in the United States and Sweden. Data from the United States are based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,146 households with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 17 years living at home. Data from Sweden are based on interview...

Excimer fluorescence is developed as a quantitative probe of isolated chain statistics and intermolecular segment density for miscible and immiscible blends of polystyrene (PS) with poly(vinyl methyl ether) (PVME). Rotational isomeric state calculations combined with a one-dimensional random walk model are used to explain to explain the dependence...

This chapter reviews research on family violence. Once viewed as rare and confined to a few mentally ill offenders, family violence has rapidly captured public and social scientific attention. The review examines the “discovery” of family violence as a social and sociological problem. Among the major problems that confront students of family violen...

The technique of excimer fluorescence has been used to study the effect of molecular weight on the kinetics of phase separation in polystyrene (PS)/poly(vinyl methyl ether) (PVME) blends. From the fluorescence results, which have been analyzed by assuming that demixing occurs by spinodal decomposition, the growth rate of the dominant concentration...

This paper reviews an extensive sampling of the international literature on child abuse. The paper focuses on: (1) where the international research on child abuse is being conducted; (2) similarities and differences in definitions of abuse and violence; (3) the types of research methods and theoretical models used to study abuse; and (4) what we cu...

Excimer fluorescence has been used to study spinodal decomposition in a polystyrene (PS)/poly(vinyl methyl ether) (PVME) blend phase separated by thermal means. From the measurement of the ratio of excimer-to-monomer fluorescence emission intensities, the time dependence of the rich- and lean-phase compositions during phase separation has been dete...

The rapid emergence of elderly abuse as a social problem has led to the public dissemination of data derived from exploratory research. This paper assesses the state of knowledge of elderly abuse and examines the limitations of current research on the extent, patterns, and causes of elderly abuse. Suggestions are offered to researchers and practiti...

Excimer fluorescence has been used to study the conformational properties of and energy migration in polystyrene (PS) dispersed at low concentration in miscible blends with poly(vinyl methyl ether) (PVME). Fluorescence spectra of monodisperse PS samples with molecular weights ranging from 2200 to 390 000 were taken at temperatures between 286 and 3...

A relatively simple three-dimensional energy migration model has been developed and used to explain the dependence of the ratio of excimer to monomer fluorescence on concentration for miscible polystyrene/poly(vinyl methyl ether) blends cast from toluene. The model is based on a lattice approach for the determination of the dependence of the rate o...

This paper reviews a sampling of the literature on child abuse, spouse abuse, and family violence from around the world. The 72 books, journal articles, newspaper articles, and legislative reports which are included cover the period 1960-1981. A section on where family violence research has been conducted includes studies on child abuse and neglect...

Examines the extent of violence toward parents by adolescent children in relation to: (1) sex and age of the child; (2) the likelihood that mothers, more than fathers, are victims of children's violence; (3) social factors that may influence child to parent violence; and (4) stress as a factor in family violence. (Author/MJL)

Two basic ethical questions—informed consent and the risk-benefit equation—are examined as they apply to the data collection, analysis, and publication strategies of qualitative family research. Although previous discussions of qualitative research ethics have focused almost exclusively on the difficulties of studying deviant groups or communities,...