David N. Jones (ed.), John Pickett, Margaret R. Oates, Peter R.H. Barbor: Understanding Child Abuse. Published by  Hodder & Stoughton, 1982. £2.95 (paperback).

This paperback, in a Teach Yourself series, aims at an overview of child abuse and what it sets in train, for those whose professional work brings them into contact with child abuse, and for a wider lay audience. I would think that as a handbook it would be of particular relevance for those social workers who have to deal with child abuse, but less so for psychotherapists concerned with understanding the dynamics of the interaction between abusing parents and abused children. That it is based on a wealth of experience gathered by the editor and his three co-authors is obvious, and Jones has followed his own advice in attempting to write in a way that is free of jargon.

The book deals with three areas: understanding the abusing parent and the abused child, the action which has to be taken immediately the abuse is recognised, and the long-term work with the family. I shall review each of these in turn.

Although the book is titled Understanding Child Abuse, the section on understanding the abusing parent and the abused child is a disappointingly short part of the book. Jones et al. view child abuse not as a unitary phenomenon with a single cause but rather as a common symptom of many different family problems. They offer a nine-point typology of the abusing parents, which excludes the sexually abusing parent, and the focus of the book is similarly on violent abuse to the exclusion of sexual abuse. The part of the book dealing with the abused child consists mainly of medical details