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This book describes the various ways in which children have suffered physical and sexual abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents and caretakers. It is a handbook for all workers in the mental health field. It outlines the contributory factors, the treatment modalities available, and the social institutions involved.
The number of victims, at least in the hundreds of thousands in this country annually, is shocking. The group that Green has studied comes from the lowest socioeconomic minority stratum. This is the most visible group. Here ignorance, poverty, and familial instability are major contributory factors. The inevitable involvement of a variety of social agencies has brought to light an area which once was the exclusive and private domain of parents. The sectors of the population which are not subject to such public scrutiny, the middle and upper classes, are the principal source of our private patients. Our clinical experience with adult patients occasionally reveals the kind of mistreatment described by Green, with the patient himself either as abuser or as someone who was abused as a child. When children become our patients, the frequency of serious maltreatment becomes even more evident.
In his description of the contributing factors, Green cites social stresses and internalized parental psychopathology. The therapeutic interventions he describes work most effectively when the social