Children Exposed To Violence

Children’s exposure to violence (CEV) in their home, their community, and our society has finally been recognized as a serious mental health, social, and public health problem. This book highlights a summary of relevant current research, practice, and policy issues. It is the third in a series to help provide current state-of-the-science information to stimulate awareness, research, and best practices in the field.

This book provides chapters concerning the physiological effects of violence on children, its effects on behavioral and emotional functioning, and differences between boys and girls. Current interventions for children and families, such as innovative programs that are both home based as well as community based, are described. Promising and evidence-based practices are presented to provide the most recent approaches to helping children recover from the trauma of the abuse.

The chapters in this book provide greater awareness of the issues involved with CEV, stimulate additional research, improve practice techniques, lead to more evidence-based programs for both intervention as well as prevention, and help initiate a national priority to eliminate violence in the home and community.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Emotional Abuse.

Robert Geffner is Founding President of the Family Violence and Sexual Assault Institute and Founding President of Alliant International University’s (AIU) Institute on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma (IVAT). He is also currently Clinical Research Professor of Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology, AIU, San Diego, CA.

Dawn Alley Griffin holds a joint appointment with Alliant International University’s Center for Forensic Studies as a Research Associate and with the Center for Undergraduate Education as a faculty member and the coordinator of the criminal justice and the psychology programs.

James Lewis III is a clinical neuropsychologist and nationally certified school psychologist. Currently, he teaches program development to systems of acute response to children exposed to violence, and the effects of trauma on a child’s developmental processes. He serves as a program consultant to New Opportunities Inc.