Troubled Youth, Troubled Families: Understanding Families at Risk for Adolescent Maltreatment

The 1970s witnessed a growing concern and awareness regarding child abuse, an awareness which gradually extended to include the maltreatment of adolescents. In the 1980s a number of intervention projects dealing with this particular problem were started. Troubled Youth, Troubled Families is one of the first full-length reports to deal with adolescent abuse.

“The bulk of the research on parental maltreatment of youth has focused on physical violence directed toward children. Troubled Youth, Troubled Families makes an important contribution to this area both by focusing on the  understudied topic of adolescent abuse and by attempting to provide a systematic analysis of potential association between victimization and subsequent antisocial behavior. . . . The superb hypotheses generated by this study should be of interest to life course and family scholars as well as criminologists.”

—Candace Kruttschnitt, Contemporary Sociology