Are We Really All One Global Family?

An analysis of family violence and abuse calls for a global approach to understanding families all over the world. This is especially true for intimate partner, child, and elder abuses that occur in families. Kathleen Malley-Morrison calls for the adoption of her belief that “we are all one family”, despite the different contexts in which we live. This book (see record 2004–16237–000) presents data from 24 countries in every part of the world and makes it perfectly clear that abuse and violence differ in each of these countries. However, the underlying principles of seeking nonviolent family relationships prevail everywhere. The ways in which abuse and violence differ when they play out in a culture are primarily based on the explicit and implicit assumptions about family life and the definitions of what constitutes abuse and maltreatment in each culture and inside each family. Malley-Morrison uses data that were collected during the past 20 years from the United Nations efforts to enhance the lives of women, as well as the results from her cross-cultural survey on family abuse. Each chapter discusses a different country, and each is organized in a similar manner. The context of the macrosystem that represents cultural and historical values in each country is discussed, as are the individual family microsystems in which the traditional macrosystem forces play out. Participant's personal stories are shared, which allows the individual situations to be heard. Definitions of what constitutes violence and abuse in each country are delineated and basic human rights are maintained in the topics under discussion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)