Children of Battered Women

The battering of women by their intimate partners is probably the most unreported crime today. Women are very reluctant to communicate their plight, convinced that theirs is an isolated and unique situation for which they are personally to blame [ 1] . A similar lack of recognition by professionals is confirmed by Hilberman & Munson, who identified wife -beating in half of the women referred to them for psychiatric assessment, but who emphasize that this pattern had been previously recognized by health clinic staff in only 4 of the 60 women concerned [ 2 ] . A conservative estimate holds that one in ten Canadian women is battered every year [ 3 ] . The widespread frequency of family violence is illustrated by Gelles Ts experiences in seeking a nonviolent control group for the violent families studied in The violent home: of the supposedly nonviolent neighboring families, 37% had