Current Controversies on Family Violence

Richard J. Gelles received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of New Hampshire. He is the Dean of The School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania and holds The Joanne and Raymond Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Director of the Center for the Study of Youth Policy and Co-Director of the Center for Children's Policy, Practice, and Research. His book, The Violent Home was the first systematic empirical investigation of family violence and continues to be highly influential. He is the author or coauthor of 23 books and more than 100 articles and chapters on family violence. His latest books are, The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children′s Lives (Basic Books, 1996) and Intimate Violence in Families, Third Edition (Sage Publications, 1997). Mary M. Cavanaugh, MFT, M.S. is currently a doctoral candidate in both Social Welfare and Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been involved with numerous research projects on intimate violence that have been submitted to the National Institute of Justice and the National Institute of Mental Health. She is a practitioner in the field of domestic violence facilitating batterer intervention service programs in cooperation with adult probation and parole departments and victim service agencies. She has served as a consultant and trainer on offender risk assessment and treatment services to state and local victim service agencies and youth and family service departments. Ms. Cavanaugh has recently completed a project for the U.S. Army on "The Evaluation of Domestic Violence Prevention and Intervention Strategies". She also serves as a consultant to the Violence Against Women and Family Violence Research and Evaluation Program for the National Institute of Justice.