>
> >consideration on their horizon. My own work, which brings me into frequent
> >contact with child abusers, for example, convinces me that punishment has
> >little rôle in influencing them.
>
> So what does?
I'm not sure. For one thing, the social process of confronting victimization of children follows a lengthy course, and I work at the very beginning. Actual treatment is farther on. Since parenting is extremely an extremely diverse abuse, neglect, and their treatment is correspondingly complex. Some situations seem to involve removing material stresses. Simple enough, but not something to base a broad approach on. Back years ago, when I was a child protective worker and worked in somewhat greater depth with parents, I recall, for example, a woman who hit her son in the face with a belt when he wouldn't eat. There were several levels to what was going on, but the most immediate problem was an abusive relationship with the father. I encouraged her to focus her anger on him, and work towards getting away from him. She had a lot of energy, wasn't stupid at all, and her relationship with the children improved while she accumulated the money for tickets back to her parents' farm in Ireland.
This is a nice story, but too much of a happy ending (and, of course, I don't know where they were at in five, or ten, or now, twenty-five years) to make me think that people who do long-term work with abusers could see it as a model. At the same time, part of what made it simple was that probably for the first time, a male authority figure told her she didn't have to submit blindly to her husband. I do remember her rather timidly saying she was squirreling away little increments of the household money for the Aer Lingus flight, and her great relief when I didn't try to tell her marriage was a sacred thing, etc. In her case, it was possible to address some of what was going on on a straightforward conscious level, even though unconscious material (as evidenced in the fact that the abuse incident arose out of a conflict over eating) played a rôle.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema