Some of the most frightening and harmful violence in modern society takes place inside the family. Wives, children, grandparents, all of them can be subject to attacks that range from mild ‘roughing up’ to assaults that leave the victim physically or psychologically crippled.

What causes this violence? What sort of people are the attackers and the victims? What can we do to diminish it and to help those who suffer? Originally published in 1978, Jean Renvoize author of the highly praised Children in Danger traces the web of violence along many different strands. She covers baby battering and child abuse, violent husbands and wives, ‘granny bashing’ and incest. She looks at the psychological roots and the social patterns; she also surveys the agencies that act to prevent family violence, from social workers and those who run refuges to police and doctors. She suggests a number of positive steps that could and should be taken to improve society’s response.

As in Children in Danger, she draws on many first-hand sources of information, not only professionals working in the field but also the detailed and intimate self-revelations of both victims and batterers. The first chapter – an almost unbelievable account by a girl caught up in four generations of violence, whose sufferings make her recoil from it and yet at the same time draw her inexorably deeper in, both as victim and aggressor – is the first of many case histories on which Jean Renvoize draws. Her book is an extraordinary document about humanity, as well as an essential guide for anyone who has to deal with the problems it discusses with such insight and objectivity.