ABSTRACT
Family therapists have been very active in areas where abuse has occurred and something of the originality of the ®eld shines through in these situations. It is very easy in situations of abuse to adopt a simple approach that castigates the abuser and sees its role as the ending of abuse. From a therapeutic perspective, however, such action is only the start of the healing process. For instance where a child has been sexually abused, a therapeutic approach would seek to heal the relationship with the main carer and help the child process the abuse such that it has minimal in¯uence on the child's later life and development. Family therapy contributes to this therapeutic approach in a number of ways. Firstly, family therapy would want to work with the carer and child together at least for some of the time, as family therapy would argue that relationships are best healed in vivo. Secondly, family therapy, with its ability and preference to hold a number of different perspectives, would be able to work with the complexity and ambivalence involved in this healing. Thus feelings of anger, resentment and rejection can be heard as well as those of caring, love and guilt. In other words, family therapy would not assume that healing between mother and child would be easy, as each have lost something of their lives in the process of abuse and disclosure. Lastly, family therapy would ideally wish to ensure that there is a process of reparation that occurs between abused and abuser, with the expectation that such work would free the child to manage future relationships with the abuser and others. In practice this latter process rarely happens.
