Fostering Accountability: A Reconstructive Dialogue with a Couple with a History of Violence

According to some experts (e.g., Straus and Gelles, 1990), domestic violence affects hundreds of thousands of heterosexual couples in the United States. Increasingly, as family therapists we see couples and families in which the bonds of trust have been compromised by the injustice inherent in intraf amily violence. When couples want to stay together, often the therapy focus is on rebuilding the marriage after the physical violence has ended.