Up close: family therapy challenges and innovations around the world.

Family therapists from 10 different countries (China, India, Israel including Palestinian citizens, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and the United Kingdom) describe systemic therapy in their contexts and current innovative work and challenges. They highlight the importance of family therapy continuing to cut across disciplines, the power of systems ideas in widely diverse settings and institutions (such as courts, HIV projects, working with people forced into exile), extensive new mental health initiatives (such as in Turkey and India), as well as the range of family therapy journals available (four alone in Spain). Many family therapy groups are collaborating across organizations (especially in Asia) and the article presents other ideas for connections such as a clearing house to inexpensively translate family therapy articles into other languages.

Arab parents' reactions to child sexual abuse: a review of clinical records.

This paper addresses parents' reactions to sexual abuse cases in their families. The study analyzed the clinical records of individual and family therapy sessions with 35 cases of Arab Palestinian clients, citizens of Israel (27 individuals and 8 families). Families were categorized as either functional or dysfunctional. It was concluded that the degree and type of relatedness of the perpetrator to the victim's family influences the type of reaction more than the family's level of functionality or the type of harm caused to the victim. Functional families consider the mental welfare of the victim as a serious concern. However, when the abuser is a relative or an acquaintance, functional families balance between support for the victim and the maintenance of correct relations with the abuser's family. Dysfunctional families offer solutions that in the short-term and/or the long-term usually harm the victim.

The impact of social values on the psychology of gender among Arab couples: a view from psychotherapy.

Three major psychosocial conditions have an effect upon the establishment of psychological problems within individuals and in the relationship of couples in the Arab family: (a) gender-dependent assessment of emotions, i.e., holding two different unequal yardsticks for two highly-genderized value systems; (b) imposing conflicting value demands on women; (c) glorifying and giving much respect to the notion of women's suffering in silence, a state described here as the "Mastoura" (tight lipped) woman, equivalent to the "learned helplessness" state. This article will also focus on the common forms of the manifestation of psychological or marital problems: sexual dysfunctions, somatic behavior and the usage of metaphoric language of psychosomatics. The article presents frequent complaints of couples who seek marriage therapy and the characteristics of each group.