"When trauma occurs early in life, children do not develop the capacity to regulate their experience, to calm themselves down when they're upset, to soothe themselves, to interact in appropriate ways with other people, to learn from their behavior" Margaret Blaustein, PhD. The impact of abuse and neglect on children, on their behaviors, on their sense of self, and on their capacity to form attachments with new caregivers can pose challenges for foster...

"In order to investigate a case of suspected child abuse or litigate that case, you have to not only understand the legal issues, which are complex enough, but one really has to understand something about child development, about the impact of traumatic experiences on children, in order to understand how they react to it and to understand how we react to them." John E. B. Myers, JD. Abuse and neglect can have profound effects on children's neurological...

16 years of alcohol is about a skinhead named Frankie; his violent childhood, alcoholism and his love for Ska.

"Cassandra Maxwell has had a life filled with pain. Her mother died too young, her father is an abusive alcoholic, and she's a misfit everywhere she goes. After being shuttled between various foster homes, Cass struggles to find her identity and finds herself caught up with Scott Jones (aka "Sky") and his group of friends who start a Jesus commune in California. But before long, the group is more interested in pot and sex than they are spiritual growth....

The Marina experiment is the result of over 10,000 photographs, super 8 home footage and reel to reel audiotape interrogations that director Marina Lutz's father made of her during her upper class upbringing in 1960s and 1970s Manhattan. A both eerie and infinitely fascinating archive that she herself has now sorted out and reassembled. Her father's transgressive voyeurism is turned against himself, while a courageous self portrait simultaneously...

"From Lou Berney, the acclaimed, multi award-winning author of November Road and The Long and Faraway Gone, comes a Dark Ride"-- "Twenty-one-year-old Hardy "Hardly" Reed--good-natured, easygoing, usually stoned--is drifting through life. A minimum wage scare actor at an amusement park, he avoids unnecessary effort and unrealistic ambitions. Then one day he notices two children, around six or seven, sitting all alone on a bench. Hardly checks if they're...

"We saw that things like intractable smoking, things like promiscuity, use of street drugs, heavy alcohol consumption, etc. , these were fairly common in the backgrounds of many of the patients. . . These were merely techniques they were using, these were merely coping mechanisms that had gone into place." Vincent Felitti, MD. When Dr. Vincent Felitti, head of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, began to delve...

Sometimes distasteful practices are most effectively criticized with a good sense of humor. Meet Modou, a young, courageous and determined talibé - a pupil in a Koranic school - who manages to escape from his corrupt and abusive teacher to find a better life in contemporary Dakar, Senegal.

"The false memory attack is one that has caused a great deal of unhappiness and a great deal of difficulty. It has also helped raise the standard of care. There is no doubt that the law has intruded into the practice of therapy, and there is no doubt that it will continue to do so." Alan Scheflin, JD. The 1990s saw a vigorous and well-publicized backlash, exemplified by the false memory movement, against sexual abuse survivors and the therapists who...

"An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents. When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to...