ABSTRACT
Attempts to describe and explain adolescent abuse have benefited from the work done by child abuse researchers. Dissatisfaction with attempts to explain abuse as a function of characteristics of the parent (Wasserman, 1967; Johnson and Morse, 1968; Steele, 1976; Van Stolk, 1972) or child (DeLissovoy, 1979; Friedrich and Boriskin, 1976) or as primarily due to socioeconomic stress factors (Gil, 1970, 1975, 1983; Lystad, 1975) led to an approach that has alternately been called the social interactional (Burgess, 1979), social situational (Parke and Collmer, 1975), or the ecological model (Garbarino, 1977; Belsky, 1978, 1980). The basic tenet of this framework is that maltreatment is multiply determined by forces at work in the individual (ontogenetic development), in the family (microsystem), in the community (exosystem), and in the culture in which the family lives (macrosystem).
