Negative Aspects of Family Life

Radical Psychiatrists
Laign
Ideas
Claimed to reveal the reality behind normal family life.
Concluded the family is damaging and can cause schizophrenia.
Behaviour disorders as a response to intolerable family situatiobns such as the conflicts of parents.
'Mad' people come from 'mad' families.
Behaviour that may appear bizarre has meaning for the individual.
Criticisms
Untypical families studied.
No normal control families for comparison.
Laign retracted many of his controversial ideas before he died.

Cooper
Ideas
Adds a Marxist perspective to Laing's ideas.
Family seen as an ideological conditioning device reinforcing the power of the ruling class and crushing individual identity.
Tensions and guilt in the family and caused by capitalism and it is these chains that have to be broken to produce a creative and indepndent individual.
Criticisms
Impossible to validate.
Assumes the child is powerless.
Focuses exclusively on the negative aspects of family life.

Anthropologist
Leach
Ideas
Studied pre-industrial societies where extended kin provide emotional and practicle help.
This led him to believe isolated nuclear family is emotionally overloaded, it internalises problems and expects too much of members.
Claimed the 'family with its narrow and tawdry secrets is the source of all discontents'.

The Dark Side of the Family

Many sociologists have highlighted that all is not well within the family since there is a well documented and well published set of statistics that would seem to indicate that domestic violence is on the increase.

Sociologists have suggested that as the family becomes increasingly privatised (or shut away from larger society) there is more scope for negative experiences associated with family life. This has created a situation in which domestic violence can happen behind closed doors and this has led to an increase in this aspect of family life.

Domestic violence in all about power and control in the family. It is not just physical abuse it is also mental, psychological, emotional and also the implied threat of violence. Also this means that domestic violence is a complex part of life, which for many people can be an uncomfortable reality for them, especially if they believe that the family is a positive place to be.

A Functionalist Approach - would not really be able to explain domestic violence because it views the family as a positive centre of socialisation. Therefore in sociology, Radical Psychiatry goes a lond way towards helping us to understand domestic violence and why and how it happens within the family.

R.D Laing saw the nuclear family as being dislocated from other family members and this led to emotional overload which was a result of family expectation. This led itself off from the rest of society and it became isolated and removed from the bigger picture of society. This goes some way towards expleining how abuse can happen within the family without other people picking up on vital clues or signs.

There is a significant under-representation of domestic violence statistics reported for a number of reasons. This is particularly true for men who are victims. One sociologist (Ken Pease) believes that domestic violence figures are 140% higher than those reported in the British Crime Survey (BCS) and this is worrying and implies that there is a dark figure of domestic violence hidden within the statistics because it is happening a lot more than the figures show.

1 in 4 women will be the victims of domestic violence in their lifetime.

1 in 6 men will be the victims of domestic violence in their lifetime.