Tug-of-love boy is snatched in night.

Tug-of-love boy is snatched in night

Throughout this article, we can find many assumptions and issues. One of the first issues we can discuss is domestic violence, we believe that this is the reason for the father being imprisoned and it would be wrong for the young child to go back to his violent father now.

She said he knocked her down and kicked her in late pregnancy, beat her regularly and warned: ‘ if you ever try to leave me I’ll kill you.’

Relevant psychological evidence for domestic violence is told in many different psychological theories, the most important one being ‘ The family conflict theory.’ ‘This is maintained by familial styled abuse, which is sometimes the result of stress created in dysfunctional families where each abuser strives, through the use of conflict and control, for a dominant role in the family. In this view either partner may contribute to the escalation of violence.’

Next we find a psychological assumption. If the 18-month-old boy got separated from his mother now, it would break the attachment bond they have formed and it would leave the child very confused and distressed and it could possibly affect him in later life. Infancy, childhood and adolescence are seen as sensitive periods during which attachment behaviour develops, normally or deviously according to the experience the individual has with his attachment figures.

Backed by police, social workers arrived at 2.30am to take the distressed 18- month old from her arms.

Relevant psychological evidence for this comes from Bowlby’s attachment theory. According to Bowlby there is a critical period between the ages of seven months and three years, when children form attachment bonds with the parent. If the child doesn’t save the opportunity to form attachment bonds or if they are broken, the child may have long-term effects/ problems. The most serious consequence of separation is the development of ‘ affectionless psychopathy’. This is due to the person having suffered or still be suffering the consequences of disturbed patterns of attachment, leading the person to follow a deviant pathway of development.

The last assumption in this article could be that we believe everything that we read because of what the writer has told us and the way it has been told. It is only a one-sided person’s point of view, of how they have heard or seen it.

Despite his violence, including threatening to kill the woman, he has retrieved his son under the 1980 Hague Convention, set up to protect children from abduction. Any country signed up to the treaty must return a child to the land where most of its life has been spent.

Relevant psychological ...

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Relevant psychological evidence for this comes from the Yale model of communication. According to Laswell (1948), in order to understand and predict the effectiveness of one person’s attempt to change the attitude of another, we need to know ‘who says what to whom and with what effect’. In conjunction with this we can relate it to Hovland and Janis (1959), who investigated four factors together with major aspects of each. The first one being the source, the communicator of persuasive communication, which is Laswell’s ‘who’; the second factor is the message itself, Laswell’s ‘what’; the third one being the recipient or the audience, Laswell’s ‘whom’ and the final factor is the situation or context.

Relating back to domestic violence another theory is the ‘battered woman model’, which opposes the psychotherapeutic theory of the family conflict. The ‘battered woman model’ chooses to ignore the psychotherapeutic theory that expresses the personality disorder and early traumatic life experiences that provoke people to use control and conflict, within family relationships, however the ‘family conflict theory’ is similar because they can both start by an isolated argument, anger, jealously and revenge for some perceived prior misbehavior. ‘This is a form of abuse is not caused by but, often can occur because of a loss of inhibition fuelled by an excessive use of alcohol and/or drugs. Other theories are the feminist theory’ and the ‘family systems theory.’ They say that domestic violence is understood as reciprocal and it maintains equilibrium, however they are both limited to their ability to reveal a thorough analysis on this issue.

Bowlby’s (1946) study of juvenile thieves compared 44 juveniles who had a criminal record for theft and compared them with 44 adolescents with emotional problems, but no criminal record. He studied the background and personalities of the participants over three years and reported that 17 (39%) had been separated from their mothers for six months or more before they were five years old. In practice the children had been repeatedly or continually in foster homes or hospital and were often not visited by their families. 14 of the 17 were cold and uncaring, felt no shame for what they had done and seemed quite detached from ordinary standards of decency.

In the article we cannot yet see any signs of affectionless psychopathy, in the young child however the father must have had an effect on the mother for her to take away her son from the violent father. However Rutter (1981) has argued that adverse life experiences may but not necessarily have a lasting effect on development and that it is the reason for separation that is important in determining later development rather than the fact of the maternal separation alone. If either Bowlby or Rutter is right the boy in the article is likely to have emotional problems in later life.

The four major factors involved with persuasive communication are set up as a model. It is quite artificial to investigate them in isolation from each other. In most studies this interaction becomes evident, e.g. the impact of a one or two-sided message seems to depend on the recipient’s level of education and similarly the effect of a fear-arousing message will depend on the recipients normal level of anxiety.

There are three main steps to measure attitude change, one being to measure the recipients attitude towards the attitude object, second expose the recipient to persuasive communication, like a manipulated source, message or situational variable and third measure recipients attitudes again. If there is a difference between pre- and post-test measures, then the persuasive communication is judged to have ‘worked’. Relating to the article we see that a male and a female from two different countries wrote this article, so many of us will perceive it differently and we cannot really tell if it is true or not unless we measure the attitude ourselves for a recipient whom ever who reads this article.

Relating back to the article we can say that the rate of domestic violence will never really decrease if the male is going to be continually seen as the superior figure in family relationships and also police and detectives should look into cases more before giving a child back to a violent father, where further abuse might occur and the child could possibly grow up to be violent and likely to commit crimes.

For domestic violence they should make sure that the child never goes back to a parent who is physically abusing them and make sure they have solid evidence to back this up. If the child has to go back to the land where it has spent most of its life then the parents should never leave their child and be with it as much as possible. Sometimes with domestic violence it is hard to know whether it is happening or not within a family household. To cut domestic violence down a sense of positive self esteem has to be developed and the individual must be mature enough to demonstrate tolerance for the experience of various emotions and internal tension states. However it is detrimental to whom ever is the one being violent.

If Bowlby was right in saying that children who are separated from their parents/parent during the critical period are likely to develop affectionless psychopathy, then there are extreme implications for society. If they are more likely to commit violent crimes, then they should reinforce laws more, so that there is less separation from parents unless it is extremely necessary and they are away from the violence. The attachment bond should stay as stable as possible between a child and a parent. Alternatively as the psychological evidence from deprivation studies suggests that early experiences can be overcome, a programme of psychological intervention could be instigated for all children considered to be at risk.

McGuire (1969) sees this dependent variable of ‘attitude change’ as being to vague and instead proposes that we should be asking about the recipient, have they attended to the message; have they comprehended it; yielded to it; retained it and have the recipients acted as a result. When investigating persuasive communication it is quite a hard issue to measure, because there are many aspects in each factor that need to be assessed, to see whether it can change someone’s mind. Every article is different to measure depending on the extent of persuasive communication used. The implication is that the more it is used the more it can alter peoples minds and never really knowing the exact truth of a text, because with the article we as the audience don’t know how much our attitude or mind has changed since reading it, but it will be different for everybody, depending on who you are and what situation you are in.