[Psychosocial intervention and violence towards children : a critical reflection on Québec practice.]

The importance of socio-economic and structural factors in the explanation of child abuse, is often underestimated by practitioners. As a consequence, the inter-ventive models generally adopted are based essentially on the consideration of personal factors (alcoholism, parental immaturity, childhood experience of abuse, etc.). In the light of the numerous scientific studies which demonstrate the multidimensional character of the relevant factors, a reconceptualization of this problem, and of which action strategies to privilege, is imperative. The ecological model seems appropriate to the understanding of the reciprocal interaction between the individual and the significant environments. These environments (micro-meso-exo-macrosystem) may directly or indirectly influence the family in difficulty. The suggested types of intervention would prevent the enrichment on the heightening of the personal and community resources of collectivities; they invite practitioners to analyze constantly, and to modify, when necessary, the meso/ exo/and maxosystemic elements of environments; they are grounded in the opening of boundaries and in the integration of the different services offered to these families : informal, semi-formal and formal services. It appears to be essential that an epistemological rupture occur in the paradigm that guides our practice, so as to develop a more global comprehension of this problem area, and to intervene locally at the level of the collectivities in whom ultimately resides the right to define their needs and to identify the necessary means of response. Within this framework intervention would be dynamic (proactive) and not reactive, specific to each community and integrated with the efforts already being made (or remaining to be developped) by community members. Thus the practitioner might also develop a feeling of belonging to the neighbourhood which would protect him from exhaustion and from a growing sense of powerless-ness, apathy and futility brought on principally by the daily observation of future.