‘Change is Only Part of the Answer’: An Interview with Kim Halford

Kim Halford has conducted major research on the determinants of relationship satisfaction and stability, and how to promote healthy couple relationships both through relationship education for currently well‐functioning couples, and through couple therapy for distressed couples. Kim is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Griffith University, and Director, Queensland Cancer Fund, Griffith University Cancer Support Centre. He is the author of Brief Couple Therapy: Helping Partners Help Themselves; Australian Couples in Millennium Three: A Research and Development Agenda for Marriage and Relationship Education, co‐author of Clinical Handbook of Marriage and Couples Interventions; Report to the Australian Psychological Society on the Status and Future Directions of Health Psychology in Australia; Couple CARE: The Couple Commitment and Relationship Enhancement Program, Couple Guidebook (in press). He is also author or co‐author of over 90 book chapters, journal articles and audiovisual productions.     

‘Let's Live,and See’: Interview with Moshe Talmon

Moshe Talmon, author of Single Session Therapy and Single Session Solutions, spoke to Lil Cox, family therapist from Oakrise Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service at Launceston, when she caught up with him at the Inaugural Pan‐Pacific Family Therapy Conference in Melbourne, Australia in September 2001. He spoke about his early life, training, his research showing that clients can get what they need from one session, and his current approach to therapy. Finally, he gives his reasons for continuing to live and work in Israel.     

‘Therapy Doesn't Exist in a Vacuum’: An Interview With Max Cornwell

Max Cornwell is a psychologist and social worker in Sydney. He edited ANZJFT from 1985 until 1996 and is a former editor of Australian Social Work. He has taught in hundreds of venues in Australia and abroad. In 1980 he co‐founded the Family Therapy Institute, a major influence on the training of family therapists in New South Wales until the mid‐90s. He is an Honorary Life Member of VAFT and has received the Journal Award for services to family therapy.     

The ‘Towers of Silence’ Still Stand: Protecting the Perpetrator

This paper explores the idea that professionals in the arena of child sexual abuse can be induced to respond irrationally, through their wish to protect child victims. I examine why child victims of serious sexual assault are treated as the alleged perpetrator should be. That is, when the family unit cannot give the child a safe environment, the child (not the alleged perpetrator) is removed. I argue for a systems focus, examining how each section of the protective industry: lawyers, CSV protective workers, therapists and consultants can contribute to perpetuating and sustaining child abuse. The article is written in a style that plays on the boundaries between academic article and fiction to heighten the effect of my case material.     

‘Men Don't Have Families’: Equality and Motherhood in Technical Employment

Drawing upon evidence collected during a study of female technical professionals in the electronics sector, this paper argues that organizational policies and practices in respect of this group continue to be underpinned by the ‘norm’ of the typical male employee whose family commitments impinge marginally, if at all, on work responsibilities. Women, as actual or potential mothers, continue to be seen as deviants from this norm, whose family commitments are likely to adversely affect work performance or commitment. Not only do these assumptions condition the general treatment of women technical professionals, but they are embodied in those policies and practices designed to facilitate the combination of motherhood and paid work. Both the assumptions around which policies are framed and their implementation in practice reinforce as unproblematic the prevailing domestic division of labour. Such policies and practices therefore continue to function essentially as a concession to the deviant status of women in general and mothers in particular, rather than as tools of a broader equal opportunities policy.     

‘Lady,Leave My Culture Out of It!’ An Interview With Nada Miocevic

Nada Miocevic is a social worker and family therapist who trained at Zagreb University in Croatia and at Melbourne University in Victoria, Australia. She completed her training in family therapy in 1975 at the Bouverie Centre, Melbourne. Since migrating to Australia in 1967, her work with migrant and refugee families has taken her throughout Australia and overseas. Currently she is in private practice. Her work involves conducting training courses in supervision and supervision of supervision, as well as her continuing work with families who experience long‐term illnesses.     

‘Doing things with words’: Sociology and ‘Family Policy’ debates

In examining ‘family policy’, previous work on ‘family ideology’ is developed to demonstrate that ‘traditional family sociology’ has been ‘doing things with words’. In this area sociology, far from being innocuous, has had real impact upon society and may well have been oppressive and deeply reactionary.     

‘I Thought We Came for Therapy!’: Autobiography Sessions in Couple Work

Each family builds up its own culture which is partially invisible to each of its members, and so I invite my couple clients to write their own autobiography as part of a move towards self‐differentiation. By emphasising difference in this way, I hope to allow my clients to feel OK about their discomfort, if any, with my ethnicity. I include vignettes to illustrate the process and client response.     

‘Coming of Age’: An Individual Perspective*

An outsider's view of family therapy in Australia which raises the question of professional responsibility within the profession and towards the larger system.     

Double Bind: Much More Than Just a Step ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia’

In 1956, Bateson, Jackson, Haley, and Weakland published ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia’. This paper was an early milestone in family therapy's development, signifying the importance that communications theory and cybernetics would hold for the evolution of the field over the ensuing three decades. Many are familiar with the notion of the double bind; however, the idea's theoretical underpinnings, and the broader contributions of the paper that launched it, are often misunderstood or overlooked. The 50th anniversary of the publication of ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia’ offers an opportunity to revisit the importance of the contribution made by Bateson and his then colleagues, and to return to the fore the notions of logical typing, context, relationship and circularity that are at its heart.     

‘We took a bath with the chickens’: memories of childhood visits to the homeland by second‐generation Greek and Greek Cypriot ‘returnees’

Drawing on a wider study of 90 second‐generation Greeks and Greek Cypriots who have relocated to their ancestral homeland, in this article we focus on the significance of childhood visits to the homeland. Freedom – how children were allowed to roam free and stay up late – is the key trope of such memories, in contrast with the strict spatio‐temporal parenting they received in the host country. Different, sometimes less pleasant memories, however, emerge when the visits took place during later, teenage years. We explore the connections between childhood visits and adult relocation. Adult returnees find that settlement in the homeland produces a new set of challenges and reactions that differ markedly from childhood experiences and memories. They engage a second narrative trope, nostalgia, reflecting on the loss of the ‘authentic’ nature of the homeland and its customs and values. Instead, they highlight the materialism and xenophobia of Greek and Cypriot society nowadays. However, they see the ‘homeland’ as a safer place in which to raise their own children.     

‘You Can Stand on Your Head and Still End Up with Lower Pay’: Gliding Segregation and Gendered Work Practices in Danish ‘Family‐friendly’ Workplaces

This article explores the process of gliding segregation in two Danish workplaces. We address the questions of how and why women and men at the same workplace, with the same levels of education, often end up doing different work tasks. Drawing on a gendered organization perspective and sense of entitlement theory we illustrate the processes whereby structural and cultural expectations place women in predictable and routine work, and men in more developmental work. We also show that the level of education makes a difference to women's sense of entitlement to developmental work, but that the discourse of family friendliness disadvantages women in the allocation of interesting and valued work tasks. The findings illustrate the resilience of gendered work practices and the importance of focusing on workplace interactions to explain this.