The Abused and the Abuser

Severe abuse often occurs in settings where the grouping, whether based around a family or a community organisation or institution, outwardly appears to be very respectable. The nature of attachment dynamics allied with threat, discrediting, the manipulation of the victim's dissociative defences, long-term conditioning and the endless invoking of shame mean that sexual, physical and emotional abuse may, in some instances, be essentially unending. Even when separation from the long-term abuser is