Objective: To describe the development and validation of the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (STSS), a 17-item instrument designed to measure intrusion, avoidance, and arousal symptoms associated with indirect exposure to traumatic events via one's professional relationships with traumatized clients. Method: A sample of 287 licensed social workers completed a mailed survey containing the STSS and other relevant survey items. Results: Evidence was found for reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and factorial validity. Conclusions: The STSS fills a need for reliable and valid instruments specifically designed to measure the negative effects of social work practice with traumatized populations. The instrument may be used to undertake empirical investigation into the prevention and amelioration of secondary traumatic stress among social work practitioners.

This article reports the findings of an exploratory study of the experiences of 51 battered women in four spouse abuse shelters in a Florida county with a preferred arrest policy. Despite this policy, which encourages the police to arrest spouse abusers, the police arrested only 12 abusers, although 36 women wanted their abusers to be arrested. Moreover, the police provided information about injunctions for the protection and spouse abuse shelters in only 22 cases. Possible reasons for these findings and implications for social work practice are presented.Florida Statute 901.15 allows the police to make an arrest when an injunction for protection has been violated or when violence has occurred or they believe that it will occur if an arrest is not made. Many local law enforcement agencies have supplemented this statute by implementing a preferred arrest policy that guides the police to make an arrest as a preferred response to a report of domestic violence.In the fall of 1989, a task force of concerned citizens in a Florida county that had such a policy expressed concern that the police were not using it. Their preliminary analysis of arrest rates by type of call found that in 1989, the police made few, if any, arrests for spouse abuse. The task force contacted one of

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The purpose of this paper is to describe recent empirical research findings about family violence, and to explore selected social work treatment issues in the light of these findings. The last two decades has seen a proliferation of research about family violence. Most of the early research used small clinical samples and so generalizing findings to other groups has been difficult. However, the recent research has examined a number of important psychosocial correlates of family violence using more methodologically sound methods. As a result, we now know quite a bit about how and why family violence occurs. Also, within the last decade a number of studies have explicated the kinds of treatments and approaches that are most effective in dealing with abusive people. This paper summarizes these treatment strategies.