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. ‘1 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. ‘2 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 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.