Treatment strategies aimed at shifting the power imbalance within the family alone, without accompanying social sanctions, run the grave risk of entering into a covert alliance with the abuser....When clinicians only investigate and reconstruct past pscyhological traumas of abusive men, they beg questions of the men's social responsibility for their violence.

Almeida & Bograd quoted in M. McGoldrick, et al., "Violence and the Family Life Cycle"