Although with effort and professional assistance, many parents are able to overcome their problems that led them to abuse their children (such as substance abuse or emotional illness), social work dean and author Richard Gelles, who wrote a chapter in Treatment of Child Abuse: Common Ground for Mental Health, Medical, and Legal Practitioners, argued that some parents are essentially untreatable. Gelles estimated that between 10% and 15% of parents and other abusive caretakers are treatment-resistant individuals who will not consider changing their behavior and who also have social and psychological attributes that cause them to be treatment-resistant.

Some patterns among abusive parents who may be untreatable are as follows:

-           Violent behavior at an early age

-           Substance abuse

-           Social isolation

-           Poverty

-           Antisocial personality disorder

These parents may be highly resistant to change, and they are also likely to be dangerous to their children.

Gelles said, "Caretakers who do not recognize or admit to the harm they have inflicted on their children, by acts of either omission or commission, are not going to respond to an action-oriented intervention such as intensive family preservation, a parenting class, additional social resources, or even psychotherapy."

Gelles said officials should also take the abused children's needs into account, and says, "Decisions about treatment of intervention should be made with a child's sense of time and a child's need for permanence as the main criteria for choice of intervention. For treatment-resistant families, the intervention of choice would be to terminate parental rights and seek a permanent placement for the child or children."

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