Child Abuse and Culture: Working with Diverse Families

Lisa Aronson Fontes, PhD, is on the faculty of the University Without Walls at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has dedicated two decades to making the social service, mental health, criminal justice, and medical systems more responsive to culturally diverse people. Dr. Fontes has published widely on cultural issues in child maltreatment and violence against women, cross-cultural research, and ethics. She has worked as a family, individual, and group psychotherapist, and has conducted research in Santiago, Chile, and with Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and European Americans in the United States. She also worked for three years with Somali refugees. In 2007 Dr. Fontes was awarded a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, which she completed in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, she is a frequent conference speaker and workshop facilitator.