This article examines the roots of the desire to seek revenge as a primary motivator of human behavior with an emphasis on the role of child maltreatment. The review covers anthropological, historical, and literary examples to modern research on normal, clinical, delinquent, and criminal populations. For example, chimpanzees display retaliatory vengeance behaviors, defined as occurring long after the insult occurred. The history of child abuse is seen as parallel to the development of institutionalized revenge. Child emotional abuse is seen to be a possible cause of damage to brain organization and failure in ability to modulate emotional control. Extreme feelings of shame resulting from child abuse, physical, sexual, and emotional are seen to underlie violent, retaliatory behavior. Because notions of justice and fair play and of appropriate consequences for wrongdoing appear to be built into our human sense of justice, the implications of understanding revenge for treatment and social policy are discussed with the recommendation for social and legislative change. The present obvious discrepancy in the United States, which professes to represent democracy, equal opportunity, and social justice, may create more outrage and desire for revenge than in earlier times on the part of those being abused in their homes. Society has moved historically from tribal justice and blood vengeance to a world of laws in which the criminal justice system now practices its own form of legalized revenge. It is suggested that retributive justice be replaced by restorative justice: the restoration of relationship, and individual and social healing by asking who is hurt and what is needed to heal the hurt rather than to punish, with the acknowledgment that imprisonment can be recommended where the purposes of all three involved, the victim, the social group, and the perpetrator, are served. This change will require a radical shift in basic assumptions of what justice is and how it can be best obtained. References