Child Abuse, Sociology of

Child abuse, as a recognized sociological phenomenon, is relatively new. It wasn't until 1946 that American medicine recognized the intentional mistreatment of children as a real entity. This changed, in large part, due to John Caffey's seminal article in the American Journal of Radiology that documented a series of long-bone injuries and subdural hematomas in infants and toddlers consistent with our current understanding of child abuse. However, it was not until C. Henry Kempe et al.'s paper defining the battered child syndrome that our current view on child abuse took ...