Abuse, Child

The term child abuse refers to the multiple ways in which children are victimized by the willful or negligent actions of adults. The abusive victimization of children includes three broad categories of harm: (1) caretaker neglect of children's health and well-being, (2) acts of physical violence by adults against children, and (3) sexual violations of young people's psychic and physical boundaries before “the age of consent” to sex, established by the cultural and legal norms of a given society.

Child abuse is commonly viewed today as a troubling social problem. It is combated by legal punishments, therapeutic interventions, and social reforms. But, from a historical perspective, it is important to recognize that for centuries Western societies ignored, and even authorized and defended, routine assaults by adults upon children. This was particularly the case for harm done to children by their “God given” or legal guardians. Indeed, until recently, according to the patriarchal precepts of ancient Roman law and the common law traditions of Britain and the United States, parents and legal guardians were granted almost limitless power over children placed under their authority. This meant that legal guardians had the right to impose any punishment deemed necessary for a child's upbringing. At the same time, children—even those targeted by severe acts of physical violence—had virtually no rights to protect them against harsh and excessive sanctions of abusive caretakers. As late as the early 19th century, despite a proliferation of all kinds of punishment against alleged social wrongdoings, there existed no formal laws aimed at stemming the caretaker abuse of children. During this time, a major North Carolina court ruled, in the case of State v. Pendergrass, that a parent's judgment concerning a child's “need for punishment” was presumed to be correct and that criminal liability was limited to cases resulting in “permanent injury.”

Despite the “child saving” efforts of several generations of 19th- and early 20th-century reformers, the precarious legal position of children changed little until the early 1960s. Noteworthy among the relative failures of child reform efforts were the House of Refuge Movement, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (an organization occasioned by the widely publicized 1875 case of “Mary Ellen,” a 9-year-old girl viciously assaulted by her foster parents), and the early years of the juvenile court. Despite an abundance of pro-child rhetoric, these early attempts at “child saving” contributed more to strategies of “preventive penology” than to actually curtailing the abusive power of adults over children. As a strategy of social control, preventive penology sought to reduce crime and social unrest by removing delinquency-prone youths from corrupt urban environments and improper homes. Those removed from their homes were placed in public or privately funded child reformatories. Public intervention against abusive adults lagged by comparison. In truth, it was not until the early 1960s that laws were placed on the books against caretaker assaults upon children. These laws resulted from publicity surrounding the “discovery” of the so-called child battering syndrome by pediatric radiologists and their medical allies, pediatricians and child mental health specialists.

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