Who Owns Child Abuse?

Gerald Cradock

doi:10.3390/socsci3040854

Abstract

Expectations of contemporary child protection apparatuses are strongly influenced by beliefs inherited from the nineteenth century child rescue movement. In particular, the belief that child abuse determination is obvious. However, this assumption fails to make a distinction between nineteenth century’s emphasis on impoverished environments and the twentieth century introduction of the pathological child abuser. Moreover, the proliferation of kinds of child abuse, and the need to distinguish child abusers from non-abusers, means knowledge is now spread across an array of disciplines and professions, which necessarily destabilizes the definition of child abuse. The increasing exposure of alternate care systems as potentially abusive has similarly destabilized the old common sense solution to neglected children—namely removal. Finally, as uncertainty increases, and definitions become more divergent, the question of what child abuse is, and what should be done about it, becomes increasingly politicized.

Highlights

Perhaps the most curious thing about child abuse is the degree to which its practical definition is usually treated as obvious even though its precise composition and boundaries are subject to chronic and intense disagreement
The confidence of nineteenth century child savers has been badly shaken over the past several decades
Orphanages and charitable support typically distinguished between full orphans and half-orphans, religious affiliation, and the depth of moral depravity children were likely to express. These distinctions were not made on the basis of types or severity of child abuse—that was generally seen as generic—but rather by the moral standing of parents or the children themselves

Summary

Introduction

Perhaps the most curious thing about child abuse is the degree to which its practical definition is usually treated as obvious even though its precise composition and boundaries are subject to chronic and intense disagreement. To frame the problem in these binaries obscures the degree to which the understanding of child abuse is fundamentally epistemological In other words, this view inevitably presumes child abuse has a reality independent of the varied discursive practices that constitute it. The view that there is a single and universal phenomenon designated by the term ‘child abuse’ is fundamentally a modernist conception It is a means of placing child abuse outside the confusions and complexities of history by positing a true description of a fixed reality 1. Norbert Elias, this manner of describing child abuse is a “retreat into the present” whereby current practices and discourses are projected as epistemological absolutes applicable at any time and in any place [4] From this perspective, as civilization develops child abuse is increasingly discovered or revealed as our knowledge expands. In other words, calling for “oined-up” services, or single “child-centered” practices will always be thwarted by the incommensurability of varied knowledge constructions and their resultant practices

Child Saving

Child Abuse as Science

Alternative Care as Iatrogenic Abuse

Child Abuse

Conclusions