Child Abuse and the Literature of Childhood Leslie Fiedler (bio) I have not found it easy to justify my professional involvement in a symposium on "child abuse."* More than once, in fact, I have been tempted to abandon the subject to those able to persuade at least themselves that they are qualified by their expertise to participate meaningfully in such a debate. Yet in terms of lived experience rather than specialized learning, I know I have as much right as anyone to speak my piece on the subject. More right, indeed, than some, since not only have I been like everyone else, a child, but unlike many others, I am a parent as well. I have participated in the rearing of eight children (the oldest now about to turn thirty-eight, and the youngest just turned fourteen), all of whom, I am quite willing to confess, I have on some occasions and to some degree "abused." Moreover, as a child I was myself "abused" by my parents: harshly scolded, angrily whipped, rejected, teased, scorned; treated, in short, as less than fully human—or at least so it appeared to me then. I can clearly remember telling myself in pain and tears, at age four or five, "Never forget. Never forget!"; and indeed I have not. It seems to me, as a matter of fact, that I have become a writer in part at least because I wanted to share those memories of my childhood rage and grief with others who have repressed similar ones or learned to be ashamed of them. Certainly my very first published story (a story so raw and inexpert that I have never been able to force myself to reread it) dealt with the topic that I have, after all, decided to confront in the strange context of this symposium. But this means, does it not, that I have never really doubted that the complex and difficult subject of violence in parent-child relationships comes within the purview of literature. Properly understood, even the paucity of references to the subject [End Page 147] in literature before the nineteenth century provides us with a clue to a phenomenon with which anyone investigating child abuse must come to terms, if he hopes to understand why the "battered child" remained for so long "invisible" even to the workers in hospitals where such children were often sent to die. Not until 1962 did any physician forthrightly describe what came to be called thenceforth "the battered child syndrome" in a journal intended for circulation outside of a tiny group of specialists, as I first learned reading David Bakan's The Slaughter of the Innocents, which appeared as a part of a "Behavioral Science Series" in 1971. Mr. Bakan is an extraordinarily sensitive and tactful observer. In this case, however, he reports only the "facts," i.e., what can be verified by the methodologies of the social sciences. And he leaves unanswered, therefore, the question of why doctors and nurses did not earlier see—know how to see, permit themselves to see—what was before them day after day after day. It is clearly not a matter of the inefficiency of the instruments they used to examine their child patients but of a climate of expectation, an a priori set of assumptions about what was conceivable in parent-child relationships. Such assumptions are typically derived not from technical or medical textbooks but from the novels doctors read, the plays and movies they see, the television shows they watch—along with everyone else in their time and place—from childhood on; and they fall, therefore, within the purview of professional writers and professional readers, which is to say, literary critics. Such critics, like poets, playwrights and novelists, are accustomed to thinking of social reality not as given but as determined by perception. They have, moreover, no difficulty in understanding that to answer the question of why "abused children" remained for so long invisible to medical professionals, it is necessary first to deal with the question of why all children, why "the child," as we have come to understand that term, remained for so long unnoticed, unperceived by everyone; and why when he did...