By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Author's note: The Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture that I gave for the NYU Post-doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis on March 14, 2003, was based upon the text below. This text is part of a longer work in progress, and it should not be read as a finished piece. Please do not cite it or circulate it in its present form. Thank you, EYB
Part 1: "Child abuse and neglect" (CAN)
Child abuse had to be discovered. People have always known, of course, that some adults beat or rape or starve children; and that some societies have explicitly sanctioned injurious acts and violence against children, even institutionalizing corporeal punishments, child labor or child prostitution, infanticide. Although most of the harm done to children was taken for granted, some of it was condemned or prosecuted even before child abuse was discovered. In the mid-18th century, for example, almost a quarter of the capital rape cases prosecuted at the Old Bailey in London involved victims of less than ten years of age; while three quarters of the men charged with rape in mid-19th century France were accused of raping children. But these actions were prosecuted as rape, not as "child abuse and neglect." That designation had to exist before crimes against children were clearly and consistently distinguished as crimes against children. But even then there was not a concept explicitly indicating that a group—children—was being targeted and attacked when a child was raped as a child. There was not a concept like the concept sexism, which indicates that women are targeted and attacked when a woman is raped as a woman. Maltreatment of people of color existed long before such maltreatment was marked with the word "racism" and understood as prejudice against a group called "Negroid."
Throughout the 19th century, as children became more and more a group distinguished from adults and understood as having a special form of existence and stages of development, scientific and policy literatures distinguished types of children needing community—not just family—protective attention. In America, the 19th century categories were three: destitute, delinquent, and neglected. Starting in the 1870's and continuing into the 1920's, efforts to address destitution, delinquency and neglect were dominated by private groups, not legislatures. Some were socialist groups, echoing the hope of the great feminist-socialist reformer Ellen Key, who in 1900 had confidently proclaimed the advent of "the century of the child." But most were made up of wealthy Americans with Rousseuistic views, people critical of their own evangelical and puritan colonial forbearers for the way they had violently subdued children, preparing them for conversions, steering them to salvation. Philanthropic child protection societies were established in cities across the nation, but the national model was located in New York, and it grew out of a single heart-wrenching story, which might as well have appeared in a serial by Charles Dickens as in the April, June and December, 1874 pages of The New York Times.
Mary Ellen Wilson, an illegitimate child living in the home of a couple who were not her relatives, was brutally treated by her guardians. A neighbor observed her being beaten by her foster mother and sent to school in clothes not at all warm enough for the winter weather. A network of wealthy reformers came into play when, through a well-placed intermediary, the neighbor approached Mr. Henry Bergh, who was the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Mr. Bergh, in turn, called in his friend and counsel to the APSCA, Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry, who took the child's case to court. For lack of any child protection statutes, Mary Ellen was rescued from her abusive home by a writ for removing one person from the custody of another, de homine replegando Her foster mother was sent to prison, and Mr. Gerry was propelled on to the founding the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
In the child protection societies that grew up at the end of the 19th century, the reigning idea was that neglected children needed, first and foremost, to be protected from adult violence, and that the way to do this was to remove the children from their families and send the offending adults to prison. With the co-operation of state legislatures, the protective societies had a great deal of power to prosecute—they had functions that later would be carried out by the police and the district attorney. State legislatures made few child protection laws, but they did make it a misdemeanor to interfere with the work of a child protection agent.
"Cruelty to children" was what the neglected suffered from in the era when they were dealt with by philanthropic organizations like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. But when broader based Progressive concern with children's welfare began to be asserted in the years just before the First World War, neglected children slowly moved into the hands of social workers and police employed by states and by such federal agencies as the Children's Bureau, established in 1912. Judges and lawyers became involved as a juvenile court system evolved, bringing along with it distinctions between child victims and adult victims of crime. Both child welfare and child protection services were given a great push forward by the 1935 Social Security Act and its later amendments.
A dramatic change came about when the medical profession got involved in defining the social problem of the children who were called "neglected." In the 1960's, a Colorado-based group under the leadership of Dr. Henry Kempe, M.D., a pediatrician. led the way. Kempe was an émigré, trained by the psychoanalyst Rene Spitz, who had himself been a protégé of Sigmund Freud's colleague Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest. Spitz was a pioneer in making psychoanalytic films of institutionalized children., Using radiologic film and building on work done by radiologists in the 1950's,Kempe and his team described in medical terms a syndrome, a disease—"the battered child syndrome"—which they suggested should be approached in terms of treatment and epidemiology as though it were similar to smallpox or tuberculosis,
The Kempe group convened a medical conference in 1961, published their key article entitled "The Battered Child Syndrome" in a 1962 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and then published a wide-ranging essay collection with the same title that is still basic reading for clinicians, researchers, lawyers, and policy-makers. Less than five years after their careful description of how to use X-ray films to identify physical abuse was taken up by the popular magazine press, all of the fifty States had laws on their books mandating reporting of suspected physical abuse. By 1974, there was a federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which encoded a broad definition of child abuse. Money was allocated for research efforts aimed at discovering the national incidence of child abuse and studying various approaches to prevention and treatment. A National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) was established to monitor the national and states efforts, and it received steadily increasing financial backing up until the Reagan Administration targeted it as a threat to family rights and succeeded in scaling it back considerably. The National Center issues reports on child abuse annually, as do other organizations like the American Humane Association, but since there are fifty different state maltreatment laws, each with its own definitions, reporting procedures, and sanctions, the scope of the problem and the efficacy of various approaches to it are more elusive than is the case with the diseases tracked by the Centers for Disease Control.
In the decade after physical abuse was medically discovered, definitions for reporting and then for prosecuting and treating tended to be based on it: physical abuse was the model form of abuse for social services and legal purposes. But, at the same time, the vast increase in attention given to abuse resulted in more refined clinical descriptions and the identification of sub-populations of victims and victimizers. Particularly as physicians began to delineate "failure to thrive" (which had originally been called "deprivation dwarfism" or "psychosocial dwarfism") as a form of abuse, the way was opened for distinguishing physical neglect from physical abuse. Although physical abuse remained the most studied form of harm to children until the 1980's and popular press coverage of child abuse continued to focus on spectacular cases of bruising and battering, physical neglect was explored.
The new attention to neglect focused on acts of omission (rather than commission), not on effects discoverable on the child's body by x-rays or examinations. Many forms of neglect are less visible than physical abuse and sometimes the effects of neglect are not apparent at all for years. Using the new definition, researchers discovered that neglect is the most common form of abuse, amounting to around 50 percent of reported cases, and also that it is the form most frequently resulting in death, especially among very young children. Over 50 percent of maltreatment fatalities are from neglect.
When it became apparent that treatment programs based on the assumption that all maltreaters of children are alike were very ineffective, the child abuse literature began to reflect the insight that people neglect their children for reasons quite different than those propelling people to physical abuse. Further, although physical abuse comes in many forms, neglect is even more heterogeneous. While physical abuse had been subdivided in a medical manner by pathogens and effects—that is, by the means used to harm, such as beating, burning, whipping, cutting, shaking (as in "Shaken Baby Syndrome"), and so forth, and by the effects on organs and areas of the child's body—neglect was subdivided by differences in the negligent acts and domains of activity. The neglect categories included physical neglect such as deprivation of necessities of food, clothing, shelter, hygiene; educational neglect, medical neglect and mental health neglect; abandonment or lack of supervision; fostering of delinquency ;and intentional drugging. In study after study, two findings were noted about neglect that needed explanation. First, neglect correlates very highly with poverty and with single parent households, while other forms of abuse are to be found in all socioeconomic classes. This means that a majority of neglecters are women, while in other forms of abuse, particularly sexual abuse, the vast majority of perpetrators are male. And second, neglect is usually the sole form of abuse in a neglecting family, while other families tend to engage in multiple types of abuse..
After a decade of increasingly sophisticated reporting of physical abuse and neglect, reports of suspected child sexual abuse became more common. Even so, resistance to discovering child sexual abuse remained very strong, and Henry Kempe felt compelled in 1978 to try to do for sexual abuse what he had done in 1962 for physical abuse –to bring it into pediatric awareness. So he published a survey article in Pediatrics called "Sexual Abuse: Another Hidden Pediatric Problem."
Kempe did not mention it, but in the 1970's feminist exposure of sexual violence against women (as one of the main manifestations of what had come by then to be called "sexism"), had a profound impact on attention to child sexual abuse. Violence against adult women was the model for studying sexual abuse of children—at first, almost exclusively of female children by males. For years, the category "sex offenders" included both offenders against adults and offenders against children, even though both types of offences are heterogeneous and quite distinct causes and conditions underlie their forms. By the 1980's the number of suspected cases of child sexual abuse had overwhelmed the social service agencies charged with investigating them and the facilities available for treating the children.
As soon as the reporting of sexual abuse began to escalate and sexually abusive families were studied, comparisons with physically abusing and neglecting families were made. As a group, families where there was sexual abuse had higher median incomes, fewer external family pressures, and more internal family dysfunction. In comparison to other types of abusing families, they more often had two parents present in the household, with at least one employed full-time. Children reported for sexual abuse were predominantly female (75 percent of all cases), older that physically abused and neglected children (the average age was 8.1), and more likely to have been victimized by someone known to them but not their parent. While physical abuse was committed just as frequently by women as by men, and neglect was committed more frequently by women than by men, sexual abuse was much more common among men than among women. Sexual abusers were more commonly heterosexual than homosexual.
However, as soon as these comparative characteristics were established by questionnaire and survey methods, some of them began to be doubted by researchers with more access to clinical data. More male sexual abuse victims were discovered; more instances of sexual abuse of very young children were discovered, as it often turned out that a child brought into treatment at latency (age 6 to 10) would reveal earlier abuse; and more cases of incest were discovered, particularly as incest became a topic that could be talked about publicly or considered in television films like "Something about Amelia" (1986). Incest is the form of sexual abuse most likely to remain for years undiscovered, as it is the form most likely to be covered up within a family and a community, its victims being responded to with hostility and denial.
What can be said with certainty and generally about sexual abuse is that more secrecy surrounds it than any other form of abuse, so its discovery—in every sense—is the most difficult. Even the physical examinations are more difficult to conduct, not the least because of the invasion of a child's body and privacy they involve. In the late 1980s, pediatricians hoped that use of the culposcope, an instrument that illuminates, magnifies, and photographs the external genito-urinary and anal areas, would make sexual abuse discoverable in ways comparable to those by which x-rays had made physical abuse discoverable. But even with this instrument available, the vast majority of children later proven to have been sexually abused showed no evidence of the abuse when they were examined. And, of course, not all forms of sexual abuse leave physical traces. It turned out that sexual offenders, too, were not discoverable by technological means—for example, by penile plethysmography on males, which tracks penile erectile response to various stimuli—or by psychological testing of males and females. Sexual abuse is the form of abuse that depends most for its discovery on the verbal testimony of the victim, so it is not surprising that in this area of study questions about the reliability of children's testimony have been more important than definitional questions about what actions constitute abuse.
As physical abuse and neglect and then sexual abuse were being investigated, a whole field of scientific study, called CAN—"Child Abuse and Neglect"—took shape. Conferences and journals like Child Abuse and Neglect (1977) proliferated, research and treatment centers were set up, doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, lawyers, police, school teachers, and any professionals in regular contact with children were trained to make their own discoveries of child abuse and neglect. On an international scale recognition of child abuse and neglect increased dramatically as the United Nations declared 1979 the Year of the Child and formulated the Children's Charter, one of the founding documents of the Children's Rights Movement.
CAN was always a multidisciplinary field, because pediatricians, child psychiatrists, social workers, lawyers, police, and social service administrators had to cooperate in handling cases and working for prevention. But it has not always been a multitheoretical field. For its first decade, until the mid-1970's, CAN was dominated by the work of Henry Kempe and his associates, who founded a center in Colorado which became a model for both research and treatment. The field was shaped by their pioneering efforts to explore the psychology—and in about 10 percent of cases, the psychopathology—of abusers and neglecters, but particularly of physical abusers, and their efforts at developing strategies for intervention. For example, following Rene Spitz's lead, Kempe's group made films of mothers giving birth to babies and making their first contact with their newborns: their aim was to be able to predict which mothers, not able to bond or become securely attached, might be at risk for abusing. In the domain of theory, their hope was to describe an abusive type, the product of abusiveness transmitted over several generations, and their approach was psychodynamic, although they were much more open than most Freudians at the time to the work of the English psychiatrist John Bowlby and his associates in America who studied types of "insecure attachment."
The key characteristic that Kempe's associates described in the physically abusive parents they studied was their "underlying attitude of demand and criticism" in relation to their children. In a "role reversal," the children were called upon to give the parents the love and attention—the motherliness—that the parents had not gotten from their own parents. Writing about the physically abused children they studied, Steele and Pollack said:
All had experienced . . . a sense of intense, continuous, pervasive demand from their parents. This demand was in the form of expectations of good, submissive behavior, prompt obedience, never making mistakes, sympathetic comforting of parental distress, and showing approval and help for parental actions. Such parental demands were felt to be excessive, not only in their degree but, possibly more importantly, in their prematurity. Performance was expected before the child was before the child was able to comprehend fully what was expected or how to accomplish it. Accompanying the parental demand was a sense of constant parental criticism. Performance was pictured as erroneous, inadequate, inept, and ineffectual. No matter what the patient as a child tried to do, it was not enough, it was not right, it was at the wrong time, it bothered the parents, it would disgrace the parents in the eyes of the world, or it failed to enhance the parent's image in the eyes of society. Inevitably, the growing child felt, with much reason, that he was unloved, that his own needs, desires and capabilities were disregarded, unheard, unfulfilled, and even wrong. . . . Everything was oriented toward the parent, the child was less important.(pp.97-98)
Steele and Pollack looked at other characteristics appearing frequently among the physically abusing parents they studied. They saw intense rivalries in the past with siblings whom the abusers felt had gotten more parental love; they catalogued "obsessive-compulsive personality traits into which parental criticism had been channeled at an early age"; and they described rivalries in the present tense with a spouse or with the child designated for abuse. But the researchers interpreted all these as manifestations of the abusive parent's underlying feeling of being unloved or badly loved as a child. Abusing parents did not fall into particular character types—although there were hysterics and obsessionals among them—but they were all of a basic type: they were, as adults, still unloved—often abused—children.
Like the Freudian-influenced Frankfurt School social theorists of that time who were searching for a typical prejudiced person, a single "authoritarian personality," the Kempe group hoped to describe a single type programmed or acculturated to be a child abuser. If the abusive type could be discovered, a therapy designed for that type could be developed. But their own research also led them to raise the question of why some unloved parents physically abuse and others neglect.
We occasionally see a child who is both abused and neglected. Yet there is a striking difference in these two forms of caretaker-infant interaction. The neglecting parent responds to distressing disappointment [of expectations directed at the child] by giving up and abandoning efforts to even mechanically care for the child. The abusing parent seems to have more investment in the active life of the child and moves into punish it for its failure and to make it "shape up" and perform better (pp.99).
There was a clue here to what comparative work with parents of different types—or with different types of caretaker-infant interactions—would yield, but Steele and Pollack chose to consider only parents involved in physical abuse, not neglect. And their work preceded attention to sexual abuse or emotional maltreatment.
The work done by Steele and Pollack was so rich and so powerful that it overshadowed very interesting psychodynamic clinical research in this early period of CAN that was not focused solely on physical abusers. This research actually turned up not a single abusive type of person, but three basic types (which I will return to later). The three types did not get further explored, however, before the pendulum of attention in the field of CAN shifted away from psychological study of victimizers
By the late 1970's, when neglect had been more carefully studied outside of the Kempe Center and neglect's relation to poverty underlined, and when the discovery of sexual abuse was bringing millions of children into the nation's child protective services, sociological factors came more into theoretical play. Sociologically oriented researchers tried to compass all the forms of abuse, not just physical abuse. V. J. Fontana, for example, wanted to speak of a "maltreatment syndrome" rather than a "battered child syndrome" in order to include neglect more securely in research set ups and in policy decisions and in order to account for more of the social context of sexual abuse.
Speaking at the 1978 International Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect, Henry Kempe addressed the etiological controversy:
Since our last meeting, there has been lively debate about the relative importance of societal abuse of the parents by suggesting that child abuse is essentially a product of young families caught up in the stresses of poverty, racism, unemployment, poor housing and that these crises trigger the attack on the child and are the primary cause of physical abuse in children. This concept does not, of course, take care of the failure-to-thrive syndrome, or sexual abuse or incest, but it does take the therapist somewhat off the hook by blaming society's shortcomings for the parents' abusive behavior. Without underestimating the importance of external crisis as a trigger phenomenon, let me just point out that we are so very struck with the high incidence and serious nature of child abuse among a group of individuals who do have a job, housing, cheap food, free comprehensive health care, are married, and live surrounded by potentially helpful people. I am talking here about a group of military families who enjoy all these societal advantages and still have a significant problem of child abuse, with five child deaths occurring in a single military camp in my state in the past twelve months, Clearly internal and external stresses combine to trigger attacks.
The psychodynamic work that had been done by the Kempe group on physical abuse was also difficult to build upon and extend into the domain of sexual abuse because of the complex history that sexual abuse had in psychoanalysis. Because Freud had first hypothesized that both the major forms of neurosis—hysteria and obsessional neurosis—had their roots in "precocious sexual experience," that is, what is now called child sexual abuse, and then had withdrawn that hypothesis in favor of one that rooted the neuroses in the childhood fantasies of the oedipus complex, most researchers in the field of CAN assumed that Freudians did not—could not—account for actual, as opposed to fantasized, sexual seduction and abuse.
Freud had acknowledged real trauma, of course, but he put his emphasis on the child's intrapsychic world of sexual desire and fantasized sexual experience, he did not develop a description of how real traumas can effect a child's development. In the late 1920's and early 1930's, Freud's colleague and friend in Budapest, Sandor Ferenczi, did develop very vivid and compelling portraits of the consequences of childhood sexual seduction and abuse, and formulated a rich theory of sexual traumatization, but this work was marginalized in psychoanalysis and almost unknown in non-psychoanalytic psychology and psychiatry until the emphasis in CAN on sexual abuse brought it back into consideration.
But it was, unfortunately, not Ferenczi's trauma theory but Freud's fantasy theory, which many later Freudians made into a rigid refusal to consider actual sexual traumatization, that got most influentially woven into the complex historical discovery of child sexual abuse in the 1970's. This happened as lawyers defending alleged sexual abusers charged the victims with fabricating their stories of abuse and charged child witnesses to abuse with fantasizing. Freudian theory was put in the service of blaming the victim.
It was in the context of early-1980's debates about whether or how children could be psychologically manipulated in sexual abuse cases that a fourth category of child abuse was formulated. At first, it was called "emotional abuse" (a title that had existed for years) and then the preferred terms became "psychological abuse" or "psychological maltreatment." The first International Conference on Psychological Abuse, in 1983, was largely given over to definitional questions, as this form of abuse was and still is the hardest to define for either treatment or research purposes. By 1991, five categories of psychological maltreatment had been identified in standard-setting work by Hart and Brassard:
spurning (belittling, degrading, shaming a child for showing normal emotions, singling out a child for special criticism or punishment or work, publicly humiliating);
terrorizing (placing at risk or in danger, threatening loss, harm or danger if unrealistic expectations are not met, threatening violence);
isolating (placing unreasonable limits on freedom, unreasonably restricting social contacts);
exploiting/corrupting (modeling, permitting or encouraging antisocial behavior or developmentally inappropriate behavior, not permitting developmentally appropriate autonomy, restricting cognitive development);
denying emotional responsiveness (being detached and uninvolved through incapacity or lack of motivation, interacting only when necessary, failing to express affection, caring, love). Some researchers also pulled into the orbit of "psychological maltreatment" as a sixth category the mental health, medical, and educational forms of neglect. Others classified as a type of psychological maltreatment the "Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome," in which parents insist that their children have medical conditions and take them from doctor to doctor seeking verification, eventually making them ill, even slowly murdering them with conflicting treatments.
Almost all researchers who focus on psychological maltreatment are aware that it is involved to some degree in all of the other three forms of abuse—physical abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse. But it does sometimes appear in pure culture—some reports say in 5 percent of cases. Statistics on psychological maltreatment are the most elusive, however, because it is seldom reported and almost never constitutes the basis for intervening in a family's life or starting a legal proceeding. School teachers, private therapists, and other professionals who have on-gong contact with a psychologically maltreated child are the most likely to discover and possibly report the problem. If the psychological aspects of parenting practices were placed on a continuum from good parenting to bad, psychological maltreatment would fall at the extreme negative end of it, where differences of opinion among cultural groups about what constitutes good and bad parenting would be least. Interestingly , a 1987 Harris poll showed 75 percent of the respondents were aware that "repeated yelling and swearing" at a child can have long-lasting emotional consequences while only 42 percent were aware that the same can be said for corporeal punishment.
Part 2: Diversifying subfields and searches for unifying ideas
While the professionals who are part of the CAN research and treatment network have explored the different forms of abuse, the general public, alerted to the discovery of child abuse, and reminded of it by daily news reports of horrifying attacks on infants, children, and adolescents, grew much more aware of the seriousness of the problem. But there was very little further education for the general public. Anyone who is required by law to report suspected child abuse and neglect—from police officers to school teachers to youth center staff to chiropractors—receives some at least rudimentary instruction in how to identify victims of the different forms of abuse. But most citizens, and most policy makers at local, state and federal levels, have no idea that the researchers and practitioners in the field of CAN are studying and treating such a vast range of distinct but complexly interrelated behaviors and phenomena.
CAN is a field in which the subfields, identified by the different populations of victims, have been staked out and diversified. A rough map exists, and now it needs to be further refined. Each segment of it needs deeper exploration, conducted with awareness that the different subfields have been defined only by type of immediate effect or by type of act. The subfields are not defined by type motivation for abuse or by the psychic and social functions served. Both victims and victimizers have been studied in CAN, but the subfields of the field have been defined only by study of the victims and their symptoms. Questions need to be asked now about why, for example, in the domain of neglect some people neglect their children physically, others deprive them of education, while still others force them into criminal activities like begging and drug running (crimes which wold now be called psychological abuse). In the domain of sexual abuse, distinctions need to be made between sexual abuse of children that involves sexual acts, incestuous and not-incestuous; abuse that involves exploitation—like child pornography, child sex trafficking; abuse that involves pedophilia. Particularly in the sexual domain, the age of the victim –whether an infant, a child or an adolescent—makes a great difference in terms of the form of the abuse and the outcome, but so does the age of the victimizer, whether an older child, an adolescent or an adult, and the situation of the victimizer, whether in a family context or not.
CAN is a field that needs further and further diversification and refinement, But, on the other hand, it is a field that lacks a conceptual overview, general or unifying ideas. Feeling this lack, some researchers in the field suggested in the 1980's that the diagnosis Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome or later Disorder (PTSD) could act as the unifying framework, revealing what all victims of child abuse and neglect have in common. That is, it was suggested that this symptom-cluster, developed out of work with Vietnam War veterans and with survivors of natural disasters and added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980, was an encompassing symptom-cluster. But, as critics have pointed out, many child abuse victims do not exhibit the PTSD symptoms. The PTSD symptoms are most frequently to be found among victims of physical and sexual abuse, seldom among victims of neglect, and only among certain types of victims of psychological abuse (for example, terrorized children).
Efforts to use PTSD as a unifying framework did have the great benefit of connecting the field of "child abuse and neglect" to trauma studies or traumatology. But the CAN field also became at the same time more and more connected to Attachment Theory, a connection that had begun to form in the 1970's when neglect was explored as a subfield. This connection developed further as the consciousness began to dawn in the 1990's that child abuse and neglect is not a disease or even four diseases, but the opposite of—or the absence of, the blocking of—the kind of parenting and caretaking and concern for children that fosters healthy attachment and child development. Child abuse is, most broadly, the failure to establish or the interruption of a caring relationship between a child and an adult or a group of adults that should meet the child's needs and foster its potentialities. Child abuse makes the child "other" and blocks normal maturation into adulthood. The crucial general questions, which Steele and Pollack had raised for physical abuse, were arising for the whole range of CAN phenomena: Are there reasons why abusers of all sorts are unable or unwilling to take good care of children, to supply the ingredients of good child care and healthy development?
This kind of general question was raised as an attitude toward child abusers that was meant to be "compassionate and non-punitive" was cultivated and associated with an effort to unite the psychodynamic and the more sociological theories of abuse origins into a synthesis sometimes called "ecological." In the 1980's at the Children's Hospital in Boston, under the leadership of Dr. Eli Newberger, the "battered child syndrome " of the Kempe group was criticized for putting too much stress on parental intention to harm and not enough on the kinds of stresses that produce poor parenting. Newberger and his associates defined child abuse as "a family crisis which threatens the physical and emotional survival of a child," while they put their treatment emphasis on strengthening family life. But after the discovery of child abuse expanded in this direction of focusing on relationships, a step beyond the bifurcation of psychological and sociological approaches and two steps beyond the medical or disease model, it stalled. And the stall has reactivated among citizens and policy makers when the definitional disputes that have always been characteristic of the CAN professionals reached them and intersected with concerns over professional interference in family life and concerns over the possibility that false accusations of abuse were common.
Researchers, therapists and the general public all routinely now apply the name "child abuse and neglect" to a large range of behaviors, but constant disputing about where to draw definitional lines goes along with the normal usage. Similarly, various kinds of prevention approaches are being tried and tested, but amid great skepticism about their efficacy. Treatments are being offered to some child victims and some adults who were child victims, but there is no agreement about which treatments are most effective for which populations and types of victimization. There is also an on-going struggle about whether to offer physically or sexually abusive or neglectful people treatment or prison sentences—and if treatment, of what sort? And all this discussion takes place in the context of increasingly strenuous attacks on the generous funding for CAN that was available in the 1970's and 1980's, but which (as noted) disappeared in the Reagan presidency, when an ethos of "family values" weighed against state and federal interventions in child rearing.
Generally, although interference with normal development and particularly, recently, with secure attachments and healthy, cherishing relationships , is emerging as the broadest definitional framework of child abuse and neglect, the realization has not even begun to dawn that "child abuse and neglect" names not just a group of four types of behaviors or of anti-growth relationships but a form of prejudice, comparable to sexism and racism. We do not think that there is such a thing as prejudice against children –and we certainly have no word for it. This stall in thinking has meant that only the phenomenological surface of child abuse has really been discovered. The visible (or X-rayable) phenomena have been discovered, the name "child abuse and neglect" has been given to them, and the forms of victimization have been preliminarily mapped, but sources, meaning, and significance in our contemporary world—our globalizing world—of child abuse and neglect remain obscure. There has been a conceptual breakdown, which is our contemporary form of the denial that, for centuries, kept child abuse from being discovered at all We are really no further along than Charles Darwin was when he remarked about infanticide that: "Our early semi-human progenitors would not have practiced infanticide… For the instincts of the lower animals are never so perverted as to lead them regularly to destroy their own off-spring" (Bakan, xi). Darwin recognized that "child abuse and neglect" actions are human actions, that is, actions which distinguish us from the other animals, but he was at a loss to understand this "perversion"—as he called it—of our nature.
Unlike Darwin, most contemporary people, hearing the phrase "prejudice against children" would find it senseless or just shocking. We do not even use the word that was available in Darwin's time for prejudice against children, misopedia ('hatred of children"), which was developed to echo the more common words msogyny, misandry, and misanthropy. "Prejudice against children" makes no sense to most of us because it flies in the face of a conviction that parents (if not all adults) love their children and with ideas about maternal (and sometimes paternal) instinct. Further, we understand a prejudice as a way of thinking about, talking about, and acting against a group and against individuals as members of a group; but most people do not recognize children as a group or think that when a child is attacked the fact that the child is a child is involved as is the attacker's attitude toward children and the attacker's society's attitude toward children. Although other huge portions of the human species are recognized as groups—women and people of color are two—and these groups are represented by social and political movements asserting their rights, children have not won comparable group acknowledgment. There is a fledgling children's rights movement, which presumes rights specific to children as a group, but the existence of the group is not yet part of common consciousness. In 1994, The United Nations issued a Convention on the Rights of the Child –not the Rights of Children (like the Convention on the Rights of Women). But the existence of this Convention is known to very few citizens of the one hundred and ninety countries that ratified it, and only a few citizens of the United States of America know that their government was the only legitimate national government in the world that did not ratify this Convention, claiming that it impinged on our national sovereignty. It is certainly a clear example of prejudice against children to value, as United States governments have, the strictest construction of national sovereignty over the welfare of children.
Everyone who uses the words sexism and racism understands that they refer to prejudices against a group and against individuals as members of the group. Beating a woman is a manifestation of sexism, not just an action against an individual woman stemming from a victimizing individual's individual psychology and social situation. Sexism is the concept that connects the individual psychology of the woman-beater to the social and political context of the act and to the cultural norms that sanction—or even require—woman-beating. Physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and neglect are directed against children as members of their group, too, but even though the name "child abuse and neglect" now exists to designate the effects of these behaviors, most people still think of the harm that befalls a child as befalling only that child. There is no misopedia or "childism" involved.
Because the behaviors comprised by "child abuse and neglect" are not thought of as manifestations of prejudice, little in the whole vast history of social scientific study of prejudices has been brought to bear on these behaviors. The word "sexism" came into existence in 1965, at just about the same time that child physical abuse was being discovered by Kempe's team, but the emergent field of child abuse and neglect did not link up with the study of sexism that then burgeoned with the upsurge of the Women's Liberation Movement and contemporary feminism. There were no theorists or activists to advocate for analyzing and combating prejudice against children, and children do not, of course, appear in public to advocate for themselves any more than infants speak for themselves when they are abused—their x-rayed bones have to speak for them. Children do not have deeds or words—the noun infans means without speech—in the political sense. The vast library of books on prejudice that has built up since the 1960's does not include volumes on prejudice against infants, children or adolescents , although it has begun to include volumes on prejudice against another age-designated population group, ageism.
The lack of a link between "child abuse and neglect" studies (CAN) and studies in prejudice is not just an academic matter of how research is organized in universities or fields organized in the domain of social science. The isolation of child abuse and neglect as a field from other types of prejudice studies has had profound effects on public policy for the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect, as it has had profound effects on prejudice studies, which have a glaring hole where the suffering of children should be. The lack of a link between CAN and studies of prejudice has meant that the questions that stop most people who think at all about child abuse and neglect from going very far—How could a person beat a child? Rape a child? Starve a child to death? How can others let this happen?—the questions of motivations and meanings—can hardly get posed. The psychological inquiry that was characteristic of CAN in its formative years never did connect up with the broader field of inquiry into human destructiveness and violence. Recently, for example, while reports of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests have been pouring forth from all parts of the United States and from around the world, and the Vatican has been trying to formulate a policy for dealing with the priests charged with abuse, the media have been very reluctant to ask what moves a priest—a person committed to imitatio Christi, to compassion for human suffering—to abuse a child. To ask: What is pedophilia? What are its forms? How can it be treated? Without understanding, policy is usually made badly, if it is made at all. And without understanding, people tend to throw up their hands in despair rather than thinking in terms of social problems and solutions.
Part 3: Childism: Prejudice against children
If there is a prejudice against children, as widespread as sexism is, what is its message? The message, I think, has two basic parts, which appear in all the myriad forms that childism takes. The first is that children are the property of their parents, which in patriarchal contexts means primarily of their fathers, to be raised and used and controlled and disposed of as their parents see fit. In the medieval European world, this ownership was of children as physical property, like chattel, in the modern world the meaning is custodial. For a childist, child ownership is the natural subordination of children, which is tied to the dependency children are born into. It is thought natural for the dependent child to serve the parent's interests—and it is only a step from that assumption to the assumption that children should give their parents parenting, not just when the parents are old and enfeebled, but when they become parents. The dependency of children seems to give the idea of child ownership even more legitimacy than the sexist's idea that women, even though they are adult and not dependent for their very survival on another adult's care, are naturally subordinate
The second part of childism's message is that children are bad and in need of control or punishment for their badness, which also makes them burdensome. That is, they are born needing to be disciplined, continuously subordinated, and they are born a burden on their parents, especially those who feel that their own needs have not been met. The childist says righteously: "You have to discipline your kids or they will grow up delinquent" (or, in the older language of instruction, "spare the rod and spoil the child") The childist says, with a sense of natural hierarchy and ownership: "Children have to be taught to respect their parents and authorities." And the childist says: "Children should not drain their parents' resources or pull them down." The degree to which this "bad and burdensome" ingredient of the prejudice is spread through any given society varies over time, as does the degree to which it is buttressed with religious argument, mores, customs, legal codes, and educational precepts. Whenever a social movement reflects and promotes rebellion of children against their parents, the prejudice that calls children bad and burdensome waxes defensively; it wanes when children are once again properly subordinated.
The first ingredient of prejudice against children—child ownership—links it to prejudice against women and to racial prejudice. For a great deal of its history, and in much of the world to this day, sexism meant that men could own women, as racism meant that people of one group could own people of another group as servants or slaves. And the various kinds of adult-to-adult subordination, of course, survive elimination of legal ownership and sanctioned slavery, as prejudice against children has survived the elimination of the most concrete forms of the child ownership idea. Prejudice against children is also tied to sexism and racism in that female children are victims of sexism and children of one group are victims of prejudice against their group as well as against themselves as children.
But the second part of the prejudice against children, while it has some elements in common with sexism and racism, also distinguishes childism. Sexism assumes inferiority of women, which can take many forms, sinfulness, sexual wildness dirtiness, cunningness, and so forth; but these forms of inferiority are different than the badness and burdensomeness attributed to children. Similarly, racism assumes the inferiority of a racial group, which is almost always imagined as primitiveness, sexual perversity or anarchism, and intellectual deficiency, not as the kind of badness and burdensomeness attributed to children (although racists do sometimes call their victims childlike or imagine them as uncivilized children). Children may be accused of these types of inferiority—particularly if they are female or of a particular group, or if their sexuality is a focus of attention and fear—but they are specifically bad as carriers into the present of a badness that comes from the past or as carriers of an ill that is going to be manifest in the future, and they are particularly burdensome as competitors for scarce resources in the physical sense and, more importantly, in the emotional sense—resources of survival and resources of love. Their badness and burdensomeness always have a tacit temporal dimension: children are bearers of curses and legacies of failure from the past, or they are potential competitors with or supplanters of adults in the future.
When they are born, children are completely powerless, completely helpless—more dependent than any other mammals—but they are imagined as made powerful by a legacy they incarnate or as preparing to be powerful in the future because of a destiny. Their badness has to do with how they may undermine or overthrow adults, taking away what adults have or want or need. They are a threat to adult power and pleasure. Prejudice against children turns the most obvious fact about adult-child relations, which is that children grow up to replace the generation that gave birth to them, into a frightening and reprehensible badness of the children. Prejudice against children is manifest in all kinds of ways of keeping children down, keeping them children, stopping their growth and maturation, which is felt as overthrow, usurpation, parracide. Children are, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, "new beginnings," representatives of the human condition of natality, of being born. Childism is rejection of "new beginnings," and thus a rejection of a key existential condition, a key feature of our humanness, natality.
Looked at from the opposite side of the prejudice coin, people who are prejudiced against children imagine that children are good only if they enhance the power or pleasure of adults, by carrying on the past or fulfilling an expectation for the future. They are good if they parent the parent, giving the parent all good things the parent feels have been lacking. Spanking a child who has misbehaved is quite a different action than fracturing the skull of a child who has cried a bit too loudly, but these behaviors are on a continuum of behaviors that have in common the attitude: a child is a being who should make me feel good, and who is bad if he or she does not make me feel good. A child can be sexually abused in many different ways, and the ways lie upon a continuum in terms of the violence that may be involved, but all the ways have in common that the adult abuser enjoys power over the child (a position that the abuser, particularly the pedophile, generally, feels could not be obtained in relation to an adult), and that power makes the adult feel good, feel enlarged, inflated. Types of sexual abuse differ, but they have in common that the sexual abuser makes the child the kind of sexual object he wishes the child to be—the child is like a screen onto which the abuser projects his wishes. The child is, as feminists said of women in patriarchy, objectified. And if the child fails to be the feel-good object, it is punished.
This feature of childism has been observed under different names, including the one given it by Morris and Gould and used by Steele and Pollack in their discussion of physical abusers: "role reversal," that is, "a reversal of the dependency role, in which parents turn to their infants for nurturing and protection." Parents who feel insecure and unsure of being loved turn to their children—or a particular child—as though the children had adult abilities to offer the missing love and security, while not making adult demands or having adult power to command. The parents behave like frightened and angry children, and they have no idea what their own children, as children, need (an ignorance that manifests in cognitive terms as lack of knowledge about children and child development, lack of any sense that children have needs that are different from adult needs). Abusive young mothers, for example, will say : "I never felt loved in my whole life, and when my baby was born I thought he would love me; but when he cried all the time it meant he didn't love me, so I hit him." A pedophile will say: "When I was with her she made me feel that I was special and I felt I gave her a kind of loving she needed for her own good and no one else could give."
The two interrelated and overlapping parts of the childism message that I have been outlining—the part that proclaims children natural subordinates, and the part that declares children bad or burdensome and needing adult discipline—are negations of an attitude toward children, or a belief about children, that can be simply expressed as "I value this child more than myself," or "I want this child to be well and happy more than I want my own wellness and happiness." The raising of children is the natural sphere of altruism. "You, who are totally dependent on me, can totally depend upon me." This non-prejudicial attitude presupposes, I think, the idea that children are sociable by nature, that they are born into the world wanting to love and be loved by their caretakers and that their natural growth and development are the unfolding of this drive. Looked at in the same way, sexism and racism are negations of an attitude toward adults that can be simply expressed as "all people are created equal and should not be deprived of their basic survival needs or prevented from the development of their sociability—their need to love and be loved—in relationships of equality"
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