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This chapter looks at countermovement organizing, focusing on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). It highlights the struggles over the social construction of knowledge that came with the rise of the FMSF and its allies, and analyzing the political and cultural reasons for the movement's gains. It traces the frames used by the FMSF and analyzes the success of the frame emphasizing “memory science” and the unreliability of “recovered memories.” The chapter discusses the countermovement's tactics and its coalitions across the political spectrum, including with conservative, anti‐feminist, and progressive groups. It argues that the social construction of knowledge is an important part of social movements.

This chapter describes the formation of the modern child protection system. The most critical date in the process was 1962, when pediatrician Henry Kempe and his colleagues published their seminal article describing “The Battered Child Syndrome.” Kempe agitated for a more robust response to child abuse, and became an effective spokesperson for the renaissance of interest in child abuse and neglect in the 1960s and 1970s. The law of every state requires professionals to report suspicions of child abuse to authorities, and this chapter describes the creation of reporting laws in the 1960s. Prior to the 1970s, the federal government played a useful but minor role in child welfare and protection. In 1974, Congress assumed a leadership role with passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). CAPTA was followed by additional federal laws, especially the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. By the 1980s, the government-funded and -operated child protection familiar to us today was in place.

Chapter 2 focuses on the work of child welfare researchers who emphasized the roles of socioeconomic and racial disparities as important risk factors for child abuse. It recreates a historical moment in which addressing poverty was depicted as a means of “primary prevention” of abuse. It also examines the history of the New York Foundling Hospital’s Crisis Nursery in the early 1970s, a respite care service designed by pediatrician, Vincent Fontana, to be a tool to prevent child abuse in struggling families. While numerous well-respected researchers and practitioners advocated for the importance of addressing structural inequalities in the prevention of child abuse, this approach was never accepted as mainstream. This chapter examines how and why such approaches were marginalized, and at what expense.

This chapter examines the widespread acceptance of mandatory reporting as a powerful tool in combating child abuse. It follows the implementation of CAPTA (1973) throughout the country, and the unsuccessful attempt to legislate national standards for reporting child abuse in the mid 1970s. The chapter examines local and national statistics to examine the impact of expanding mandatory reporting, and questions why this tool was viewed as so powerful. In particular, it asks why the increase in reports was seen to be the pertinent measure of success, rather than measures of child well-being. The chapter follows the trajectory of mandatory reporting over the decades, and examines its long-lasting appeal, despite having significant unintended, but certainly foreseeable, consequences.

Chapter One examines the role of the advocacy group Parents Anonymous in defining, broadening and disseminating perceptions of child abuse. This group was highly influential and played a pivotal role in shaping Senator Walter Mondale’s (D-MN) approach to the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. The chapter also examines the group’s use of federal funds and multiple allegations of fiscal irregularities. The chapter ends in an examination of Jolly K’s, the group’s founder, use of racist language that culminated in her termination from the group, tragically leading to her suicide.

Chapter 3 shows how ideologically diverse activists and legislators converged around a narrow, single-issue opposition to child sexual abuse and defined it as a politically neutral issue. The chapter shows how three challenges to this consensus emerged and were resolved: a 1981 Republican attempt to kill CAPTA; 1992‒1996 feminist organizing around child custody cases and False Memory Syndrome Foundation attempts to weaken CAPTA; 2000 forward, expansions of sex offender registration and notification requirements. Narrow neutrality facilitated the passage of legislation and pulled policy toward criminal justice and away from feminist challenges to the patriarchal family and conservatives’ emphasis on preserving the traditional family. Federal engagement shifted over time from a focus on violence within the family to a focus on child pornography and the control of sex offenders; although framed in terms of dangerous strangers, the new focus affected the larger number of familial offenders as well. Legislators and advocates downplayed race and gender while constructing an implicitly white victim, producing predominantly white offenders because of the prevalence of familial abuse. Experiential and expert knowledge and shared emotional rituals produced and maintained narrow neutrality in Congress, activist and professional groups, and media representations.

This chapter introduces definitions of child maltreatment and the prevalence of child abuse investigations. The introduction also maps the early history of both public and medical interest in the intentional harm to children.

The final chapter examines recent developments, addressing three questions: What is the significance of well-known sex abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church and Pennsylvania State University? How has the word of a child fared since 1995? What are the continuing effects of the academic battle over child suggestibility? The chapter argues that recent scandals are not easily generalized. Although there have been some signs of overreacting to sex offenders who have finished their prison sentences, there is also evidence of continuing underreaction to sexual abuse in general. Moreover, those who originally argued that child suggestibility claims belong only in cases with extremely coercive interviewing are now applying those arguments in cases with strong corroboration and without coercive interviews. There has also been a surprising effort to undermine the professionals who provide front-line services to victims of child sexual abuse. Thus the witch-hunt narrative continues to endanger children.

Chapter 3 examines child sexual abuse in early twentieth-century Scotland and the competing discourses surrounding its prosecution. At the heart of the study is a set of High Court cases of sexual assault upon children involving the aggravated offence of communicating VD, and the role played by the enduring superstition that ‘having connection with a virgin’ was a cure for the affliction. The chapter traces how this ‘pernicious delusion’ figured in medical testimony to legal proceedings and government enquiries throughout the period. It explores the impulses and constraints shaping the response of the law to ‘child outrage’. The impact of these cases on the campaign by feminists, rescue workers, and purity activists to amend the criminal law and the conduct of investigation and trial in respect to sexual offences against women is documented, as is the growing importance of forensic medicine in securing convictions. Continuing resistance is revealed within the medical profession and judiciary, as well as within the family and local community, to recognising child sexual abuse. The chapter illustrates the many layers of denial that operated to deny the child victims justice and the extent to which the legal process stigmatised them as sexual dangers to be institutionalised..

Child abuse is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and other countries. It is the second leading cause of death among children in the US. All 50 States, the District of Columbia, and the US Territories have mandatory child abuse and neglect reporting laws that require certain professionals and institutions to report suspected maltreatment to a child protective services (CPS) agency. Four major types of maltreatment are considered: neglect, physical abuse, psychological maltreatment, and sexual abuse (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010). Once an allegation or referral of child abuse is received by a CPS agency, the majority of reports receive investigations to establish whether or not an intervention is needed. Some reports receive an alternative response in which safety and risk assessments are conducted, but the focus is on working with the family to address issues. Investigations involve gathering evidence to substantiate the alleged maltreatment. Data from reports on child abuse is derived from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), which aggregates and publishes statistics from state child protection agencies. The first report from NCANDS was based on data for 1990. Case-level data include information about the characteristics of reports of abuse and neglect that are made to CPS agencies, the children involved, the types of maltreatment that are alleged, the dispositions of the CPS responses, the risk factors of the child and the caregivers, the services that are provided, and the perpetrators (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010). During 2010, the NCANSDS reported that an estimated 3.3 million referrals estimated to include 5.9 million children were received by CPS agencies. Of the nearly 2 million reports that were screened and received a CPS response, 90.3% received an investigation response and 9.7% received an alternative response (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010). Of the 1,793,724 reports that received an investigation in 2010, 436,321 were substantiated; 24,976 were found to be indicated (likely but unsubstantiated); and 1,262,118 were found to be unsubstantiated. Three-fifths of reports of alleged child abuse and neglect were made by professionals.

This chapter analyses the role that children played in marital violence. A large proportion of women who took their husbands to court for marital violence also complained that their husbands had physically harmed or mistreated their children. For these women, harm to their children was a source of anger and anguish, and many expressed a great deal of concern for their children’s wellbeing. This chapter also asks how children affected women’s responses to marital violence. Most of the abused wives in this study were also mothers, and thus had to confront their husbands’ violence not just as wives but also as the guardians of children. Although motherhood made women more vulnerable to abuse, it also often strengthened their resolve against violence as they sought to protect their children.

Nearly fifty years passed between the reform allowing parties to testify in civil cases and the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898 that allowed defendants to testify in criminal cases. This delay was a byproduct of the reform and experimentation that characterized the Victorian legal system’s approach to the possibility of witness deceit. The Act also marks the triumph of cross-examination as the guarantor of veracity in the courtroom. Several highly publicized in which the respectable defendants were accused of scandalous crimes helped drive the Act’s passage.

Many authors see child abuse as a very important cause of violent behavior. In this chapter we examined published evidence on the association between physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse and trauma and behavior outcomes in victims. The comprehensive review indicates that all forms of abuse, as well as indicators of trauma, are associated with violent offending, but they are also consistently associated with nonviolent offending. The findings also strongly indicate that physical abuse experience is more prominent among violent offenders than nonviolent offenders, however, leading to questions about aspects of physical abuse that lead to violent behavior in victims, rather than general antisociality.

The book ends by questioning the legacy of child welfare policies since the late 1960s. A deliberate attempt to avoid implicating socioeconomic status and race in child abuse led to the creation of our current child welfare system, which disproportionately intrudes into the lives of low income and minority families. Raz emphasizes the importance of recognizing the complex history of our current child welfare system in any attempts at future reform. Raz argues for a complete reform of our child welfare system, which would separate child abuse investigations from the provision of services

In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returns to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. As with Morrison’s other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues.

The integral relationship between carceral violence and gender violence has led to the criminalization of thousands of survivors. The criminal prosecution of domestic violence survivors for being unable to prevent their batterers’ abuse of their children, also known as “failure to protect,” reflects this punitive trend. This chapter recommends a paradigm shift from a “mitigating factors” strategy that attempts to provide explanatory context for survivors’ “failure,” to a structural critique that exposes the ideological foundations of “failure to protect.” Considering two case studies, it examines how these prosecutions create a spatial continuity of violence between domestic space and court space, revealing how the violence of punitivity and confinement becomes violence that is co-threatened by batterers and court actors. It proposes Battering Court Syndrome (BCS) as a framework from which to theorize the criminalization of survivors, a political diagnosis of the institutionalization of domestic violence, and a possible legal defense strategy.