child abuse

child abuse, willful infliction of pain and suffering on children through physical, sexual, or emotional mistreatment. Prior to the 1970s the term child abuse normally referred to only physical mistreatment, but since then its application has expanded to include, in addition to inordinate physical violence, unjustifiable verbal abuse; the failure to furnish proper shelter, nourishment, medical treatment, or emotional support; incest and other cases of sexual abuse, molestation, or rape; and the use of children in prostitution or pornography.

Scale and causes

Surveys in North America and Europe that ask adult subjects to recall childhood mistreatment indicate that between 10 and 30 percent of young girls are subjected to exploitation or abuse as widely defined above. Estimates of abuse or neglect by parents or guardians range from about 1 out of every 100 children to more than 1 in 7, and figures are far higher if emotional abuse and neglect are included. Although widely prevalent, child abuse often is overlooked by family, friends, and health professionals. Prejudice, anxiety, and shame—not lack of information—seem to be the major reasons for the failure to recognize these private acts of violence—a form of tacit denial that leads to their perpetuation. Child abuse can have serious future consequences for its victims, including delays in physical growth, impaired language and cognitive abilities, and problems in personality development, learning, and behavior.

Cruelty to children has several major causes. Abusive patterns of behavior by parents can be viewed as maladaptive responses to stressful situations and feelings of powerlessness. As such, they represent the warped efforts of adults to master situations that are out of their control and to regain a psychological equilibrium through the imposition of their will on defenseless children. Psychiatric and pediatric studies have shown that a large proportion of parents who abuse their children were themselves physically or emotionally mistreated during their childhood. Typically overdisciplined and deprived of parental love in their infancy, these parents repeat the pattern with their own children, often in the belief that they are legitimately exercising their parental right to punish a child. This “cycle of abuse” is a particularly important factor in cases of sexual abuse, and it is now widely believed that many child molesters were victims of abuse as children.

Legal issues

Legal remedies for child abuse range from the incarceration of the offender to the removal of the abused child from the custody of parents or others guilty of committing the crime. With proper social and psychotherapeutic intervention, many child abusers can be helped. In fact, many emotionally troubled abusers are relieved to be discovered, and often they respond well to the therapeutic help they receive. However, some recent theories about child molesters suggest that their conditions are less susceptible to intervention than was once believed, and many jurisdictions have resorted to strict penal solutions, such as sexual-predator laws, which provide for indefinite incarceration for habitual sexual offenders. The treatment or cure of offenders is thought to be more difficult when the victims are young children or toddlers, and compulsive pedophiles are viewed as intractable problems for both therapy and the justice system.

The legal definition of child abuse differs between societies and has changed significantly over time. For example, the age of sexual consent varies greatly between and even within countries. Some European countries prohibit the use of physical violence to enforce discipline, though others permit moderate forms of coercion. Despite these differences, the abusive treatment of children, however it is defined, is widely proscribed by criminal statutes. One of the earliest national laws to protect children from cruel treatment was adopted in Great Britain in 1884, when the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was organized. Similar organizations subsequently were created in other countries. In the United States in 1875, New York became the first state to legislate protection for children. Its laws served as a model for other states, all of which developed statutes designating child abuse a criminal offense. In the 1880s American states systematically began raising the age at which girls could give sexual consent from 10, which had been in place since colonial times.

Child-protection legislation proliferated during the 1960s. First developed in the United States, these laws soon became models for criminal statutes in many other countries. In 1962, American medical authorities discovered the phenomenon of “baby battering”—the infliction of physical violence on small children—and both the federal government and states adopted laws to investigate and report such acts; eventually, these laws were applied to cases of sexual abuse and molestation. In 1974 the United States created a National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

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Since the 1970s, conservative and feminist groups have sought, for different reasons, aggressive measures to combat child abuse. Although earlier campaigns against child molestation had emphasized the threat posed by strangers, feminists stressed what they perceived as the vastly greater danger posed by male intimates, such as fathers, stepfathers, uncles, and brothers. Because abuse by male relatives is rarely reported by the family involved, child-welfare advocates called for new laws that would allow greater intervention by outside professionals. During the 1970s and ’80s, most states adopted some form of mandatory reporting procedure whereby doctors, teachers, and social workers were required to report any circumstances that might reveal suspected child abuse. The courts also revamped their procedures to grant more protection to victims. For example, to remove the need for child witnesses to confront the accused, children often were permitted to testify from behind screens or even by video link from another room, and judges and lawyers were encouraged to frame questions and language in a way that did not baffle or intimidate children.

Along with the changes in laws and attitudes came a dramatic upsurge in the number of reported abuse cases. Between 1976 and 1986, reports of child abuse and neglect across the United States rose threefold to more than two million, with a further increase to nearly three million reports by the mid-1990s. However, a majority of these reports were judged to be unfounded. Reports of sexual abuse rose 18-fold between 1976 and 1985. The increases in recorded child-abuse figures, which may have been a result of greater awareness of the problem rather than a surge in abuse, contributed to a widespread impression that society was suffering an “epidemic” of child abuse, and concern reached immense proportions during the 1980s.