BiblioVault - Books about Child abuse

The Battered Child

Edited by Mary Edna Helfer, Ruth S. Kempe, and Richard D. Krugman

University of Chicago Press, 1999

First published in 1968, The Battered Child quickly became a landmark work. Our awareness of child abuse today is due in no small part to the remarkable impact of its first and subsequent editions.

The new edition of this classic text continues the legacy. While updating and significantly adding to previous editions, the fifth edition retains the multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach that initially set the work apart. This new edition contains chapters from professionals in such diverse fields as pediatrics, psychiatry, legal studies, and social work that reflect the past decade's extraordinary advances in research and techniques. Twenty of the book's 30 chapters are entirely new, while the remaining material has been extensively revised.

Part I provides a historical overview of child abuse and neglect as well as background material on the cultural, psychiatric, social, economic, and legal contexts of child maltreatment. Part II discusses the processes of assessing cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and neglect from the unique perspectives of all the professionals involved, including teachers, pediatricians, and social workers. Part III describes intervention and treatment, focusing on legal issues, investigative procedures, and therapeutic processes, while Part IV addresses prevention and policy issues.

Previous editions of The Battered Child have earned the labels of "a classic" and a "Bible." With its up-to-date information, unequaled scope, and contributions from experts on every aspect of child abuse, the fifth edition of this cornerstone text is even more essential to the field than its predecessors.

"Comprehensive and up-to-date."—David Cottrell, British Journal of Psychiatry

"A valuable contribution to the field of abuse and neglect"—Prasanna Nair, Journal of the American Medical Association

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Catching a Case

Inequality and Fear in New York City's Child Welfare System

Lee, Tina

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Influenced by news reports of young children brutalized by their parents, most of us see the role of child services as the prevention of severe physical abuse. But as Tina Lee shows in Catching a Case, most child welfare cases revolve around often ill-founded charges of neglect, and the parents swept into the system are generally struggling but loving, fighting to raise their children in the face of crushing poverty, violent crime, poor housing, lack of childcare, and failing schools.

Lee explored the child welfare system in New York City, observing family courts, interviewing parents and following them through the system, asking caseworkers for descriptions of their work and their decision-making processes, and discussing cases with attorneys on all sides. What she discovered about the system is troubling. Lee reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for families, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet. For instance, parents can be accused of neglect for providing inadequate childcare or housing even when they cannot afford anything better. In many cases, child welfare exacerbates family problems and sometimes drives parents further into poverty while the family court system does little to protect their rights.

Catching a Case is a much-needed wake-up call to improve the child welfare system, and to offer more comprehensive social services that will allow all children to thrive.

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Child Abuse in the Deep South

Geographical Modifiers of Abuse Characteristics

Lee W. Badger

University of Alabama Press, 1988

The recognition of child abuse as a troubling social and public health problem along with the documentation required by mandatory reporting laws have made possible the epidemiological investigation of risk factors association with child abuse. Child Abuse in the Deep South is a study of physical and sexual child abuse designed to measure the incidence of child abuse and neglect in the state of Alabama, identify the characteristics of confirmed abuse, and test the hypothesis that community size is a key, predictive variable in the surveillance, reporting, and caseworker determination of abuse. Child Abuse in the Deep South is based on a comprehensive review of more than seven thousand randomly selected narrative reports from the Alabama Central Registry.

A landmark finding in this study is that different combinations of cultural factors contribute to the physical and sexual abuse of black and white children in rural, small-town, and urban communities. The rates of abuse discovered and reported in small towns are revealed to be materially higher than those in rural or urbanized locations, especially for young white males, and the authors query whether this indicates higher rates of abuse or higher rates of reporting

Child Abuse in the Deep South provides a quantitative benchmark that investigators and policy-makers will find invaluable on the path to defining at-risk populations, effective interventions, and treatments.

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The Child Cases

How America's Religious Exemption Laws Harm Children

Alan Rogers

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

When a four-year-old California girl died on March 9, 1984, the state charged her mother with involuntary manslaughter because she failed to provide her daughter with medical care, choosing instead to rely on spiritual healing. During the next few years, a half dozen other children of Christian Science parents died under similar circumstances. The children's deaths and the parents' trials drew national attention, highlighting a deeply rooted, legal/political struggle to define religious freedom.

Through close analysis of these seven cases, legal historian Alan Rogers explores the conflict between religious principles and secular laws that seek to protect children from abuse and neglect. Christian Scientists argued—often with the support of mainline religious groups—that the First Amendment's "free exercise" clause protected religious belief and behavior. Insisting that their spiritual care was at least as effective as medical treatment, they thus maintained that parents of seriously ill children had a constitutional right to reject medical care.

Congress and state legislatures confirmed this interpretation by inserting religious exemption provisos into child abuse laws. Yet when parental prayer failed and a child died, prosecutors were able to win manslaughter convictions by arguing—as the U.S. Supreme Court had held for more than a century—that religious belief could not trump a neutral, generally applicable law. Children's advocates then carried this message to state legislatures, eventually winning repeal of religious exemption provisions in a handful of states.

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City of Eternal Spring

Afaa Michael Weaver

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014

Winner of the 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award (poetry category)

This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two earlier books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author’s personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver’s travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.

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Crime and Family

Selected Essays of Joan McCord

Joan McCord, introduction by David Farrington, foreword by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

Temple University Press, 2007

Joan McCord (1930-2004) was one of the most famous, most-respected, and best-loved criminologists of her generation. A brilliant pioneer, Dr. McCord was best known for her work on the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, the first large-scale, longitudinal experimental study in the field of criminology. The study was among the first to demonstrate unintended harmful effects of a well-meaning prevention program. Dr. McCord's most important essays from this groundbreaking research project are among those included in this volume.McCord also co-wrote, edited, or co-edited twelve volumes and authored or co-authored 127 journal articles and book chapters. She wrote across a broad array of subjects, including delinquency, alcoholism, violence, crime prevention, and criminal theory. This book brings her most important and lasting work together in one place for the first time.

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Damaged Parents

An Anatomy of Child Neglect

Norman A. Polansky, Mary Ann Chalmers, Elizabeth Werthan Buttenwieser, and David P. Williams

University of Chicago Press, 1983

"Most of us are unaware of child neglect even when we are witnessing it. . . . Neglect is a matter of things undone, of inaction compounded by indifference. Since it goes on at home, it is a very private sin. . . . It is little wonder that most of the public is unaware of poor child caring. Its ignorance is even greater as to how widespread the problem is. But this is not a blissful ignorance. The public may not want to attend to child neglect, but it lives with the distortions of human personality that are left in its wake."—from chapter 1 of Damaged Parents

"Norman Polansky and his colleagues have produced a truly remarkable book. . . . One of the consequences of [the] relative invisibility of child neglect is that we also know less about it. But this book will help to correct that for it contains reports of findings from two systematic efforts to define, measure, classify, and understand child neglect."—Thomas M. Young, Social Service Review

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The Future of Child Protection

How to Break the Cycle of Abuse and Neglect

Jane Waldfogel

Harvard University Press, 1998

Lisa Steinberg. Elisa Izquierdo. Lance Helms. These are just a few of the names drawn from recent headlines, revealing cases of horrendous child abuse and neglect. Such cases have led to a crisis of confidence in the current child protective services (CPS) system, and to frequent calls for reform.

The public is right to be concerned, shows Jane Waldfogel, but many perceptions of the CPS system and the problems it is designed to alleviate are inaccurate. This book goes beyond the headlines, using historical, comparative, and specific case data to formulate a new approach to protecting children.

Currently, Waldfogel argues, the CPS system is overwhelmed by referrals. As a result, neither high-risk nor low-risk families are adequately served.

Waldfogel examines the underlying assumptions of CPS, compares the U.S. record with those of Britain, Canada, and Australia, and offers a "new paradigm" in which CPS joins with other public and private partners to provide a differential response to the broad range of children in need of protection. She highlights reforms underway in several states and in Britain.

This book's analytical clarity and straightforward policy recommendations will make it mandatory reading for policymakers, practitioners, and others interested in the future of child protection.

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Heroes of Their Own Lives

The Politics and History of Family Violence--Boston, 1880-1960

Linda Gordon

University of Illinois Press, 2002

In this unflinching history of family violence, Linda Gordon traces policies on child abuse and neglect, wife beating, and incest from 1880 to 1960. Gordon begins with the so-called discovery of family violence in the 1870s, when experts first identified it as a social rather than personal problem. From there, Gordon chronicles the changing visibility of family violence as gender, family, and political ideologies shifted and the women’s and civil rights movements gained strength. Throughout, she illustrates how public perceptions of issues like marriage, poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and responsibility worked for and against the victims of family violence, and looks at the link between family violence and larger social problems.

Powerful and moving, Heroes of Their Own Lives offers an honest understanding of a persistent problem and a realistic view of the difficulties in stopping it.

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Making an Issue of Child Abuse

Barbara J. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 1986

In this absorbing story of how child abuse grew from a small, private-sector charity concern into a multimillion-dollar social welfare issue, Barbara Nelson provides important new perspectives on the process of public agenda setting. Using extensive personal interviews and detailed archival research, she reconstructs an invaluable history of child abuse policy in America. She shows how the mass media presented child abuse to the public, how government agencies acted and interacted, and how state and national legislatures were spurred to strong action on this issue. Nelson examines prevailing theories about agenda setting and introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding how a social issue becomes part of the public agenda. This issue of child abuse, she argues, clearly reveals the scope and limitations of social change initiated through interest-group politics. Unfortunately, the process that transforms an issue into a popular cause, Nelson concludes, brings about programs that ultimately address only the symptoms and not the roots of such social problems.

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Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.

American Indian and Alaska Native Perspectives

Royleen J Ross

Rutgers University Press, 2022

This book is part of a concentrated series of books that examines child maltreatment across minoritized, cultural groups.Specifically, this volume addresses American Indian and Alaska Native populations. However, in an effort to contextualize the experiences of 574 federally recognized tribes and 50+ state recognized tribes, as well as villages, the authors focus on populations within rural and remote regions and discuss the experiences of some tribal communities throughout US history. It should be noted that established research has primarily drawn attention to the pervasive problems impacting Indigenous individuals, families, and communities. Aligned with an attempt to adhere to a decolonizing praxis, the authors share information in a strength-based framework for the Indigenous communities discussed within the text. The authors review federally funded programs (prevention, intervention, and treatment) that have been adapted for tribal communities (e.g., Safecare) and include cultural teachings that address child maltreatment. The intention of this book is to inform researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and advocates about the current state of child maltreatment from an Indigenous perspective.

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Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.

Multicultural Considerations

Milton A Fuentes

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Preventing Child Maltreatment: Multicultural Considerations in the United States is the first book in a concentrated series that examines child maltreatment across minoritized, cultural groups. Specifically, this volume examines core multicultural concepts (e.g., intersectionality, acculturation, spirituality, oppression) as they relate to child maltreatment in the United States, while the other books take a closer look at particular ethnic or racial communities in this country. Additionally, this book examines child maltreatment through the intersection of feminist, multicultural, and prevention/wellness promotion lenses. Recommendations for treatment in each book build on a foundation of prevention and wellness promotion, along with multicultural and feminist theories. Throughout this book, five case studies, which are introduced in Chapter One, are revisited to help the readers make important and meaningful connections between theory and practice.

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Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.

The Black Community Perspective

Melissa Phillips

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Child maltreatment occurs in the Black community at higher rates than any other racial group. Given the prevalence of child maltreatment risk factors in the Black community, such as being in a low-income family, single parent family, greater exposure to physical discipline, and less access to services and resources, it is not surprising but nonetheless concerning that Black children are at greater risk for abuse and/or neglect. Unearthing the cause and effect between the challenges faced by the Black community and the life outcomes for Black children is key to making positive changes happen. Through a feminist and womanist lens, the authors unpack the range of factors that intersect and impact the Black community that are necessary to address to effectively protect Black children. Understanding how to prevent maltreatment and promote health and wellness are essential to adequately address maltreatment so as to protect and empower Black children.

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Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.

The Latinx Community Perspective

Esther J. Calzada

Rutgers University Press, 2022

This book is part of a concentrated series of books that examines child maltreatment across cultural groups. Specifically, this volume examines core concepts relevant to Latinx families (e.g., familismo, acculturation, spirituality, oppression) as they relate to child maltreatment in the United States. While there are vast differences across Latinx families, authors use critical race and feminist theories to explore the impact of differences based on gender, race, immigration status, and country of origin. The book begins by contextualizing child maltreatment in Latinx families within the pervasive structural racism and inequality in the United States and addressing unique traumas experienced by Latinx families resulting from that inequity. Subsequent chapters address prevention of child maltreatment, responses to maltreatment and healing from trauma with an emphasis on resilience within the Latinx community. Three case studies are used to illustrate and apply concepts from each chapter.

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Refining Child Pornography Law

Crime, Language, and Social Consequences

Edited by Carissa Byrne Hessick

University of Michigan Press, 2016

The legal definition of child pornography is, at best, unclear. In part because of this ambiguity and in part because of the nature of the crime itself, the prosecution and sentencing of perpetrators, the protection of and restitution for victims, and the means for preventing repeat offenses are deeply controversial. In Refining Child Pornography Law, experts in law, sociology, and social work examine child pornography law and its consequences in an effort to clarify the questions and begin to formulate answers. Focusing on the roles of language and crime definition, the contributors discuss the increasing visibility child pornography plays in the national conversation about child safety, and present a range of views regarding the punishment of those who produce, distribute, and possess materials that may be considered child pornography.

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Sex, Contraception, and Motherhood in Jamaica

Eugene B. Brody

Harvard University Press, 1981

This book is the first to offer a combined social science and psychoanalytic perspective on reproductive behavior. The author emphasizes the personal histories of his subjects within their cultural environment, and takes into account the setting of the interview and the subjective responses of both interviewee and interviewer. The study reveals how Jamaicans, particularly women, relate to their own parents, learn about sex, experience sexual maturity and first intercourse, and perceive their relations with subsequent partners. Other themes examined are the significance of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood and the folk context of Jamaican beliefs about reproduction and contraception.

All of these are aspects of what the author terms a “culture of motherhood.” His unique approach illuminates the many complex factors that influence this population's use or nonuse of contraceptive methods. In his concluding chapter, Eugene Brody offers suggestions for reconciling the private needs of individuals and the public goals of Jamaican population policy. Although his research centers on one Caribbean island, his ideas are applicable to other developing countries. In Sex, Contraception, and Motherhood in Jamaica, family planning professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social scientists will find an intriguing new approach to reproductive policy.

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Threatened Children

Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims

Joel Best

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Child abuse, incest, child molestation, Halloween sadism, child pornography: although clearly not new problems, they have attracted more attention than ever before. Threatened Children asks why. Joel Best analyzes the rhetorical tools used by child advocates when making claims aimed at raising public anxiety and examines the media's role in transmitting reformers' claims and the public's response to the frightening statistics, compelling examples, and expanding definitions it confronts. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from criminal justice records to news stories, from urban legends to public opinion surveys, Best reveals how the cultural construction of social problems evolves.

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Violence against Children

Physical Child Abuse in the United States

David G. Gil

Harvard University Press, 1970