Making an Issue of Child Abuse

Barbara J. Nelson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226220017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1. Child Abuse as a Social Problem

The date was March 26, 1973. The weather in Washington, D.C., was rainy and mild. On this typical early spring day a very atypical event was under way. Senator Walter F. Mondale (D., Minn.), an erstwhile presidential candidate, was holding the first day of hearings on his Child Abuse Prevention Act. Never before had Congress demonstrated so great a concern for child abuse. These hearings were proof to all who were interested that child abuse was firmly established on the congressional agenda. The hearings began at 9:30 A.M. in the wood-paneled offices of the Dirksen Building. Second among the witnesses, and the most riveting, was “Jolly K.,” founder of Parents Anonymous. Mondale asked her if she had abused her child:

“Yes, I did, to the point of almost causing death several times. . . . It was extreme serious physical abuse. . . . Once I threw a rather large kitchen knife at her and another time I strangled her because she lied to me. . . . This was up to when she was 6-1/2 years old. . . . It was ongoing. It was continuous.

“I had gone to 10 county and State facilities. Out of those, all but one were very realistic places to turn to. Six of them were social services, protective service units. . . . Even the most ignorant listeners could have picked up what I was saying, that I was abusing [my daughter], and that I was directly asking for mental health services. . . . I wanted to keep my child. I wanted to get rid of my problem. She wasn’t the problem. She was the recipient of my behavior.”¹

Senator Jennings Randolph (D., W. Va.) turned the questioning to Jolly K.’s experience with Parents Anonymous, the self-help group for abusive parents styled after Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Like AA, Parents Anonymous encourages abusive parents to talk about their fears and frustrations with child rearing, and their guilt and anguish over the harm members have caused their children. Randolph went straight to the political heart of the matter, asking how successful Parents Anonymous was in eliminating further abuse and keeping children at home. Happily, Randolph learned of the program’s success:

“Most of them have the children in the home. Most of them have the symptomatic behavior of abuse now removed. . . .

“We encourage parents to utilize us until they feel comfortable enough to go out and utilize other existing services. . . . where they can work more deeply with internal problems.²

Jolly K. was the perfect witness, cutting through academic pieties to convince the assembled senators, witnesses, and journalists of the gravity of the problem. She was, figuratively, a sinner who had repented and been saved by her own hard work and the loving counsel of her friends. But more importantly, she embodied the American conception of a social problem: individually rooted, described as an illness, and solvable by occasional doses of therapeutic conversation.

Senator Mondale encouraged this conventional understanding of the problem. Any more elaborate view, especially one which focused on injustice as a source of social problems, threatened to scuttle his efforts to move this small piece of categorical legislation through Congress. With able maneuvering, Mondale’s approach prevailed, and on January 31, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) into law. The legislation authorized $86 million to be spent over the next three and a half years, mostly on research and demonstration projects, though some funds were earmarked for discretionary social service grants to the states.³

Eighty-six million dollars for child abuse, a problem which did not even warrant an entry in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature until 1968!⁴ How did this happen? Or, asked more elaborately, how did child abuse, a small, private-sector charity concern, become a multimillion-dollar public social welfare issue? This book tries to provide an answer. It is a study of the politics of child abuse and neglect, a history and analysis of political issue creation and agenda setting.

The book has three broad aims. The first aim is, of course, to recount the history of child abuse policy-making over the last three decades. The story begins in 1955 with the renewed efforts of the American Humane Association (AHA), a charitable organization engaged in research on child and animal maltreatment, to ascertain the extent of physical child abuse and the adequacy of governmental response. The AHA shared its findings with the U.S. Children’s Bureau, which in 1963 proposed a model statute to encourage reporting of physical child abuse. Other organizations as diverse as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Council of State Legislatures proposed different model reporting laws. Bombarded with model statutes and facing no opposition, state legislatures passed child abuse reporting laws with dizzying speed. The demand for services, or at least the demand for workable service models, encouraged Mondale to sponsor federal legislation in 1973; legislation which was successful despite opposition from the Nixon administration. That legislation appeared to be untouchable until President Ronald Reagan was elected and stripped social programs bare in an attempt to balance the budget and shift the initiative for solving social problems to the private sector.

But the history of child abuse policy making is also a vehicle for the discussion of political agenda setting more generally, this book’s second aim. E. E. Schattschneider, the dean of agenda-setting studies by virtue of his classic work The Semi-Sovereign People, asserted that the most important decisions made in any polity were those determining which issues would become part of public discourse. “Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out,” Schattschneider said with economy.⁵ This book tries to elaborate the process by which issues get “organized into politics.” It is an attempt to advance our understanding of the first step of the policy process, the step where those issues which will receive governmental attention are chosen from among those issues which could receive governmental attention.

The third aim of the book is to discuss what I call “the public use of private deviance.” My interest here is to link child abuse with other issues dealing with violence and personal autonomy (e.g., rape, domestic violence, incest, sexual abuse, and attacks on the elderly) which have recently become part of the governmental agenda. Like child abuse, each of these issues was accepted as a proper concern of government in part because it was represented as deviance improperly protected by the privacy of the family. But the focus on deviance—and medical deviance at that—turned policy makers away from considering the social-structural and social-psychological underpinnings of abuse and neglect. The advantages and limitations of the deviance approach, which are essentially the advantages and limitations of liberal reform, constitute the third theme.

The book focuses on decision making in governmental organizations. I am most interested in the process whereby public officials learn about new problems, decide to give them their personal attention, and mobilize their organizations to respond to them. Of course, this process is influenced by the type of problems considered and the organizational and political milieux in which officials work. Thus the book will give particular attention to the fact that during the agenda-setting process child abuse was vigorously portrayed as a noncontroversial issue. Disagreements about how best to respond to abuse were suppressed, along with the great debate over the extent to which government ought properly to intervene in family matters. These conflicts became much more apparent as the political climate grew more conservative in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed, government’s attention to child abuse in the post World War II period must be understood as part of a larger concern with equity and social justice. So too the movement away from governmental responsibility for child protection should be viewed as part of a larger concern with governmental efficiency and traditional patterns of family authority.

The book is organized chronologically, presenting three case studies of agenda setting in governmental institutions, and an analysis of the role of the mass and professional media. Chapter 2 discusses the theoretical approaches to agenda setting, expanding and linking the organizational, interest group, and economic literature. Chapter 3 shows how the first contemporary governmental interest in child abuse arose through communication between the American Humane Association and the U.S. Children’s Bureau. Chapter 4 makes the connection between governmental response to child abuse and popular awareness of the problem, and illuminates the varying roles played by the professional and mass media in making the public aware of child abuse. Chapter 5 presents the states’ response to child abuse. Here we shall discuss the rapid adoption of child abuse reporting laws—all fifty states passed legislation in only five years—as well as present a case study of the passage of New Jersey’s first reporting law. Chapter 6 considers how Congress became aware of popular and professional interest in abuse and chose to do something about it. Chapter 7, the last chapter, reviews the findings about agenda setting and concludes with an assessment of the future of the public use of private deviance. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by defining social problems, discussing the invention of child abuse as a social problem, presenting the difficulties in defining and measuring abuse, and elaborating on the theme of the public use of private deviance.

The Invention of Child Abuse

Defining Social Problems

Examples of the brutal or neglectful treatment of children are found as far back as records have been kept. But the mere existence of a condition like cruelty to children does not mean that every society which witnessed abuse condemned it, although some individuals may have.⁶ A social problem goes beyond what a few, or even many, individuals feel privately: a social problem is a social construct. Its “creation” requires not only that a number of individuals feel a conflict of value over what is and what ought to be, but also that individuals organize to change the condition, and achieve at least a modicum of recognition for their efforts from the wider public.⁷

The social problem we know as child abuse is a product of America’s Gilded Era. Until the 1870s maltreatment of white children was not a part of public debate. Extreme brutality was handled by the court on a case-by-case basis. Less severe cases may have upset the neighbors, but child-rearing decisions were considered the prerogative of parents, particularly fathers.

What happened, then, to make the public think of abuse as a social problem? The answer rests in part with the “Mary Ellen” case, a rather grisly instance of abuse which received widespread publicity in New York City in 1874. A “friendly visitor” discovered that the girl had regularly been bound and beaten by her stepmother. Outrage over the incident precipitated the forming of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first child protection association in the country.

A single incident, however momentous, does not guarantee that concerned individuals will view the event as an example of a larger problem, and organize to solve it. To bring a problem to light requires leadership to create the groups necessary to act, and a cultural willingness to accept the problem as defined. Sociologist Neil Smelser calls this latter requirement “structural readiness for change.”⁸ The requirement of structural readiness does not mean, of course, that if certain conditions are not defined as problems the time is simply not right for recognition. Repression keeps certain conditions from being defined as problems. Nonetheless, the creation of a social problem does require some public receptivity.⁹

The ideal of a “protected childhood” provided the cultural backdrop necessary for the acceptance of abuse as a social problem. Cruelty to children, especially by parents, appeared much more troublesome when contrasted with the “modern” image of childhood as a safe and sheltered period of life. Scholars have offered a number of rather different explanations for the creation of the modern family and its reverence for childhood.¹⁰ Phillipe Ariès suggests that the transformation of formal education under the Scholastics, the idea of privacy, and the rise of a partly urban, commercial society, conjoined to initiate the affective family and attention to childhood as a separate time of life deserving of protection. Lawrence Stone proposes another explanation. The rise of “affective individualism” in the West produced a bourgeois family based on friendship and sentiment. Both Ariès and Stone locate the origins of the modern family in the bourgeoisie. In contrast, Edward Shorter locates the origin of the modern family in changes in village culture. Technological innovations which allowed capital surplus freed villagers from patriarchal village mores and permitted the development of “familial empathy.”

Though they disagree on many points, these explanations all concur with the idea that in the modern family, normal, correct child rearing excludes excessive violence or gross inattention. In America, belief in a protected childhood was the product of three forces—natural rights ideology, commitment to civic education, and the increasing number of bourgeois families—which converged in the post—Civil War period. During Radical Reconstruction natural rights ideology, with its commitment to equality, drew a growing number of supporters. Its rhetoric frequently extended natural rights to animals and children. Elbridge T. Gerry, one of the founders of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, was an advocate of this position. In 1882 he wrote that “at the present day in this country, children have some rights, which even parents are bound to respect,” sentiments much less evident a century earlier.¹¹

Those who might not fully support the notion of the natural rights of children could still see the wisdom of educating children for citizenship. Indeed, America’s experiment in republican government produced a long-standing commitment to civic education.¹² But after the Civil War the support for civic education in part superceded older, more traditional educational concerns. Childhood was no longer seen only as the time to form a moral adult, but also the time to forge a separate citizen of the republic. Historian Stanley N. Katz nicely summarizes this transformation:

Philip Greven has graphically described how evangelical and even moderate colonial Americans self-consciously set out to subdue their children’s independence...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Child Abuse as a Social Problem
• 2. Theoretical Approaches to Agenda Setting
• 3. The Children’s Bureau
• 4. The Agenda-Setting Function of the Media
• 5. There Ought to Be a Law!
• 6. Congress
• 7. The Public Use of Private Deviance
• Notes
• Index