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Making an Issue of Child Abuse

Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems

The University of Chicago Press

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."

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.

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.

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! 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. 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. 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.

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." 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.

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. 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.

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. 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 and to make them conform to the dictates of divine law and parental wisdom. So long as salvation was generally perceived as dependent upon conversion, it was obviously the parents' highest duty so to treat their children. For the Rousseauian modern parent, however, precisely the opposite was indicated. For them the child was a fragile flower to be cultivated, nourished and appreciated so that its finest qualities could realize their potential. The discovery of childhood and an optimistic view of child psychology thus transformed child-parent relations.

The increasing number of bourgeois families, where the wife and children did not work for wages, gave substance to this view. A protected childhood became a standard by which well-to-do families could measure the social adequacy and integration of less fortunate families. Well-to-do activists, who could afford to provide such protection for their children, organized child protective societies beginning in the 1870s. But as we shall see later, they were immediately confronted by the unsettling observation that economic conditions constrained many parents from providing such protection for their children.

The Mary Ellen Case

The first child protection society was formed in 1874 in response to the notorious Mary Ellen Wilson case. Mary Ellen's plight was crushingly Victorian. She lived in the home of Francis and Mary Connolly, but she was not the blood relative of either, being the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Connolly's first husband, Thomas McCormack, and Fanny Wilson. A neighbor noticed that Mrs. Connolly treated the child brutally, beating her with a leather thong and allowing her to go ill-clothed in bad weather. The neighbor told Mrs. Etta Angell Wheeler, a "friendly visitor," who then went to Henry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) to ask if the ASPCA could help the child.

The popular version of Bergh's response reports that Bergh successfully argued in court that Mary Ellen ought to be removed from her cruel guardians because she, as a member of the animal kingdom, deserved the same protection as abused animals. Actually, the case was argued by Bergh's friend and counsel, Elbridge T. Gerry, who had Mary Ellen removed from her unwholesome surroundings by a petition for a writ de homine replegando, an old English writ for removing a person from the custody of another. The case was a staple in New York newspapers for months, no doubt aided by the fact that Mrs. Wheeler's husband was a journalist. In December 1874 the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (New York SPCC) was formed, with Gerry, who had successfully removed Mary Ellen from her home and won a prison sentence for her stepmother, as the moving force.

Gerry and his friends had a ready model for action when the Mary Ellen case came to their attention: the British and American animal protection societies. Animal protection societies were first formed in England in 1824. Henry Bergh, who founded the American SPCA in 1866, explicitly used the Royal British SPCA as his guide. When not ignored, both the English and American SPCAs were the objects of laughter and scorn. Only the meat- packing industry, whose unsanitary and cruel practices were often attacked, ever paid them much attention. Indeed, the important role of the animal protective societies in promoting sanitary meat and milk processing has largely been forgotten today, when we remember the SPCAs only as the perfect example of frivolous Victorian do-gooding.

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Excerpted from Making an Issue of Child Abuse by Barbara J. Nelson. Copyright © 1984 University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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