ABSTRACT
Considerable research has been carried out over the past 25 years that attempts to explain the problem of child abuse and neglect. While scat tered individual cases of abuse were known about and discussed by medical and social service professionals during the nineteenth century (Lynch, 1985) it was not until the latter half of the twentieth century that a previously apathetic and indifferent public and professional community devoted concentrated effort to the issue of abuse and ne glect of children (Johnson, 1984; Nelson, 1984). Between 1962 and 1967, each of the 50 states enacted child abuse legislation which included provisions for the mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect. The federal government enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (PL 93-247) and established the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect. A handful of research efforts and publications quickly multiplied into hundreds of books and articles. Prior to 1960, abused and neglected children were virtually the missing persons of the medical, social work, social problem, and child welfare literature. Today, we have accumulated sufficient data to provide preliminary an swers to the important questions pertaining to this field of inquiry. Nonetheless, many questions remain unanswered, and much research offers ambiguous or contradictory findings. The most recent reviews of the state of knowledge on child maltreatment agree that we still know little about the causes of child abuse or how to treat, predict, or prevent it. Moreover, little is known about the long-term consequences of child abuse and neglect (Gelles, 1980; Starr, 1979; Zigler, 1979).
