ABSTRACT
Child abuse and the development of systems to protect children from abuse, has been a major focus of attention in all western and to an increasing extent non-western countries during the twentieth century. Discourses on child abuse in Australia have followed developments in the United States and also the United Kingdom with the positivist medico-legal model being dominant. This discourse has constructed child abuse as an objective social problem about which something can and should be done. Child protection professionals, as the adult experts on child abuse, have decided who are the abusers and defined them as pathological. They have placed these abusers under surveillance or removed their children, defined as victims.
