ABSTRACT
The history of child abuse since the 1960s perfectly illustrates how little credence should be given to official declarations of concern about physically and sexually abused children as subjects. Instead, such declarations have tended to focus on children merely as objects in the struggles and ambitions of professions, and as figures in expressions of ideological and cultural value systems. In discussing cruelty to children it is important to recognise that over the last century public and professional anxiety for the ‘problem’ has come in two waves: between the 1880s and early 1900s and since the 1960s (moving from physical to sexual abuse). We need to inquire into why this hiatus occurred. What happened to ‘cruelty’ between those dates? And why does the ‘problem’ resurface first as ‘the battered baby syndrome’, followed by ‘child abuse’ which in the 1980s was redefined as ‘child sexual abuse’? What’s in a name? It will be necessary to look back and forth across the years in order to answer these questions, and constantly to bear in mind that we are dealing with a shifting set of definitions and interests used to describe and identify a particular condition for groups of children which may or may not have altered much over the last century. In other words, ‘abusing’ parents are ever present and, therefore, it is the definition of cruelty and abuse and public interest in the ‘problem’ which is subject to ‘rediscovery’. In the arguments and debates over meanings and solutions we should never forget the ‘abused’ children themselves.1 If much of history comprises vast silences of oppressed people, then the silence of these children engulfs us in its enormity.
