Making an Issue of Child Abuse *

Agenda-setting is the course by which issues are adopted for Governmental consideration and perhaps remedy. Although agenda-setting can be approached from an economic or issue-oriented perspective, the focus of this work is on decision making in organizations. The objective was to find out how officials learn about new problems, decide to give them their personal attention, and mobilize their organizations to respond to them. To answer these questions we examined four situations where child abuse achieved important agendas: the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the mass and professional media, state legislatures, and Congress. In the process we discovered how child abuse, originally a private-sector charity concern, became additionally a public-sector social welfare issue.