Abstract
Publication of the Battered Child Syndrome (BCS) brought a new focus on a critical problem—severe and repeated abuse of children. However, it also led to a substantial expansion in the scope of the child protection system to situations far different than those discussed in the BCS. By the 1980s, over 15% of all children born each year were reported to CPS before turning 18, most for potential “harms” to their development that did not involve physical or sexual maltreatment. The CPS system is not well-designed to help these children. While children now receive somewhat more protection from severe physical and sexual abuse, the great majority of children who experience other types of seriously inadequate parenting fail to receive needed support. This commentary discusses why the CPS system should be focused on the types of harms to children identified by in the BCS and outlines why a new approach is needed to meet the needs of other children whose futures are seriously compromised because they receive highly inadequate parenting.
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Notes
- 1.
My discussion focuses on child protection in the United States. The BCS also influenced policy and programs in many other countries. Many of these countries are experiencing problems similar to the ones I describe with respect to the US system (Lonne et al. 2008).
- 2.
While reporting increased, the number of children under state supervision did not change dramatically at this time. In the 1960s, there already were several hundred thousand children in foster care. They came to state attention in a variety of ways, especially the actions of social workers supervising families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children and requests from parents who could not care for their children, often due to poverty. The large numbers of children placed in foster care, often for lengthy periods, constituted a situation of great concern to many commentators (Wald 1975, 1976).
- 3.
The situations identified in the BCS largely involved children less than 12 years of age; most cases involved infants and toddlers and my analysis of the current situation focuses largely on younger children.
- 4.
While knowledge regarding treatment has expanded greatly, there still is not much evidence on how to successfully work with parents who severely abuse young children.
- 5.
Other factors also contributed to the increased focus on maltreatment, including the emergence of a children’s rights movement in the 1960s and the increased legalization of the juvenile justice and child welfare systems as a result of several US Supreme Court decisions. However, there were, even at that time, substantial debates about the definition of abuse and the role of the child protection system. These were reflected in the work of a major project established in 1972 by the American Bar Association and the Institute for Judicial Administration, the Juvenile Justice Standards Project. I was the reporter for a volume of that project that focused on Standards Related to Child Abuse and Neglect. Due to the debate over the appropriate scope of intervention, the proposed Standards Related to Abuse and Neglect were the only standards not adopted by the ABA. These debates are discussed in two law review articles that I wrote at that time (Wald 1975, 1976).
- 6.
This change also was due in part to changes in the administration of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (Courtney et al. 2008).
- 7.
This has been true since the 1960s (Wulczyn et al. 2005).
- 8.
This is evidenced, in part, by fact that less than 10% of substantiated cases of physical or sexual abuse lead to removal of the child (USDHHS 2010). The greatest threat in most physical and sexual abuse cases is to the child’s emotional development, rather than their physical well-being.
- 9.
Neglect is also present in some physical and sexual abuse cases. The focus on neglect in the United States is very different from other countries, where physical abuse cases constitute the majority of interventions, perhaps because these countries have a greater social welfare safety net (Waldfogel 1998; Trocme 2008).
- 10.
Neglect can also lead to physical health problems and there is increasing evidence that highly stressful home environments can cause damaging brain changes (Center on the Developing Child 2007).
- 11.
The rate in Pennsylvania reflects the fact that its’ reporting law includes only serious abuse. However, under a separate law, state agencies do deal with thousands of cases of “general neglect.” The reasons for variation among other states has not been studied, but likely relate to value choices, the structure of reporting laws, resources, worker training, and a variety of other policies and practices.
- 12.
Unfortunately, as with many other aspects of the child protection system, there are no comparable data over time. There have been large declines in injury death rates of children over the past 40 years. The number of children who are found to have died as a result of maltreatment each year has varied over time, generally between 1,500 and 2,000 children each year. However, many more states now review child deaths to determine the cause, so the likelihood of uncovering and labeling maltreatment-related deaths has increased. The fact that the overall number of deaths attributed to maltreatment has remained relatively steady may indicate, therefore, that there has been an actual decline in maltreatment-related deaths, not just in accidental injury deaths.
- 13.
In recent years, more families are getting services, largely through differential response systems. See discussion below.
- 14.
In California, for example, general children’s programs, primarily schools, account for more than half the state’s budget, and medical care for the poor absorbs another 25% (California Department of Finance 2008). Everything else competes for what is left.
- 15.
- 16.
In a forthcoming piece, I will propose a new approach for helping children in other families where there is very inadequate parenting, including many of the cases of neglect that now dominate the child protection system.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Richard Barth, Jill Duerr Berrick, Mark Courtney, Deborah Daro, Brett Drake, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Jane Waldfogel, and Fred Wulczyn for their very helpful comments on an early version.
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Wald, M.S. (2013). Taking the Wrong Message: The Legacy of the Identification of the Battered Child Syndrome. In: Krugman, R., Korbin, J. (eds) C. Henry Kempe: A 50 Year Legacy to the Field of Child Abuse and Neglect. Child Maltreatment, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4084-6_12
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