Child Abuse

by

Ruth Beecher

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0028

Introduction

The history of child abuse is an emerging field of scholarship, driven in part by the feminist and survivor activism that has seen the phenomena increasingly discussed in public life since the 1970s. Just as the concept of childhood itself has shifted over time and space, so too have understandings of child abuse. The distinctions between childhood and adulthood along with “norms” of parenting as well as definitions about what constitutes “discipline” as opposed to “cruelty,” “maltreatment,” “violence,” or “abuse” continue to be contested. Existing across disciplines rather than fitting neatly within a single category, the histories of child abuse are of interest to the professional groups that have a role in child welfare or child protection services: the physicians, psychiatric and social workers, as well as those engaged in childhood studies. Historians of medicine, childhood and youth, welfare and public services are also increasingly active in the field. Scholars grapple with key historiographical questions related to gender and sexuality, age and generation, race, ethnicity, and social class. Child abuse is currently understood as harm inflicted on a child, whether physical, emotional, or sexual, as well as neglect, by which is meant the persistent failure to meet a child’s physical and/or psychological needs. It is recognized that different forms of abuse often co-exist. However, as will be evident from the citations below, the historiography is somewhat uneven; for example, there is very little historically grounded research into certain categories of abuse such as child neglect or emotional abuse whereas the scholarship on sexual abuse is more developed. The English-language historiography is also heavily skewed to the United States, Britain, and Ireland, although some important scholarship has emerged from Australia and Scandinavia, particularly arising out of inquiries into historical abuses. Sources are often severely restricted due to cultural taboos, and, where histories involve the living or very recently deceased, concerns about confidentiality and safeguarding. Historians are increasingly naming and exploring the ethical and methodological challenges they face in archival research, in generating oral histories and in their writing about the recent past, whether it concerns those who were victim-survivors of abuse or the perpetrators of sexual offenses, or the professionals assessing or treating the people affected. In many countries, there are strict restrictions around the personal data available about individuals. The difficulties inherent in recovering children’s voices become more acute in seeking to uncover the experiences of those who have been ill-treated. To what extent should historians seek to locate and explore the experiences of specific children or perpetrators or those directly affected by the sexual abuse rather than exploring broader social, cultural, and political themes using aggregate data in bureaucratic sources?

General Overviews

Child abuse and its histories are often contained within the broader literature on interpersonal violence, which discuss children’s experiences alongside those of adult women. From the 1970s, many feminist activists examined the prevalence and meaning of the victimization of women and girls subjected to physical or sexual violence and were silent on the rape and abuse of boys. This shifted from the 1990s, due mainly to the activism of male survivors and to the influence of medical debates about the physical signs of abuse. Earlier feminist writings about sexual violence such as Rush 1980 and Nelson 1987 tended to include some historical context about the sexual abuse of children. More recent work on sexual and family violence has been penned by professional historians such as in Bourke 2022, Finkelstein 2000, Freedman 2013, and Pleck 2004 as well as by anthropologists as in Montgomery 2024.

• Bourke, Joanna. Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.

  Argues that because sexual violence is historically, geographically and culturally contingent, it is not inevitable. Historians of medicine will be interested in Bourke’s careful attention to the role of medicine and psychiatry, including further harms caused by medics and the pernicious effects of racialized medicalization. Throughout, Bourke considers the intersectional nature of abuse; how age, class, disability, gender, race, and religion compound the harms inflicted on victims.

• Finkelstein, Barbara. “A Crucible of Contradictions: Historical Roots of Violence against Children in the United States.” History of Education Quarterly 40.1 (Spring 2000): 1–21.

  DOI: 10.2307/369178

  Explains the persistence of violence against children in the United States as related to long-standing and intertwined religious, political, and socioeconomic traditions that privilege family privacy, discourage the establishment of universal health and education provision, and serve to limit child protection intervention.

• Freedman, Estelle B. Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2013.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt6wpm5m

  Argues that a ruling class of white men controlled definitions of and responses to sexual violence in US history, including who may claim protection. Examines the dynamics of race, class, and gender across the period 1850 to the mid-twentieth century, and the activism that rose in resistance to sexual violence.

• Montgomery, Heather. Familiar Violence: A History of Child Abuse. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2024.

  Explores different forms of cruelty inflicted on children in England from the medieval period to the present—infanticide, abandonment, neglect, physical chastisement, child sexual abuse, state interventions, and “experts.” Argues that across all periods, most parents loved their children; the parents of the past were no more likely to be deliberately violent to their offspring than their modern-day counterparts; and definitions of unacceptable childcare practices were always contested.

• Nelson, Sarah. Incest: Fact or Myth. Edinburgh: Stramullion, 1987.

  Foundational British feminist text that comprehensively dissects a wide range of long-standing myths and stereotypes surrounding child sexual abuse via an analysis of sociological and medical research. Foregrounds women’s testimonies about their own experiences. Argues that male perpetrators must take responsibility, that their treatment should be backed by sanction and that children must be protected.

• Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

  Posits that public responses to family violence, including child abuse, peaked in distinct historical periods and were affected by the wider political and social context. Draws on newspapers, parenting advice, autobiographies, court records, and welfare society archives in Pennsylvania and Illinois to consider the “family ideal” and how the idea was mobilized by reforming groups who were in turn motivated by their own interests: feminists, social workers, doctors, and psychiatrists.

• Rush, Florence. The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980.

  A foundational feminist text that provides an episodic history of sexual abuse, alongside an analysis of the structural and social mechanisms of politics, law, and popular culture that served to conceal sexual violence against children. Indicts Freud, for personally denying the lived experience of his female patients and for his influence on his followers who ignored the prevalence and seriousness of child sexual abuse (see Masson 1984 cited under The Professions and Child Abuse).