You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Maltreatment of children is a subject often addressed in psychoanalysis. Over the past 40 years, research has established four subfields of child maltreatment: physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. On November 18, 2004, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl presented an informative account of the historical development of the field of child abuse and neglect, and the relevance of our current system of classifications.
Young-Bruehl proposed that our thinking about child abuse in the above-mentioned categories is, in fact, inadequate for the subject. She noted that the concept of child abuse was not established until the late nineteenth century and was then classified and categorized quickly, without much thought. Young-Bruehl argued that the chief obstacle to the discovery of child abuse and neglect is a shared disbelief that some parents cannot fulfill their responsibilities as parents—particularly their child's expectation to be loved. In addition, she argued that this inability to fulfill parental responsibilities is a form of prejudice against children; she labeled this “childism.”
In the Colonial period in this country, corporal punishment was institutionalized for both children and adults, as noted in the phrase, “The idle fool is whipped at school.” Machines to whip people were created in the period of Industrialization. By the mid-nineteenth century child abuse was identified, when the Enlightenment views of Rousseau and Locke, that children were born good, began to circulate. This contradicted the prior chief rationalization for child abuse, that children are born bad and have to be disciplined.
In the late nineteenth century, classifications were established for children who needed help from outside the family, those who were considered destitute, delinquent, or neglected. Houses of refuge for street children and juvenile courts for child victims of crimes were founded. In 1874, a foster mother was convicted of abusing her foster child. As a result, pri