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Sander J. Breiner has written a complex, multifaceted book on child abuse that is based on extensive scholarly and clinical research. He set himself the task of reaching an audience larger than only mental health professionals, of putting scientific material into a more widely meaningful and readable form; by and large, he has successfully achieved this goal. Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse through the Ages and Today is very readable, very interesting, and very informative on a number of levels. Breiner combines psychohistorical and sociological surveys and analyses with psychodynamic commentary and social-policy recommendations. This particular mix of approaches and concerns makes this volume a unique contribution to the burgeoning literature on child abuse. It might have been desirable, therefore, not to repeat the same title as was used in an earlier innovative, although quite different, work in the same field, Slaughter of the Innocents: A Study of the Battered Child Phenomenon, by David Bakan (1971), a work not referenced by Breiner.
At the start of this book, Breiner offers a provisional definition of child abuse: “the willful infliction of permanent damage—whether physical, psychological, or a combination of the two—on a child by an adult” (p. 9). Although he astutely adds that the question of what constitutes “permanent psychological damage” is a complex one that cannot be considered independendy of its cultural context, nevertheless, Breiner continually makes judgments, based on a contemporary humanistic-psychoanalytic perspective, concerning the negative and positive presumed consequences of child-rearing practices in various cultures and in different historical epochs. That is, he has in mind a model of healthy development that he uses as his yardstick of “correctness.” He continues to rely on this model of healthy development when he later