Abstract
Over the course of centuries, people have justified physical and emotional abuse of children to “expel evil spirits, please certain gods, transmit educational ideas, or maintain discipline” (Radbill, 1968, p. 3). Only in the last 20 years have scholars, professionals, and the public labeled the parental abuse of children as a problem. With the application of roentgenological procedures to detect fractures and the highly publicized article by Kempe and his colleagues (Kempe, Silverman, Steele, Droegemueller, & Silver, 1962), which introduced the term “the battered child syndrome,” concern for the welfare of children has steadily increased. By the end of the 1960s, every state in the union had passed laws that required, or at least recommended, that incidents of suspected abuse be reported to specified authorities (Gil, 1970). Studies of abusive families began to fill journals across a variety of disciplines as people sought to understand this sad phenomenon.
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Rosenberg, M.S., Reppucci, N.D. (1983). Child Abuse. In: Childs, A.W., Melton, G.B. (eds) Rural Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3512-2_14
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