Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

4 Child Maltreatment in the Last 50 Years 45
New York City, with local SPCCs in many American towns soon after that year,
the issue was put on the emerging social work agenda (Giovannoni, 1990, pp. 6–7;
Baartman, 1993; Zigler & Hall, 1990, pp. 38–75). Around 1900, adherents of the
Progressive Education movement such as Ellen Key emphasised the issue of maltreatment
of children in the context of schooling. It was only in the 1980s through
the outlaw of corporal punishment in British schools and on schools in a number
of American states (Stearns, 2006, p. 105) that this issue was taken seriously.
Meanwhile, a number Child Protection Acts were passed in Europe, the USA and
Canada (Dupont-Bouchat et al., 2001, chap. 5; Dekker, 2001, 2002, 2000, 2007;
Key, 1900). In the first decades of this child protection system, the focus was not
so much on child abuse as criminal and neglected children and juvenile justice.
Moreover, it was assumed that the prevalence of those problems was very modest
indeed. According to the Dutch liberal minister of Justice, P. W. A. Cort van der
Linden (1846–1935), speaking in 1901 during the Parliamentary treatment of the
Dutch Child Acts, risky parental behaviour and risky childish behaviour were the
exception. Moreover, the state only had the right to intervene after negative effects
were observed: “Only stopping, not preventing is the responsibility of the state”
(Donker, 1955, p. 7). This approach changed after the Second World War. Speaking
in 1955 at the 50-year celebration meeting of the Child Acts, Mr. J. Overwater
(1892–1958) – president of the National Federation/the Dutch Association for Child
Protection, a magistrate and a leading figure in the world of child protection – maintained
that child protection was “dominated by cases of various sorts of educational
and behavioural problems. Moreover, these problems, in contrast with the majority
of former cases on material neglect in the past, are now not limited to one single
social group: they do exercise their bad influence upon the society as a whole”
(Overwater, 1955, pp. 15–23; Overwater, 1948). This statement reveals a broader
understanding of the maltreatment of children, recognising that there are more risks
and more families and children at risk.
In 1962, policy focused on child abuse and child maltreatment received an enormous
boost with the publication of the famous article Battered Child Syndrome by
the American medical doctor Kempe. Following this publication, maltreatment of
children (understood as an educational problem) was put on the agenda of medical
doctors. Moreover, from the 1970s, it got an increasing and lasting attention from
policy-makers, educational professionals and educational scientists (Kempe, 1962;
Baartman, 1996). Indeed, due to the work of Kempe and his colleagues, “child
abuse has become a common household word” (Giovannoni, 1990, p. 10). Carole
Jenny wrote an article entitled “Medicine Discovers Child Abuse” during which
she praises Kempe’s famous 1962 article, calling it one of the JAMA (Journal of
the American Medical Association) classics. According to Jenny, the importance
of Kempe’s article has little to do with its scientific value. It only includes two
case reports and, for some readers, might therefore appear a little thin on statistics.
Moreover, Battered Child Syndrome “gave speculative psychological explanations
about why parents would severely beat their children”. Kempe’s article became
a JAMA classic because it established the idea “that physicians have a special
responsibility to children – a responsibility to help keep them safe, sometimes even