Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

46 J.J.H. Dekker
from their own parents”. As a result of this article, mandatory legislation relating to
child abuse was established in every state in the USA between 1963 and 1967. This
later caught on in Europe. In addition, many scientific reports and articles on the
subject were being written (Jenny, 2008, pp. 2796–2797; Kempe & Kempe, 1978;
Kempe, 2007).
Growing attention to the maltreatment of children does not automatically mean
that it should become more prevalent. On the contrary, when looking back over 50
years of child maltreatment research and policy, we see that maltreatment of children,
at least in the Western world, diminished substantially. This was due to two
developments: first, a new and almost generally accepted standard of educational
behaviour resulted from growing attention to child maltreatment; second, a historically
unprecedented increase of the availability of financial means for education
resulted from increasing economic prosperity.
First, Kempe’s article helped to establish a general standard as regards unacceptable
behaviour towards children. Over the last few decades, what counted as
unacceptable was made more explicit than ever before. Standards for educational
behaviour were explicitly laid down in national and international regulations. This
meant that parents could now be expected to be conscious of the fact that, when
beating their child, they were acting against almost generally accepted educational
standards and breaking the law. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child from 1989 requires member states to protect their children against violence
and maltreatment.
Second, increasing economic prosperity in the Western world during the last 50
years meant that more financial means were available for the education of children
than ever before in history. This made it easier for a growing number of parents to
educate their children and to care for them according to the new educational standards
and laws. I want to suggest that this is a convincing reading of the situation
despite the occurrence of economic crises in the early 1980s and the crisis that is
still going on now. This current crisis might have a temporarily negative effect on
the diminishing trend of child maltreatment. It should also be noted that some parents
did not benefit from the welfare state. In the USA this became clear in 1997
through the work of American sociologists Paul Amato and Alan Booth in their
alarming book entitled “A Generation at Risk” (Amato & Booth, 1997; Dekker,
2009, pp. 17–36). The majority of studies from the 1970s until now seem to reject
this hypothesis of diminution. Rather than corroborating the hypothesis of a diminishing
trend in child maltreatment, they report an increase of maltreatment. Some of
these studies will be examined in the next section. In Sections 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6, I will
address the reasons for seeing child maltreatment as an increasing phenomenon.
4.3 No Diminution: Studies on the Prevalence of Child
Maltreatment as Historical Sources
After the publication of Kempe’s alarming article, numerous articles in an increasing
number of academic journals were published on child abuse and neglect. The
increase in the number of articles listed under the keywords child abuse in the