History of SCF

THE CHILD SAVERS RIDE AGAIN:

Child Abuse and The New Reign of Terror in Therapeutic America

© Allan C. Carlson

Salem Massachusetts, 1692: Tituba, a servant girl steeped in the "black magic" of Barbados, has excited the imaginations of two children, nine-year-old Betty and 11-year-old Abigail. The youngsters writhe, scream, and moan on demand before amazed, frightened adults. The experts arrive from Boston, question the girls with technique, handed down from the Great Inquisition, and discover the cause: witches! Townspeople--some strange, most ordinary--are brought before the bewitched children. The girls identify 40 of them as those who had caused their maladies. With a passion for securing confessions, zealous prosecutors toss out factual evidence as the Devil's work. Instead, spectral evidence is introduced: "I saw him fly on a stick across the face of the moon." Those of the accused who deny their guilt are subsequently tied to a stool and dunked beneath water. If they drown, this is clear evidence of guilt. If they survive, the Devil is surely responsible and, they are promptly hanged. Twenty "witches" so perish.

Jordan, Minnesota, 1984: James Rud, a trash collector and baby-sitter, has been arrested for sexually molesting two children. Once in custody, he plea bargains with the prosecutor and, in exchange for a reduced sentence, describes his involvement in a large child-sex-ring composed of Jordan parents. With no prior investigation, police arrest the parents and seize the children, placing the latter in the care of social workers. Once in custody, the children are grilled for hours by a battery of experts. Therapists strip the children down and perform physical exams. Doctors stick their fingers in the little girls' vaginas, asking, "Is this what they did to you, and do you think it went in that far, and did it bleed?" Anatomically correct dolls are given to the children so they can "role play." Many of the children are told that if they reveal the truth about their abusing parents, the families might be reunited. The children start confessing. More experts come. Citizens who complain about police tactics are arrested , and their children also seized. In all, 24 adults eventually face charges. Yet as the months pass, the prosecutor fails to come up with any hard evidence. The hymens of the Little girls are all intact. None of the children show any signs of physical harm. In desperation, the prosecutor turns to some of the accused and begins plea bargaining. One of them, a police officer, is offered a new identity, relocation, no jail time, even money in exchange for testimony against the other adults. Yet he refuses the offer, demanding a trial. In September, the first couple brought before a jury is acquitted. The prosecutor begins hinting about the parents involvement in ritual murders. In November, Rud admits in a radio interview that he had lied: there was no sex ring: he made it all up. The children also recant. Yet the prosecutor is unmoved. The adults are guilty, she insists; they will never get their children back. (ro)[1]

The contemporary panic over child abuse, trumpeted in the pages of Time and Newsweek and encouraged by a spate of television productions featuring parents beating or molesting their natural children, is nothing new. "Child-saving" has a long and troubled history in America. It represents a peculiar combination of genuine concern, hysteria, the misuse of authority, and the systematic denial of Constitutional right, to both children and parents. This new, disturbing element in our era, though, is the bonding of a blatant anti-family ideology to the historic child-saving philosophy and mission. The consequence of this change is an America turned upside down, with the law becoming a weapon held at the throat of families throughout the land.

The legal tradition involving state intervention into the parent-child relationship ought first to be clarified. Under the English common law, the father was entitled to the custody of his children by legal right. (A mother's right to custody was not established until the late 19th century.) In the American colonies, this custody relationship or "sacred trust" was seen as related to the parents' duties to maintain and educate their children. Recognizing that an orderly society required that parents have discretion in disciplining within the home, the common law held a presumption in favor of the reasonableness of parental action. In cases of severe abuse, the criminal law took hold. The court, also developed a general rule that a parent could not be held liable in a civil suit for the excessive punishment of his or her child.

Yet alongside this affirmation of parental rights, the law also recognized the power of the courts to intervene into families and take away children in order to protect the interests of the larger community. The Elizabethan poor laws (1601), for example, established the principle that the children of those receiving public relief should be taken away and bound as apprentices. Concern for social conformity and the training of good work habits led the Virginia Burgesses in 1646 to pass a statute which noted that "parents, either through fond indulgence or perverse obstinacy, are most averse and unwilling to part with their children" and so directed county commissioners to select and take away two children each year, age seven or eight, to be sent to James City for employment in the public flax houses. In colonial Massachusetts, "tithingmen" were appointed in every neighborhood to "diligently inspect" the families under their supervision, concentrating particularly on "all single persons that live from under family government, stubborn and disorderly children and servants, nightwalkers, tipplers, Sabbath breakers... or whatever else course. . . tending to debauchery, irreligion, profaneness, and atheism amongst us. " Violators faced fines, imprisonment, or the loss of children.

When the U.S. Constitution was written, one of the powers specifically not delegated by the states to the Federal government was control of family governance. In contrast to most European constitutions, our foundational document makes no direct mention of children, families, parenthood, marriage, or the family's relationship to the state.. This omission derived, in part, from the Lockean emphasis on a contract society and the natural rights of individuals, doctrines of considerable influence among the nation's founders. Yet more fundamentally, it reflected the keen interest held by local communities in the family and an unwillingness to subject such sensitive questions to uniform national answers. When the Federal government began expanding its sway over national life, though, this omission generated troubling consequences. As one legal scholar has noted, Federal judicial cases do mention family privacy and family integrity, "but in reality the family as a unit is less protected than corporations." (2)

The relatively weak Constitutional protections afforded families became apparent during the 1820's with the emergence of the "child-saving" movement. The New York House of Refuge, the first juvenile reformatory in the United States, opened its doors in 1825. Setting the pattern for the next 100 years, this institution blurred over the distinctions among abused, neglected, poor, and delinquent children. By institutionalizing through court order those children who fell into any or several of these categories, the House of Refuge sought to separate real or potential youthful offenders from adults and so prevent children from entering a life of crime. While adult criminals, particularly recidivists, were considered at the time to be subhuman, children had moral possibilities -- if only they could be rescued from their evil parents and brutish living conditions. As the famed penologist Enoch Wines wrote in 1880: "They are born to (crime), brought up for it. They must be saved."

The reform school movement which swept the nation during the 19th century represented a bonding of traditional values to coercive social engineering. The new penology emphasized the corruptions of the city, "its saloons, low dives, and gangs of bad boys." It defended and sought to instill in its charges the values of sobriety, thrift, industry, prudence, and realistic ambition. Whenever possible, reform schools were set in the countryside. Agricultural training formed the core curriculum. Institutions were organized on "the family system," where a couple of "sound Christian character" would govern the children organized in "cottages." Even the mistreatment or abuse of children, leading to their separation from the family, was understood in decidedly moral terms. The model 1889 Michigan statute, for example, defined an "ill-treated child" as one "whose father, mother or guardian is a habitual drunkard or a person of notorious or scandalous conduct or a reputed thief or prostitute, or one who . . . by any other act or example or by vicious training, depraves the morals of such child."

Under the new laws, the courts were empowered to seize children of "unworthy parents" and place them in the care of private or public institutions. Following the famed "Mary Ellen" case of 1875, involving the physical abuse of a child mistakenly placed as an apprentice in the home of her illegitimate father. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children sprung up in many large cities. Through legislation, they soon acquired extraordinary police powers of investigation and arrest.

However affiliated, though, the new child-savers represented a well-funded and highly educated elite, enjoying the economic backing of private philanthropists. As with the 17th-century Puritans, their fundamental goal was to defend the safety and mores of the social order. Predictably, the objects of their attention were almost exclusively the poor, the non-Anglo-Saxon, and the immigrant, those lacking enculturation into mainstream society. These were the categories of parents who saw their children "saved." (3)

More disturbing than this crude approach to assimilation was the use of summary justice to seize and institutionalize children without any substantive legal protections. Robert Turner, Superintendent of the Chicago Reform School, described the process in 1871: "If on the judge's examination of him and his parents . . . it was considered best for the welfare of the boy that he should come to the Institution, an order . . . was made out to that effect, charging him with no crime, recording no criminal proceedings against him, blotting out all previous charges, and consigning him . . . to a Boarding School.." True, as the childsavers hoped, the youth had been spared incarceration with hardened adult criminals. Yet in exchange for this special treatment, the "delinquent" child had no jury trial subject to the rules of evidence, enjoyed no privilege against self-incrimination, had no access to legal counsel, and faced an indeterminate sentence, remaining in the reformatory until released by the committing judge. Parents also saw their rights of custody stripped away, without the niceties of due process, through an inquisitorial hearing into their character.

The Constitutionality of neglect laws empowering the state to seize children was repeatedly challenged during the 19th century. But, with only a few exceptions, they were sustained. The key decision came in 1839, after a father secured a writ of habeas corpus to secure the release of his daughter from the Philadelphia House of Refuge. The managers of the institution fought the writ, arguing that the Bill of Rights did not apply to children. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided for the managers, not only on the Bill of Rights argument but also on the doctrine of parens patriae ("the parenthood of the state"). This ancient concept was drawn from English chancery laws justifying the English Crown's assumption of the parental role in order to protect the estates of orphaned minors. The Pennsylvania Court, looking for a legal device to get around due process, now extended the doctrine to the termination of parental rights: "May not the natural parents, when unequal to the task of education or unworthy of it, be supplanted by the parens patriae, or common guardianship of the community?" (5)

The court also ruled that reformatories were "residential schools," not prisons; thus, commitment to them was not governed by due process. This doctrine of parens patriae would, underline "child-saving" work in America until the present. Predictably, its emphasis on the "parenthood" of the state led to even broader claims of authority by the child-savers and courts. As the Illinois Supreme Court, in a sweeping judgement, ruled in 1882:

It is the unquestioned right and imperative duty of every enlightened government, in its character of parens patriae, to protect and provide for the comfort and well-being of such of it's citizens as, by reason of infancy, defective understanding, or other misfortune or infirmity, are unable to take care of themselves. The performance of this duty is justly regarded as one of the most important of governmental functions, and all constitutional limitations must be so understood and construed so as not to interfere with --- its proper and legitimate exercise. (6).

With the Constitutional floodgates down and the family legally disarmed, the welfare state began seeping in.

Yet alongside the general adoption of parens patriae as a guiding legal principle, there was a distinct line of dissent, rooted in a defense of family rights and natural liberty. The most dramatic decision in this regard came in a case involving Daniel O'Connell, age 14, who was committed to the Chicago Reform School in 1870. His father subsequently demanded Daniel's release on the ground that his son had committed no crime. The Illinois Supreme Court so ordered, arguing that the boy's Constitutional rights had been violated. The parens patriae doctrine, the court opined, was subject to the restraints of divine law. "The parent has the right to the care custody and assistance of his child," the court reasoned. "The duty to maintain and protect it is a principle of natural law . . . . Before any abridgement of the right, gross misconduct or almost total unfitness on the part of the parent, should be clearly proved. " The court also cut through the window dressing, acknowledging that reform schools were, in fact, prisons. In a flourish of indignation, the court declared:

The State as parens patriae, has determined the imprisonment beyond recall. Such a restraint upon natural liberty is tyranny and oppression. If, without crime, without the conviction of any offense, the children of the State are to be thus confined for the `good of society,' then society had better be reduced to its original elements, and free government acknowledged a failure. (7)

This line of argument found relatively few echoes. As already noted, within a dozen years the very same Illinois court embraced parens patriae as "one of the most important of governmental functions." Only a handful of decisions--such as the 1885 ruling by the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which compared the forced institutionalization of children without charge or formal hearing to the activities of the notorious English Star Chamber--supported the alternate Constitutional vision of the relationship between family and state found in the O'Connell decision.

The juvenile justice movement of the 1890's--the first overt linkage of social science and social work to the law--has been enshrined in liberal mythology as a radical break with the past and a progressive, humane advance in public policy. It was, in fact, none of these. In the procedural sense, the informality of the new juvenile courts--no formal charges, no trial, no rules-of-evidence, no right of counsel, no right to confront one's accusers, indeterminate sentencing--merely represented new codifications of Constitution-straddling systems existing since mid-century. Similarly , "coercive prediction," involving the identification of probable delinquents and their removal from their families, simply continued a process already well-embedded in penological theory. Sociologically, the objects of attention--the children saved and their unfit parents--continued to be drawn almost exclusively from immigrant, poor, and minority families. Institutionally, the reformers' claims of revolutionizing the kinds of places where children were kept were only partly correct. The principal beneficiaries of this movement were usually thy private "industrial schools," which came away with more business than ever. (8)

The true origins of the movement lay in a peculiar ideological mix of social-gospel Protestantism, feminism, and socialism. The new generation of child-savers emerging in the late 19th century were overwhelmingly female. Reared in the wealthy class, these women faced the problems posed by a superabundance of leisure. Few of them had more than one or two children. All of them had a great deal of time on their hands, and all fretted about charges of "parasitism." Some such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman succumbed to the radical feminist temptation. The patriarchal family and the housewife were doomed, she said, by the advance of science and industrial production and the decay of capitalism. The world was "already losing faith in the commercial idea," -added Rheta Childe Dorr, and "endeavoring to substitute in its place a social idea." Others such as Louise Bowen, Ellen Henrotin, Julia Lathrop, and Jane Addams sought only a modified female role. Child-saving, they argued, was a reputable task for women seeking to extend their traditional housekeeping functions into the community. As Mrs. Bowen told the Friday Club of Chicago: "If a woman is a good housekeeper in her own home, she will be able to do well that larger housekeeping." Yet even this moderate variety of feminism involved a special commitment to social engineering. "Whenever and wherever we find (women)," D. D. Randall told a national conference on charity in 1884, "she is always the fearless and uncompromising apostle and the inspired prophet of a higher and better humanity." It was through this new surge in child-saving that the social work profession--partly maternal, partly feminist--was born. (9)

The Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899 appeared to shouts of acclamation, atop the crest of the Progressive reform movement and buoyed by "a massive propaganda campaign."10 within 20 years, most states had established juvenile courts on the Illinois model. America had learned that "all was not well with that ancient institution, the family," concluded one advocate. Like "Christianity on the eve of destruction of Grecian art and philosophy," the juvenile court movement had miraculously risen up to avert the consequences of a great doom. (11)

Animated by the ideals of social work, the juvenile courts, in theory, transcended legal functions to merge with social service. Juvenile crime would be decriminalized. All minors at risk of becoming delinquents would be made wards of the state and would be treated as children needing protection. The juvenile court was symbolic of the state's parenthood, it was said, with the judge assuming the role toward the child of a "wise and kind" father. "Seated at a desk, with the child at his side, where he can on occasion put his arm around his shoulder and draw the lad to him, the judge, while losing none of his judicial dignity, will gain immensely in the effectiveness of his work."(12)

Natural parents, whether "week, ignorant, greedy, or degraded, " were also to be treated as clients and given therapeutic services, with "the best interests of the child" at heart.

On the official level, the system still seemed cast in the middle-class mode, defending the bourgeois social order. The creators of the new system carried over their dedication to home and family life. In contrast to the old poor law tradition, which advocated separating children from poverty-stricken parents, the opinion grew that home life should be preserved whenever possible and therapeutic and financial aid given to intact families. According to Miriam Van Waters, perhaps the most widely read defender of the juvenile court system, social workers held a clear view of the healthy family, where "the father is dominant but not cruel or mean," where the mother "is comfortable" and "not restlessly seeking her life gratification apart from mate and children" (although, "like Jane Addams." She may do something for the community"' by spreading the cloak of her mothering a little wider"), and where both parents "genuinely love and enjoy children." She concluded: "No child has a good home if these fundamentals are lacking. "

Yet a more disturbing theme entered into the defense of the juvenile courts, suggesting that they were still less concerned with justice than with social control and a form of coercive assimilation. Judge Julian Mack readily acknowledged that most of the children who came before the court were "naturally the children of the poor . . . foreigners, frequently unable to speak English." Their parents, Mack said, "do not understand American methods and views, the amount of education demanded by law or what the modern requirements for childhood are." The state, he concluded, stood ready to use the powers of the juvenile court to reshape their lives in accordance with these views and requirements. Cultural differences, in short, would not be tolerated. (14)

At a still deeper level, the therapeutic state and the juvenile justice system implicitly threatened even the middle class. Miriam Van Waters, in her book Parents on Probation, (1927), argued that "hardly a family in America is not engaging in the same practices, falling into the same attitudes, committing the same blunders which . . . bring the court families to catastrophe." Parents could no longer "shield themselves behind natural rights," she said. It was "only a question of time before the parent's psychological handling of his child" would be subjected to the scrutiny of the state. Indeed, she looked forward to the day when the court's current interest in defending the middle-class status quo would be scrapped; when the juvenile justice system would be redirected toward "a different goal, happiness and well-being of individuals." In this humanistic environment, Van Waters exclaimed, children would no longer be "separated from parents who violated traditional moralities: they would be severed from parents who violated the right of the child to sanity and integrity of mind and body." On that great day, the parent would throw himself into the therapeutic arms of social work, "willingly" cooperate in a plan for his own welfare," and then face "the superparent, which is mankind," with a "face stained with tears," saying: "Sure, I'll make good." (15)

This "humanistic socialism" rarely surfaced so explicitly. For most of its history, the juvenile justice system remained loosely governed by middle-class values. Even the rising tide of juvenile delinquency during the early 1950's, which so worried contemporaries, was apparently a statistical artifact produced by a short-term strengthening of these values. According to one analyst, the supposedly rising level of delinquency was actually produced by an enhanced "middle class sense of normalcy and uniformity," rooted in the new suburbs, which made Americans more sensitive to youthful disorders than in the past. (16)

Ten years later, though, this sustaining moral consensus was losing its grip. For instance, parental immoralities that had until recently been seen as warnings of possible criminality in children--the presence of alcohol, the failure to provide a Christian education--were losing their negative cast. Agreement on what constituted "neglect" also faded. A joint legislative committee reviewing New York's Family Court Act in 1962 finally concluded that the term had acquired so many different meanings that a common definition was not possible. "[T]his diversity was not a proper matter of governmental regulation," the committee concluded, "so long as basic standards (food, shelter and clothing) were not violated." (17)

Morally adrift, the system soon became known for its procedural nightmares, arbitrariness, and cruelty. Cases were poorly prepared and inadequately presented. The whims of the judge, rather than case history, sealed the fate of countless children and parents. Finding sufficient foster homes for juvenile delinquents, particularly those from minority groups, proved impossible. Moreover, many juvenile reformatories of the mid-20th century had undergone changes in terminology, but little else. Cell blocks were known as "adjustment cottages." Guards were "supervisors." Isolation cells were "meditation rooms." Whips, paddles, blackjacks, and straps were "tools of control." The call for "family relations" within such institutions, one legal scholar concluded, had proven to be no more than wishful thinking: "Without ready access to family life for children coming before it, the juvenile court lost much of its raison d'etre." (18)

Despite this vacuum at its core, the system had taken on a life of its own, and it churned ahead. Only in 1966 did the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledge that the juvenile courts delivered the worst of both worlds: the child received neither the legal protections accorded adults nor the promised care and regenerative treatment. (19)

The following year, in its Gault decision, the Court declared that juveniles had the same Constitutional rights to due process as adults; a right to a notice of charges, to a public hearing, to counsel and to confrontation of hostile witnesses, the privilege against self- incrimination; and so on. "Under our Constitution the condition of being a boy does not justify kangaroo court," wrote Justice Abe Fortas in the majority opinion. He directly attacked the doctrine of parens patriae, noting that "its meaning is murky and its historic credentials are of dubious relevance.... [T]here is no trace of the doctrine in the history of criminal jurisprudence." Fortas concluded: "Juvenile court history has again demonstrated that unbridled discretion, however benevolently motivated, is frequently a poor substitute for principle and procedure." (20)

Yet over the same years that the juvenile court system was crumbling, the parens patriae doctrine found new life in a fresh crusade against child abuse. The 1960's marked the first time in nearly a century that great public attention focused on the complex problem of protecting children from abuse by their own parents. This interest derived from two sources. On the medical front, advances in pediatric radiology during the 1950's led to journal articles describing long bone fractures in children that were linked to the "indifference, immaturity and irresponsibility of parents." In 1962, several physicians coined the phrase, "battered child syndrome." Major media outlets such as Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Good Housekeeping were soon featuring articles on "Parents Who Beat Children" and "Cry Rises From Beaten Babies." (21)

Also fueling a rising sense of indignation was a general attack on the American middle-class family model launched during the early 1960's. The emergent New Left, for example, revived the Marxist critique of the bourgeois family, viewing it as predicated on property relations and exploitation. The new feminism, stimulated by Betty Friedan's 1962 book The Feminine Mystique, featured a scathing attack on the suburban American family. Malthusian theorists raised alarms about American overpopulation and opened their assault on the reproductive energies of the American family. The impact of these attitudes was most pronounced among sociologists and social workers, whose professional journals were soon full of articles on the "wretchedness" of marriage, the brutality of parents, the joy of homosexuality, and the deep moral commitment behind the "child- free life-style." Such ideas also seeped into the popular media, suggesting that there was something basically wrong with most American families.

In combination, these developments proved to be a powerful stimulus to action. Between 1963 and 1967, all 50 states approved "reporting laws," commonly requiring physicians, teachers, and social workers to report suspected cases of child abuse to child welfare agencies or police authorities. Significantly, most of these laws involved the circumvention of long-standing legal protections, including denial of the physician-client privilege and the husband-wife privilege under the rules of evidence; immunity from civil or criminal liability for those identifying suspected abusers; and a general presumption of guilt (commonly involving seizure of the children) until the parents could establish their innocence. With no organized opposition--indeed, with the support of organizations ranging from the National Association of Social Workers to the Daughters of the American Revolution--the "reporting law" movement enjoyed rapid and complete success.

During the early 1970's, Title XX of the Social Security Act also began funneling large sums of money to state and community welfare agencies in order, among other purposes, to provide social services to neglected and abused children. This change both "federalized" the abuse and neglect issues and secured for social workers "the foremost position" in conducting programs of "child-mistreatment management." (22)

Despite these moves, the frantic concern over child abuse has seemed only to grow in intensity.Wildly divergent statistics aggravate the situation. The number of reported cases of physically abused children nationwide was 6,617 in 1968, a figure that rose slowly in the years which followed. Such real numbers are indeed tragic. Yet they pale beside the "estimates" of abuse that have flooded the media. A 1971 article in the New York Times, for example, calculated 500,000 children in America abused annually, whether "physically, sexually, or emotionally." (23)

More recent media estimates of abused children have risen to 6 million. As two scholars of the question have concluded, "the definitional chaos that has surrounded the problems of child abuse and neglect has precluded.. rationality." (24)

Indeed, emotion has taken hold. Seeking to root out the "epidemic" of child abuse in America, many states have abolished the statutes setting an age below which children are presumed to be incompetent as witnesses, have abandoned the requirement for corroborative evidence, and have changed hearsay rules to allow videotapes and out-of-court statements as evidence. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, along with many states, is funding creation of school-based Multi-Disciplinary Teams (SBMDT's) trained to enter schools and ferret out "abusing families." These cadres of social workers and psychologists are authorized to examine a family's sources of income, history, living conditions, resources, history and frequency of problems, "attitudes," self-image, parenting skills, spousal relationship, impulse control, and degree of community involvement. Those failing to measure up to SBMDT standards face therapy, loss of children, and/or formal charges.

Hysteria soon claims victims, and that is indeed occurring. The number of reported cases of child sexual abuse, for example, has tripled since 1981, to 250,000. Yet even the child-savers admit that at least 80 percent of these reports are unfounded, up from 40 percent only five years before. (25)

In his recent report on the Jordan "sex ring" scandal, Minnesota's Attorney General found "many instances" of parents being charged with abuse of their children at a time when their children "had either denied the abuse or had not even been interviewed" and of parents being arrested and charged with abusing their own children "even though these children denied the abuse through several weeks of interrogation and separation from their parents." The growing list of parents and teachers falsely accused of child abuse and suffering from permanently damaged reputations has finally drawn the attention of the mainstream media. Cries of alarm are even heard on the left, with the magazine Mother Jones protesting that men are rapidly leaving day-care and elementary-teaching professions, fearful of the consequences of touching a child.(26)

Now it is true that hysteria eventually wanes, that people lose emotional interest in a given subject and return to more mundane pursuits. Unfortunately, there are indications that this round of child-saving will not settle into some workable balance.

To begin with, the social work profession has, with only scattered exceptions, institutionalized the anti-middle class, anti-family values embraced during the 1960's. It is true that in the past and under the "Protestant middle-class-values" banner, the child-savers regularly abused their authority and disrupted families for insufficient cause. When denuded of even those values, the child-saving machine has become a powerful social weapon aimed at the entire American family system.

A review of professional journals of the child-savers, such as Family Relations, reveals the "new values" at work. In an altogether characteristic article, Eleanor Macklin advances a new "family life curriculum: for high school students that would abandon the traditional family (adults marry someone of the opposite sex, have children, remain faithful, and live together until death). Instead, she proposes "education for choice," including the affirmation of childlessness, the presentation of a "single-parent-family" as "a viable lifestyle," the training of high schoolers in androgyny (unisex beliefs and acts) and skills for handling adultery, and support for gay rights. Each child should learn to write his or her own "lifestyle script." She suggests, for example, that a single child might, all at one, "choose to stay single, have children, co-parent, make a permanent commitment, be sexually nonexclusive, have a same-sex partner, and live communally. (27)

This inversion of values by the child-savers has direct consequences, as seen in the recent foster placement of two Massachusetts boys, aged two and three, with a male homosexual couple. "We can't discriminate based on anything," explained one social service executive. (28)

The "new" values of the child-savers even link up with the assault on the free-market system. According to David Gil: "Violence against children in rearing them may... be a functional aspect of socialization into a highly competitive and often violent society, one that puts a premium on the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest and that does not put into practice the philosophy of human cooperativeness." In consequence, he calls for "a revolutionary change not only in child rearing philosophy and practices of American society but also in its underlying value system." (29)

It appears that the middle-class spawned the child-savers, only to see them turn on their creators. The "terror" once confined to the immigrant poor and urban minorities is now spreading to the small towns and suburbs.

A second reason for pessimism is that child-saving has become quite a lucrative business. In Sweden--always "a decade ahead" of America in the evolution of social policy--an investigative magazine recently discovered that that nation had 10 times as many children in foster care, on a per capita basis, as neighboring Norway and Denmark. The reason? foster parents, commonly trained in social work, could earn 7,000 kronor (roughly $1,000) per month, or more, for every child they took in. Moreover, half of this income, called support allowance, was tax-free, the hardest kind of income to find in tax-happy Sweden. In one case, a couple annually earned $50,000 for caring for three foster children. Crudely put, legalized child-snatching in Sweden pays well. (30)

In the United States, financial considerations also appear to be fueling the child-abuse boom. Psychiatrists, testifying for the prosecution on vague concepts such as "the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome," have pulled down $1,000 a day for their efforts. (31)

In the Jordan, Minnesota, case, therapists grilling the children for weeks on end earned $100 an hour for their efforts. As one renegade psychologist, W. R. Coulson, admits: "Therapists love child abuse because it makes more work for them. There hasn't been a lot done on the fact that the growth in statistics on child abuse comes from people in whose advantage it is to discover it." (32)

The economic law appears to hold: (in this case, of therapists) creates its own demand.

Most tragically, the current level of hysteria and the ideology of child-saving cover up the raw truths about child abuse. The constant media focus on abusive parents from intact, suburban families belies the fact that a greatly disproportionate number of the serious physical abuse cases are found in the otherwise celebrated "female-headed families," commonly involving the illegitimate father or mother's current boyfriend. The attack on the middle-class and traditional values also cloaks the growing problems of real neglect caused by a spiraling divorce rate and working mothers with "latch-key" children. As Dr. Coulson suggests, the concentration on child abuse allows these categories of child abandoners "to steer attention away from their own sin by pointing at this awful thing which others do." (33)

The storm and fury over the allegedly abusive middle-class family blurs another disturbing fact: the linkage of child abuse to legalized abortion. During the 1960's, the advocates of abortion-on-demand argued that this policy change would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and so reduce child abuse. In fact, the exact opposite seems to have occurred. In an article for the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Philip Ney, M.D., has shown that those Canadian provinces (British Columbia and Ontario) with the highest rates of legal abortion are also the provinces with the highest (and most rapidly rising) rates of child abuse. In contrast, provinces with low abortion rates (New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Prince Edward's Island) also enjoy low, even declining, levels of child abuse. Ney postulates that women's choice of abortion has led to diminished restraints on rage, to a devaluation of children, to an increase in guilt, to heightened tensions between the sexes, and to ineffective bonding between the mothers and subsequent children. All of these factors, he notes, are closely correlated in the medical literature with abusive behavior toward children. (34)

Looking at the decaying juvenile justice system in the late 1960's, Anthony Platt concluded that the programs of the child- savers had both diminished the Constitutional liberties of youth and parents and aggravated the very problems that were supposed to be solved. (35)

The new round of child-saving focused on abuse seems destined for the same historical judgement.

So what's to be done? There is some hope that the court system may eventually place restraints on the zealots. The Gault decision, noted earlier, dealt a crippling blow to the parens patriae doctrine and offers a promising legal precedent. Earlier Supreme Court decisions have declared the right to marry and raise children to be a basic civil right and have included the rights to create a family and rear children among those liberties guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. (36)

These cases need to be continually emphasized. Also, parents' legal rights in child abuse cases, although frequently swept aside, still exist to some degree in all states and deserve intelligent defense. (37)

Moreover, several recent state court decisions have reinvigorated "the natural law defense" of family rights as a viable element of the American legal tradition. For example, in a stunning 1982 decision, the Utah Supreme Court struck down a provision of that state's Children's Rights Act which allowed for the complete termination of parental rights upon a decision by welfare authorities that "such termination will be in the child's best interest." Writing for the majority, Justice Dallin Oaks stated: "This parental right [to rear one's children] transcends all property and economic rights, It is rooted not in state or federal statutory or constitutional law, to which it is logically and chronologically prior, but in nature and human instinct." He noted that much of the rich variety in American culture had been transmitted to children by parents "who were acting against the best interest of their children, as defined by official dogma." There was no surer way to destroy authentic pluralism, Oaks added, than by terminating the rights of parents who violated the "trendy" definitions and "officially approved values imposed by reformers empowered to determine what is in the `best interest' of someone else's child." While not impugning evil motives, he did quote James Madison: "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties." (38)

Outside the court system, beleaguered parents are also beginning to organize. The Family Rights Coalition, headquartered in Crystal Lake, Illinois, serves as a clearinghouse for information on "cases of unjust aggression" by governmental agencies against families. Victims of Child Abuse Laws (V.O.C.A.L.) seeks to fulfill a similar function. These and other pro-family organizations look toward eventual legislative changes that would: establish specific legal definitions of "abuse" and "neglect" (and so limit the arbitrary nature of such legal proceedings); guarantee legal representation, rules of evidence, and due process in child-removal and related situations; protect children from abuse by state therapists; hold non-doctors legally accountable for their "reports" of abuse; and insure respect for diverse values in child rearing.

The child-savers, with only scattered if courageous exceptions, oppose such changes. Their current ideology and their financial self-interest dictate continued opposition to the recognition of procedural due process and of family or parental rights. The problem, then is to neutralize their power. Given the history of the situation, it is difficult to overestimate the complexity of that task. Yet the future of the family in America demands that the effort be made.

FOOTNOTES

1. This comparison of the witch trials to the hysteria over child abuse was suggested in an article by William McIver, in Newport News-Times, November 21, 1984.

2. This discussion from: Jeanne M. Giovani and Rosina M. Beverra, Defining Child Abuse (New York: The Free Press, 1979), pp.36-42; and Mason P. Thomas Jr., "Child Abuse and Neglect; Part I: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix, and Social Perspectives," North Carolina Law Review 50 (1972), pp. 299-300, 204-05.

3. See: Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 45, 51-58, 62-66, 74; Giovannoni and Becerra, Defining Child Abuse, p. 44-49; and Sanford J. Fox, "Juvenile Justice Reform: An Historical Perspective," Stanford Law Review, 22 (June, 1970), pp. 1206-09.

4. Fox, Juvenile Justice Reform," pp. 1213-15.

5. Ex parte Crouse, 4 Wharton Pa. 9 (1838).

6. County of McLean v. Humphreys, 104 Ill. 383 (1882).

7. People ex.rel. O'Connell v. Turner, 55 Ill. at 280-87 (1870).

8. See Fox, "Juvenile Justice Reform", pp. 1221-28, Thomas, "Child Abuse and Neglect," pp. 323-25.

9. See: Pratt, The Child Savers, pp. 42, 75-82; and Christopher Leach, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1965), pp. 46-56.

10. Fox, "Juvenile Justice Reform," p. 1230.

11. Miriam Van Waters, "the Juvenile Court from the Child's Viewpoint," in Jane Addams, ed. The Child the Clinic and the Court (New York: New Republic, 1925), pp. 218-19.

12. Julian Mack, "The Juvenile Court," Harvard Law Review 23 (1909), p. 104.

13. Miriam Van Waters, Youth in Conflict, (New York: New Republic, 1932), pp. 65-66.

14. Julian W. Mack, "Legal Problems Involved in the Establishment of a Juvenile Court," in Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, Social Work and the Courts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 200.

15. Miriam Van Waters, Parents on Probation (New York: New Republic, Inc. 1927), pp. 3-6, 35, 167.

16. Herbert A. Bloch, "Juvenile Delinquency: Myth of Threat[?]" The Journal of Criminal law, Criminology, and Police Science 49 (1958), pp. 303-09.

17. Quoted in Thomas, "Child Abuse and Neglect," pp. 343-44.

18. Fox, "Juvenile Justice Reform," p. 1233.

19. Kent v. United States, 383 U.S. 541 (1966).

20. In Re Gault, 387 U.S. at 16-18, 27-29; Part III infra. Also B. James George, Jr., Gault and The Juvenile Court Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Institute of Continuing Education, 1968), pp. 29ff.

21. See: Stephen J. Pfohl, "The `Discovery' of Child Abuse," Social Problems (Feb., 1977), pp. 310-23.

22. Giovannoni and Becerra, Defining Child Abuse, p. 69-70.

23. New York Times, Aug 16, 1981, p. 16.

24. Giovannoni and Becerra, Defining Child Abuse, p. 255.

25. Scott Kraft, "False Sex Abuse Charges Pose Growing Problem," Kansas City Star, Feb 11, 1985, pp. A-1,6.

26. Derek Richardson, "Day Care: Men Need Not Apply,: Mother Jones 10 (July, 1985), p. 60. Also David L. Kirp, "Hug Your Kids, Go to Jail," The American Spectator 18 (June, 1985), pp. 33-35.

27. Eleanor D. Macklin, "Education for Choice: Implications of Alternatives in Lifestyles for Family Life Education," Family Relations 30 (Oct., 1981) pp. 567=77.

28. See: Randal Keith "Hayes Questions DSS Moves Involving Children, Gay Couple," The Patriot Ledger, May 10, 1985.

29. David G. Gil, Violence Against Children: Physical Child Abuse in The United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 141-42.

30. "De tarvora barn!" (They Take Away Our Children!) Contra 8 (No.3, 1982), pp. 3-5.

31. Kirp, "Hug Your Kid, Go to Jail," p. 33.

32. Quoted in E. Michael Jones, "Abuse Abuse: The Therapeutic State Terrorizes Parents in Jordan, Minnesota," Fidelity 4 (Feb., 1985), p. 32.

33. In Jones, "Abuse Abuse," p. 33.

34. Phillip Ney, "Relationship Between Abortion and Child Abuse," Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 24 (Nov., 1979) pp. 610- 20.

35. Platt, The Child Savers, p.5.

36. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942) and Mayer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923).

37. See: Elaine C. Duncan, "Recognition and Protection of the Family's Interests in Child Abuse Proceedings," Journal of Family Law 13 (1973-74), pp. 803-18.

38. In Re J.P., document no 17386, filed June 9, 1982, The Supreme Court of the State of Utah, pp. 13, 17.