I would also guess that it started to ramp up from the 60s/70s. Rising living standards and education, mass media, cultural revolution and the increasing political power of women. The latter because I would guess women would on average be more likely to oppose child abuse and to strongly do so. If I remember correctly, the Suffragette movement was opposed in part because they wanted to ban alcohol. And they wanted to ban alcohol in large part because they thought it would reduce domestic violence against women and children.
I suppose a more general question is: “When did domestic violence start to be considered a serious social ill?” and I think that would be the 60s and 70s too.
It certainly wasn’t legal, but there was not the widespread mandatory reporting laws then, as there are now. Many of his teachers knew about the abuse but didn’t want to get involved, or didn’t report it when he begged them not to (out of fear of parental retribution). Today they’d be required to report it, and for the most part, that’s a very good thing.
I imagine that I see a trend in all this, and it’s a good trend. Respecting and honouring someone is losing its requirement to condone their abuse of power. A society in which abuse of power is not tolerated from anyone, is better in every way.
It makes sense to me that the calls for a ban on alcohol could have been mostly a way to remove the “I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing” excuse. Drunks generally know what they’re doing, anyway, but the excuse was common. I wonder how many guys were not really all that drunk, but just wanted to hit somebody and used the excuse.
This is a bit of a philosophical position/argument.
There’s an underlying idea that what people do in their own house is none of your business (apparently unless it is sexual, political or religious). How you raised your children or treated your wife was entirely your own business and no one else had the right to tell you what to do, no matter what horrors you inflicted upon them.
We still see the same things today in many ways, including the way new parents react to people making childcare suggestions.
The some libby lib liberals decided that justice and compassion meant we could no longer ignore these things and had to do something about it. We still see that struggle every day. The kids tortured by their parents, who moved across country and hid in a rural area to keep people from knowing about it. People insisting on homeschooling their kids because they don’t want them exposed to ideas that they dislike.
Corporal punishment was SOP in my elementary school in the 1960s. My 4th grade teacher had a red paddle hanging on the wall called Sunny Jim that she would use on us, and the principal had a bigger paddle with holes drilled in it that he would beat us with. My father never laid a hand on us, but my mother would frequently spank us, and, if she was really in a rage, used an old metal spatula that she kept on hand just for beatings. She would sometimes break a blood vessel in her hand from beating us, then she would lay a guilt trip on us by saying “Look! See what you made me do?” She slapped me around frequently until I was in my early 20’s, when I had finally had enough and realized it was not normal parental behavior. One day I slapped her back, and told her to never hit me again. She didn’t. That was in the early 80s.
Somewhere in that 2 decade span societal attitudes changed and people began to realize it wasn’t some constitutional right to physically assault people just because you were their parent.
To a bit of levity to this bleak thread. I once stuck a pencil eraser in the stove fire and put it to my cheek to see if it was hot. Yep, it was and left a perfect circle on my cheek just about the size of the end of a cigarette. My Mom had me tell people that I did it all “By my widdle self” so they didn’t think it was her! Coincidentally, a woman smoking a cigarette accidently swung her arm and passed the cigarette a few inches from her face. In shock she asked if she burned me and I just laughed and had to admit, “Nope! I did it myself with a pencil eraser!” SIGH
Born in 1967, a kid in the '70s. We were spanked and slapped and punishment was meted out by adults outside the family as well; I had a 5th grade teacher who would kick misbehaving boys in the butt – hard! (He’d be in jail today).
I never thought of it as abusive when I was a kid because it was only used after a few warnings and it was restrained and fair. However, we were all aware of the kids who were regularly thrashed for any or no reason and nothing was ever said or done about it. They had no one in their corner.
She claims now, 40 years later, that she was afraid, but that was never true. Not in the slightest. She has never made a single claim that he struck her in nearly 60 years of marriage. At this point she’s only excusing her inaction.
A number of things are trending downward at the same time in modern society:
The acceptability of violence against children
The acceptability of violence against adults
The general dangerousness of life
The general amount of physical unpleasantness experienced unavoidably
I think these are all linked to each other. If you’re a kid growing up in the 1910’s, you could quite possibly die before adulthood from a communicable disease, an industrial accident (not much in the way of safety standards) or an infected blister. You probably have a job involving hard manual labour which exhausts you and makes your body hurt at the end of the day. And if you’re a bloke, whenever there’s a war on you’ll be expected to, if necessary, march into certain death because that’s Just What Men Do. Under the circumstances, a thump on the ear from your parents is not necessarily going to register as a particularly bad thing. Getting hit is just one out of of a number of unpleasant things which happen on a regular basis
Society’s attitudes towards physical punishment have changed as life has gotten exponentially safer and more pleasant. By the 1960’s when “The Battered Child Syndrome” was published, people were also protesting the Vietnam War because they were no longer willing to accept marching into likely death as Just What Men Do. Capital punishment was being abolished in many countries around the world, so was corporal punishment for adults - I think we just had a thread where someone mentioned the Royal Navy abolished whipping in 1967. Obviously these changes have happened unevenly in different parts of the world, but the trend is all in the same direction.
It’s also worth noting that general corporal punishment is a lot more accepted, right now, among working class than upper class people - that is, among people who are more likely to have physically unpleasant and strenuous jobs themselves and therefore can still perceive a smack as falling into the general background of “yeah, life is full of unpleasant things that might happen to you”
In my lifetime abusive beatings were always a bad thing but different communities handled them in different fashions. I knew one kid who got punched around a lot until some of the other dads explained the error of that kind of thing in a fashion the other father understood; beating the snot out of him and explaining that they would be more than happy to repeat the lesson. Some relatives in the “big city” knew a cop who made note of and followed up on cases like that in a like-wise paralegal fashion. Relatives intervening and kids being legally placed with them was also known. Kids got beat and sometimes killed and everything was too little too late IMHO but I didn’t cross paths with any place where it was just open season. Teachers, ministers, and others always had their ways and their own networks they could call on.
Now as for when any form of physical punishment became abuse; for that I would say the 80s.
And before that, children with frequent unexplained injuries were often described as “accident prone”, and as an offshoot, kids were also taught that you could get VD from toilet seats. We know now that this isn’t how it happens.
When my Dad passed away, we had a family meeting and one of the good things my Mom said about him was that he never hit her. I don’t know if I just thought it or actually said it, but I remember thinking…Yeah, because he used up all his energy on me!
I later asked her why he treated me so badly and her answer caused a 20+ year riff between my Mom, my siblings and me. Thanks to the grace of God, we all reconciled shortly before her passing.
My siblings (who are much older than me) always said they got it just as bad when they were younger, but my Mom said that I really did have it the worst because my Dad had the highest hopes for me. SIGH When I asked her why she didn’t stop him, she said she tried, even threatened to leave him, but just couldn’t because of us kids. DOUBLE SIGH. In retrospect I’m glad they stayed together (As I said earlier, overall he was a very loving father). But what really hurt me so deeply was that up until that day everyone denied that I was treated differently.
