Child abuse may include any act or failure to act by a parent or a caregiver that results in actual or potential wrongful harm to a child and can occur in a child's home, or in organizations, schools, or communities the child interacts with.
Different jurisdictions have different requirements for mandatory reporting and have developed different definitions of what constitutes child abuse, and therefore have different criteria to remove children from their families or to prosecute a criminal charge. As late as the 19th century, cruelty to children, perpetrated by employers and teachers, was commonplace and widespread, and corporal punishment was customary in many countries, but in the first half of the 19th century, pathologists studying filicide the parental killing of children reported cases of death from paternal rage, [ 1 ] recurrent physical maltreatment, [ 2 ] starvation, [ 3 ] and sexual abuse.
He commented, "When we consider the tender age of these poor defenceless beings, subjected daily and almost hourly to savage atrocities, unimaginable tortures and harsh privation, their lives one long martyrdom β and when we face the fact that their tormentors are the very mothers who gave them life, we are confronted with one of the most appalling problems that can disturb the soul of a moralist, or the conscience of justice".
These early French observations failed to cross the language barrier , and other nations remained ignorant of the cause of many traumatic lesions in infants and toddlers; almost one hundred years would pass before humankind began to systematically confront Tardieu's "appalling problem". In the 20th century, evidence began to accumulate from pathology and paediatric radiology, particularly in relation to chronic subdural haematoma and limb fractures: subdural haematoma had a curious bimodal distribution, idiopathic in infants and traumatic in adults, [ 12 ] while unexplained ossifying periostitis of the long bones was similar to that occurring after breech extractions.
As a result, professional inquiry into the topic began again in the s. Henry Kempe and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association represents the moment that child maltreatment entered mainstream awareness. Before the article's publication, injuries to childrenβeven repeated bone fracturesβwere not commonly recognized as the results of intentional trauma. Instead, physicians often looked for undiagnosed bone diseases or accepted parents' accounts of accidental mishaps such as falls or assaults by neighborhood bullies.
