CHAPTER 4

Child Abuse

CHILD ABUSE made sense of multiplicity. Most multiples, according to recent theorizing, dissociated when they were little children. That was their way to cope with early terror and pain, usually in the form of or accompanied by sexual abuse. Before we see how this etiology became an item of faith, amply confirmed by clinical experience, we should consider the trajectory of the very idea of child abuse itself. For it is not a transparent idea that we all understand as soon as we think about it, notice examples of it, or recall having experienced it. You might think that the experiences speak for themselves, at least for the victims. Yes—and yet events, no matter how painful or terrifying, have been experienced or recalled as child abuse only after consciousness-raising. That requires inventing new descriptions, providing new ways to see old acts—and a great deal of social agitation. As Judith Herman observes in her powerful book Trauma and Recovery, every time we have taken trauma seriously, it has been “in affiliation with a political movement.”1

That said, we must insist that child abuse has been with us always. If we restrict ourselves only to the industrial or industrializing world after 1800, we have endless documentation of horrible things done to children—things that were at the time perceived as dreadful and that the children obviously hated. Certainly other things were done to children that we now think of as bad, and which children now would hate, but which may not have been so clearly perceived as bad by anyone long ago. But that is beside the main point: cruelty and exploitation, loathed by everyone, have been omnipresent. Focus on any specific type of vile behavior directed at children, and you can quickly document its occurrence in our recent and not so recent past. I hesitate to project this statement into European culture of too early an epoch, for the idea of child abuse takes for granted the idea of the child. There is enough plausibility in Philippe Ariès’s famous thesis about the invention of childhood to make one pause. Ariès argued that the social roles of children that we take for granted are, at the earliest, of eighteenth-century origin. But he also urged the more radical thesis that the very idea of a child, with all that it implies, is quite recent.² The thought of child sexual abuse is very closely tied to the notion that children develop through successive stages, each with its own canon of “appropriate” sexual behavior. The concept of child development came into its own only during the nineteenth century.3 Yet even that was not enough to give us our present notion of child abuse. The phrase “child abuse”—that exact phrase—is seldom found before 1960; its predecessor was “cruelty to children.” More important, the concept of child abuse, our concept, even when given a name, underwent a number of fairly radical mutations during the 1970s. I have written at length about these transitions elsewhere; a few highlights will suffice here.⁴

“Cruelty to children” of Victorian times seems so similar to our “child abuse” that I have to explain their differences. They differ in respect of class, evil, sex, and medicine. The Victorian movement against cruelty to children itself had plenty of predecessors, such as the agitation producing numerous Factory Acts that limited working hours for children. The first children’s aid society was founded in New York in 1853 and was much imitated elsewhere. But cruelty to children, as a quite specific concept, bearing that name, came expressly to the fore as late as 1874. Cruelty to children was targeted after a sensational incident—a pattern since repeated over and over again for child abuse. A girl who had been brutally beaten and degraded by her stepmother became the symbol of hidden horror. In response, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was established. It was an offshoot of an organization hitherto dedicated to preventing cruelty to animals, the American Humane Society. It was as if there had been no place for this concept, cruelty to children, so that concern had first to be fostered in an existing organization that looked after animals. The idea spread quickly in the United States and immediately crossed the ocean to Liverpool and then to London. Note the date, 1874 and after: that was the time of the first great wave of multiple personality, beginning in 1876. Yet cruelty to children and multiple personality seem never to have been connected in those days.

Cruelty to children had a riveting place in the overall portfolio of Victorian moral causes. Antislavery had been the first cause. There was the agitation over working hours for children, which conceptually linked children and slavery. Temperance, extending suffrage, opposition to vivisection and cruelty to animals, and above all women’s rights became an interconnected net that functioned powerfully to raise the moral sensibilities of the industrial world and to improve the lot of diverse victims. The campaigns were couched in similar terms. Support came from the same social subclasses and often from the same individuals.

These movements took different forms in different parts of the industrialized world. Standard social legislation covering health, workman’s compensation, and pensions originates in Prussia and then the German Empire, with its collectivist, rather than individualist, conception of the relationships between the state and its people. Many educational reforms, kindergartens, and even the idea of sending slum children to the country for their moral and physical health all originate in German language communities. In the more atomistic and individualistic Western nations such as France, Britain, and the United States, private philanthropy was the norm. The Victorian agitations were driven by a genteel mix of passionate concern, charity, and self-interest, but by and large the activists were not running scared. If they were frightened, they were prompted by the laboring and criminal classes, and by threats of revolution.

This leads to my first difference between child abuse and cruelty to children. As I shall elaborate below, child abuse, especially in America, was supposed to be classless. It was supposed to occur in constant proportion, more or less, in every social class. Poverty was not an issue. This was an American political exigency, for legislation could succeed—and succeed it did, with a vengeance—only if it were not perceived as predominantly liberal social reform. Hence class differences were explicitly excluded. Cruelty to children, in contrast, was presented primarily as a vice of the lower classes, prosperous examples notwithstanding. One potent force behind the modern child abuse movement has been fear about the rot in the American family, an internal fear, as opposed to fear of the smoldering poor. Fear for the family forms the conservative pole of child abuse activism, matched by the radical pole of feminism and its belief that child abuse is part of the patriarchal system. Child abuse agitation drew on an unusual coalition of those who challenged the traditional family and those who feared its dissolution. Class warfare, of the sort that drove part of the philanthropic cruelty to children movement, was excluded, as far as possible, in order to create a common front for child abuse activists.

My next difference between cruelty to children and child abuse has to do with evil. Cruelty to children was a very bad thing. It was wicked, depraved, despicable, wrong—in a word, cruel. But it was not absurd to locate the first anticruelty organization within the Humane Society, founded to look after animals. Cruelty to children was one among many cruelties, especially bad because innocence suffered and often grew up to become a danger to the state by entering the criminal classes. Contrast this with the outlook of recent times, when child abuse, especially when it has sexual content or overtones, seems to be the greatest evil in private life. It was not felt as the outstanding evil in the nineteenth century. Cruelty to children was bad; child abuse is an ultimate evil.

This is connected to my third difference, sex. Child abuse agitation began in 1961, when battered baby syndrome was presented to the American Medical Association. Active feminists soon placed an emphasis on sexual abuse. As familial sex abuse became incorporated into the very meaning of child abuse, abuse acquired connotations of incest. Incest produces peculiar feelings of horror in a great many societies. Explanations of this horror are unsatisfactory; they sound more like the edicts of famous psychologists or anthropologists than genuine explanations. But no matter why incest produces such widespread feelings of revulsion, it is a fact that it does, and that revulsion spread to child abuse in general. Moreover, child abuse became associated with a collection of acts that most people find monstrous for reasons having nothing to do with classical incest. Three-year-olds are sodomized by a male relative. Some of us find this not only repugnant, but also absolutely unintelligible, in the way that only rank evil can be unintelligible. Such acts have, for many, become the very prototype of child abuse. They were never central to cruelty to children. Victorians were amply aware of what we call sexual abuse of children and minors, and many cases went to court. But such vices were not grouped together, in general, with cruelty to children. When they were, it was only under a larger class umbrella, of the several iniquities of les misérables, or, occasionally, of the debauched rich. Cruelty to children did not collect, conceptually, anything like the same set of evils spanned by the idea of child abuse.

Social class, evil, and sex may seem enough to differentiate child abuse from cruelty to children—the three of them cover most of sociology. But there is one more factor, medicalization. Doctors put child abuse and neglect on the political agenda in the early 1960s. They declared that abusers are sick. Medicine has by no means kept uniform control of the administration of child abuse, but whoever aims at control must treat child abuse within some science. Contrast Victorian cruelty. The medicalization and, more generally, scientization of deviancy during the nineteenth century has become a cliché of intellectual history. Yet cruelty to children was not seriously incorporated in the medical, psychological, or even sociostatistical lore of the Victorian era. Some social control of families was exercised by physicians and through medical theories, but efforts to restrain cruelty followed another route. People did not try to control cruelty by means of a special kind of knowledge about the cruel. Some of the most vigilant agitators were medical men, but they campaigned as philanthropists, and as men of standing who happened to be doctors. They never made out that the cruel parent was a definite kind of human being, in the way in which a child abuser is now a kind of person. The man who beat or raped his daughter may have been called a beast, but there was no expert knowledge to help, cure, or manage that type of individual. He was a wretch to be punished. The mother who callously neglected her children or threw them to the floor in a drunken rage had to be separated from her flock because she harmed them, but not because she was of the child-harming species.

Medicalization is much less interesting than sex, class, or evil, yet from one perspective it is the hallmark of the concept of child abuse. There are supposed to be certain kinds of person, such as the child abuser, or the abused child, about whom scientific knowledge is possible. If the knowledge is sound, then there will be numerous different kinds of abuse, of abuser, and of abused, subject to various types of medical, psychiatric, and statistical laws. These laws will tell how to intervene and prevent or ameliorate child abuse. Multiple personality has recently thrived on child abuse as an object of knowledge. Cruelty to children was a bad thing, but it could not of its very nature have caused a mental illness. Individual acts of cruelty might drive a person mad—what else are gothic tales of horror all about? But those acts were not of the madness-causing kind about which doctors, as opposed to novelists, wrote books. Clinically, the first great treatise on hysteria, published in 1859 by Paul Briquet, makes perfectly clear that many cases of female hysteria are the product of family violence, even in childhood.5 But he never proposed that the violence itself, and its causes, should become an object of scientific knowledge.

Causes are objects of knowledge, and child abuse could be the cause of an illness only if it was something like what is called a natural kind, a kind of event found in nature and hooked up to other events by laws of nature. Medical knowledge about child abuse would be knowledge of those kinds of event and of the laws that connect them. During the late-Victorian heyday of cruelty to children, cruelty was never in the running to be such an object, such a kind, such a topic for information, control, and medical intervention.

The crusade against cruelty to children faded from notice by 1910. In the half-century 1910–1960 there were plenty of problems concerning children and adolescents. While cruelty had dropped out of the agenda, infant mortality and then juvenile delinquency rose to prominence. Then, in 1961, came child abuse. The immediate stimulus was a group of pediatricians in Denver led by C. H. Kempe. Using X rays as the objective proof, they drew attention to repeated injuries to small children. Children were found to have healed fractures in legs or arms, and similar signs of unrecorded, unreported injury. This had been widely known at least since 1945, but no one had dared to say that the scarred bones were caused by parents who had beaten up their babies. Once the Denver group had published the battered child syndrome in 1962, newspapers, television, and the mass weeklies announced this new scourge.

A new body of knowledge was abroad. It was often peculiarly a priori. “Often parents may be repeating the type of child care practiced on them in childhood.”6 This observation comes from the first paper about battered babies. It is cautious enough, with its “often” and “may,” but it was gearing up for removing the qualifications and reversing the direction of implication: “Abused as a child, abusive as a parent.” The latter became virtually an axiom believed by the vast majority of clinicians and social service workers, and an item of general knowledge among lay people. The technical literature on the “inheritance” of child abuse was nevertheless quite mixed, with firm believers ranged against skeptics who asked for some evidence. The believers held the field, for two reasons. First, the claim sounds right: that is, it fits in with twentieth-century beliefs that childhood experience forms the adult. Second, it is now a foregone conclusion that an abusive parent will profess having been abused as a child: that explains and thereby mitigates the behavior. So there is plenty of confirming evidence. The doctrine has been completely absorbed by the multiple personality movement: recall Braun’s striking statement to the ISSMP&D congress of 1993 that child abuse all too often “metastasizes across families and generations.”⁷

Surely there is a fact of the matter? Either most abusers were abused as children, or not? A thorough survey article of 1993 quotes, as an example, a statement made in a classic study of 1973: “The most constant fact [concerning child abusers] is that parents themselves were nearly always abused or battered or neglected as children.” And again from 1976: “We see an unbroken line in the repetition of parental abuse from childhood into the adult years.” In 1993, however: “More than 15 years after these comments were made, there are few in the scientific community who would embrace such remarks.”⁸ Notice that it is the “scientific community” who count. What is the problem for this community? “Most scholars are all too aware of the inherent limitations of the available database.” Usually when people complain about the database, they mean that there are too few data. That is hardly the problem here, for this review article alone cites about ninety statistical studies, many of large samples, bearing on “the etiology of child maltreatment.” I do not want to criticize the methodology of these seemingly endless studies. All this work assumes that there is knowledge to be had. That may be a mistake. There may be no true general answers to the question “Why do parents X-abuse their children?” where X is a defined type of child abuse. Moreover, there is the looping effect of human kinds that I have mentioned already. The concept of child abuse may itself be so made and molded by attempts at knowledge and intervention, and social reaction to these studies, that there is no stable object, child abuse, to have knowledge about.

The thesis that abusers were once abused was not the only principle laid down in the early days of child abuse agitation. There was also, for example, the practical injunction to separate babies from their parents or caretakers: “Physicians should not be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk of repetition exists.”9 And it was explicitly declared that the entire topic was one for medical expertise: “It is the responsibility of the medical profession to assume leadership in this field.”¹⁰ The popular press was faithful, speaking of “sick adults who commit such crimes.” To talk about the etiology of child abuse is already to grant the authority of a medical model. “Etiology” is medicine’s word for cause. It may beg the question. The question “Why do people abuse their children?” may have no general medical answer at all.

In the beginning we had battered child syndrome. It applied to babies three years old and under. The Denver pediatricians said later that they had made the deliberate decision not to go public with physical abuse as a general label for what was happening in many American families. They feared that a conservative audience of colleagues would not acknowledge anything more than what could be proved by X rays. But once searing photographs of damaged innocents were in place—injured not only with sticks and stones but by straps, nails, cigarette butts, scalding water—it would quickly be acknowledged that babies are not the only victims. It had helped, as a point of political tactics, to begin with infants. To do so enabled doctors to evade the issue of the supposed right of parents to mete out severe physical punishment to their children. No one argued that parents had a right to punish mere babies.

Once the cry was raised, battered babies would be seen as only a subclass of a central classification, the abused child. Physical abuse and the less sensational but far more pervasive neglect remained the focus. Sex was peripheral or absent. The pioneers of 1962 said later that they were well aware of sexual abuse and had it on the list of future targets. Police officers, social workers, psychotherapists, schoolteachers, and ministers of religion were certainly not unaware that sexual abuse and physical abuse often occur in the same households. But public attention was deferred. Perhaps the first great outcry occurred in a speech by Florence Rush to the New York Radical Feminist Conference, 17 April 1971. This ferment reached a more general public in 1975: “Sexual Molestation of Children: The Last Frontier in Child Abuse.”11

In the old days sex molesters were supposed to be strangers. If molester and victim were acquainted, the former would be a household servant molesting the children of the employer—or the master molesting the children of the servants. It was allowed that perpetrators could be caretakers, foster parents, wicked stepfathers, perverted schoolteachers, and priests. Molestation occurred across class boundaries and outside the ties of blood. But babies were battered in the family! What about molesting within the family? The two ideas, intrafamilial abuse and sexual molestation, began to be fused. Sexual molestation within the family means incest. By May 1977, when Ms. magazine’s lead story was “Incest: Child Abuse Begins at Home,” this agitation furiously burst into the open. A welter of otherwise discordant statistics confirmed that men abuse girls in their families far more often than anyone abuses boys.¹²

The traditional prohibition on incest applies to sexual intercourse. As soon as incest and child abuse came together, the concept was radically extended. Fondling and touching became incest just as much as intercourse.¹³ Cornelia Wilbur went a step further: “Chronic exposure to sexual displays and sexual acts during infancy and early childhood is abusive. This occurs when parents insist that a child sleep in the parental bedroom until eight or nine years of age.”¹⁴ Child abuse was molded to take in a range of acts that had never before been put together as one single kind of behavior. On the one hand, incest came to mean any type of sexually oriented activity involving an adult and a child in the same family. Or even, by an implicit slide of meanings, in the American extended family, which includes baby-sitters and day-care centers. On the other hand, the concept of child abuse picked up a whole range of behavior, all of which became colored by the horror of incest.

These events were extraordinarily liberating. They made it possible for many women, and increasingly many men, to bring into the open their degrading experiences at the hands (usually) of male relatives by blood, marriage, or convenience. Fathers, uncles, grandfathers, cousins, stepfathers, boyfriends, companions, paramours, priests. There were also memories of forced sex with mothers and aunts. Telling the stories was cathartic. The suffering lay not just in the immediate assault, and fear of the next one, but in an ongoing destruction of personality, a growing inability to trust anyone, to establish loving and confident relations with any human being. There was not only a twisting of sexual responses but also a distortion of any affectionate response. Not battered babies but battered lives. This is exactly what multiple personality clinicians began to uncover: the sad lives that they tried to put back together had experienced terrible childhoods.

There is a further item of knowledge. We might consider whether sexual experiences involving a child and an adult inevitably harm the child. In 1953, Kinsey, already made famous by his studies of male sexuality, found that 24 percent of his female informants had experienced the sexual attentions of adults while they were still girls. Kinsey seems to have thought that this might even be good for a girl, but that was before the appearance of child abuse as a concept ranging from battering to incest.15 No one seems to have been much worried by Kinsey’s finding, then. In 1979, after the rich concept of child abuse had been molded, the most influential scientific expert on child sexual abuse was David Finkelhor. He concluded, almost without qualification, that the sexual attentions of adults harm the subsequent development of children.¹⁶

There has since been a prodigious number of studies of the sequelae of child abuse—once again note the medical language. Hence it is worth repeating a more recent remark by Finkelhor and a colleague: child abuse would be wicked and evil even if it had no significant effect on the person’s growth into an adult.

There is an unfortunate tendency in interpreting the effects of sexual abuse (as well as in other studies of childhood trauma) to overemphasize long-term impact as the ultimate criterion. Effects seem to be considered less “serious” if their impact is transient and disappears in the course of development. However this tendency to stress everything in terms of its long-term effect betrays an “adulto-centric” bias. Adult traumas such as rape are not assessed in terms of whether they will have an impact on old age. They are acknowledged to be painful and alarming events, whether their impact lasts 1 year or 10. Similarly childhood traumas should not be dismissed because no “long-term effects” can be demonstrated. Child sexual abuse needs to be recognized as a serious problem of childhood, if only for the immediate pain, confusion, and upset that can ensue.17

This is absolutely right. But there is a subtext. Knowledge about the bad effects of child abuse is in a surprisingly poor state. A 1993 review by Finkelhor and his associates observes that “since 1985 … there has been an explosion in the number of studies that have concentrated specifically on sexually abused children.” The results, however, are not satisfying. “The role of disturbance to self-esteem and of a child’s prior dispositions or vulnerabilities has not been well substantiated.” Clinicians are warned that “there are too many sexually abused children who are apparently asymptomatic.” The authors complain that despite the explosion in empirical studies, there is no “theoretical underpinning.” There is great concern about “the effects of sexual abuse but disappointingly little concern about why the effects occur.” So where are we? We apparently know that sexually abused children “are more symptomatic than their nonabused counterparts.” But the sexually abused children under study had already been selected because of their symptoms. When we compare sexually abused children and “other clinical nonabused children” (i.e., children getting psychiatric treatment for something else), the sexually abused children are less symptomatic in general, except for being more highly “sexualized.”¹⁸ It is obvious to everyone that sexual abuse must have bad consequences for the development of a child—yet once again, the search for scientific proof is not doing very well.

There is a comparable number of studies on the long-term effects of physical abuse and neglect.¹⁹ Any given study seems to prove a lot, but put together, they are so at odds with each other that the net effect is inconclusive. All these studies, of sexual or physical abuse, are amazingly indifferent to social class. In a classic contribution to political science, Barbara Nelson analyzed the way in which physical abuse and neglect of children entered the American political arena.²⁰ From the outset it was essential to separate the problem of injured children from any social issues. “This is a political problem, not a poverty problem,” insisted Senator and then Vice President Mondale, who led the drive for national legislation. That approach ensured unanimity. Liberals and conservatives could agree, and social issues should not arise, because child abuse is an illness. Mondale’s words hover over most subsequent American research: “not a poverty problem.” And yet there is a “highly replicated finding that poverty and low income are related to both child abuse and neglect”; ten studies are cited in this 1993 paper.21 Writers outside the United States tend to express themselves more vigorously. “For all its horror, child sexual abuse (or physical battering) harms, indeed kills, far fewer children, either in [Great Britain] or the United States, than simple, miserable and unremitting poverty. Why, when poverty has been intensifying and welfare programmes run down, has our attention been drawn to sexual or other abuse?”²² In the author’s view part of the answer is that child abuse and especially sexual abuse offer scapegoats. It is clear that the children who die from maltreatment are the poor ones.²³ In the United States the availability of public funds for poor families with small children decreased substantially every year during the 1980s, while every year there was more and more talk about the horrors of child abuse. In 1990 a presidential panel announced that child abuse was a “national emergency.”²⁴ The first task was to “alert the nation to the existence of the problem.” Then what? “We want a system in which it is as easy for a family member to get help as it is to report a neighbor for suspected abuse.” But the panel’s focus elided unpleasant topics like filth, danger, the stench of urine in the halls, broken elevators, smashed glass, curtailed food programs, guns.

One piece of knowledge about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse, would be particularly relevant to multiple personality. Most multiples are adult women. Their illness, it is claimed, is due to childhood abuse commonly involving sexual abuse. Is this a special case? Does child abuse produce psychiatric illnesses later in life? Many clinicians are certain that it does. Can epidemiology and statistics produce confirmation of this? Anyone who reviews the literature will be extremely cautious. The claim that early abuse causes adult dysfunction is far closer to an act of faith than an item of knowledge. It seems so obviously true—yet even when there are statistical connections, they seem to be more local than might be thought. Thus a longitudinal study in New Zealand (where the universal health coverage applies to psychiatric care) found that psychiatric problems of adult women correlated less well with abuse than with straightforward poverty.²⁵

To repeat Finkelhor’s admonition: even if it is hard to correlate child abuse and subsequent psychiatric problems, child abuse remains an evil in itself. Moral philosophers distinguish, on the one hand, utilitarian or consequentialist ethics and, on the other, deontological ethics. Consequentialism assesses whether an act is good or bad in terms of its consequences. Deontology urges that there may be categorical imperatives to do, or refrain from, certain acts, regardless of their consequences. Many child abuse activists who ought (in my opinion) to be deontologists, attending to the absolute evil of child abuse, are in practice consequentialists, trying to discover bad results of such acts. The multiple personality movement has been helped by the ruthless utilitarian thrust of American sociology. Sociology is never content to say that something is just plain bad. To be bad, an act has to have bad consequences. If we had been content to intervene in child abuse just because it is bad, we would not have our present set of beliefs about the consequences of child abuse. Absent those, the multiple personality movement would not have been able to have a causal theory of the origin of splitting on which to flourish.

I have been belaboring a curious fact. On the one hand, there is an immense amount of confident general knowledge about child abuse. Much of that knowledge sprang full-blown, a priori, as the concept of child abuse was formed. On the other hand, the innumerable empirical studies do not add up. Sometimes they put in question what has always been taken for granted. What remains? First, faith. Second, purely empirical experience of particular situations and individuals that confirm the faith. And the conviction stands that there must be knowledge to be had, if only we could get it. Perhaps that is what is wrong: an assumption about the possibility of knowledge and the kind of knowledge that it must be.

There are endless studies but people are affected by them, so that the very phenomenon being investigated may be changed by the inquiry itself. It is as if there were a principle of human indeterminacy at work. Nowhere is this more clear than in the exoneration effect, as when violent people discover in their past a history of their abuse because they know that explains, excuses, and perhaps even causes their violence. I am not referring to the fact that some abusers will lie in order to avoid judicial sanctions. I mean that they may comprehend their own past differently, and now honestly see themselves as having been abused. This is not an effect to be avoided. It is inherent in the concept of child abuse. Is the concept then “simply subjective”? Not in the least, but the concept does have its own internal dynamics.

I never tire of saying that the child abuse movement is the most important piece of consciousness-raising of the past three decades or so. It has not only made us aware: it has also changed our sensibilities and our values. It has wiped out a little of our humanity—no man in his right mind today would help a strange child in a park trying to reach the water fountain. It has provided leverage for some litigious souls and it has given rise to some crazy panics. There have been some victims of false accusation—but nothing like the number of unsung victims of a less self-conscious age. There have also been some appalling miscarriages of justice. At a time of radical moral change, we have to sort these issues out case by case. But the net effect of the consciousness-raising has been overwhelmingly positive.

It is particularly necessary for me to say this here, for some readers may feel I am too distanced from the topic. Indeed a previous essay of mine has been called a “brilliant and disturbing deconstruction of child abuse.”26 I do not find this as complimentary as intended, for deconstruction so often implies irony, mockery, a lack of respect for what is being “deconstructed.” I analyze, but I never intend to deconstruct. I take a distanced view of child abuse, here, because I am preoccupied by the way in which it has become an object of knowledge, and has, in turn, become an object of causal knowledge for the new science of multiple personality.

There has been a great deal of talk, recently, about the social construction of this or that. Sometimes this is exciting, as when we read about the social construction of the present basic building blocks of physics: the social construction of quarks.²⁷ I respect someone who can argue that quarks are socially constructed: this is a daring and provocative thesis that makes us think. I feel a certain guarded admiration when a fact whose discovery was rewarded with a Nobel Prize for medicine is described as the social construction of a scientific fact; anyone who shares my respect and admiration for fundamental science has to sit up and take notice.²⁸ I do not find it similarly thrilling to read about the social construction of events that could occur only historically, only in the context of a society. It can hardly be of interest that the concept of child abuse is a social construct (if “social construct” means anything at all). What will be of interest is the successive stages in which this concept has been made and molded, and how it has interacted with children, with adults, with moral sensibilities, and with a larger sense of what it is to be a human being.

At least one published paper has the title “The Social Construction of Child Abuse.”²⁹ The example of child abuse can be a useful beacon to help us steer clear of the more tedious questions about social construction. Some of the more strident social constructionists say (without noticing the switch) that child abuse is no social construction; it is a real evil that the family and the state have so often covered up. They are right and wrong. It is a real evil, and it was so before the concept was constructed. It was nevertheless constructed. Neither reality nor construction should be in question.

Yet there is a quite different type of construction, familiar in philosophy from the time of Rousseau and Kant. Those thinkers wrote about how we construct ourselves and our sense of moral worth. But they did not think of wholly new moral concepts coming into circulation. When new moral concepts emerge or when old ones acquire new connotations, then our sense of who we are is affected. The effect is more pervasive when the moral concept is also taken to be a causal one. Child abuse is both an ultimate evil and causally powerful. We may have little conventional proof that child abuse has terrible sequelae in adult life, but those supposed sequelae are part of the common ground of psychiatrists, scientists, social workers, and lay people. That knowledge affects the way in which individual human beings come to conceive of themselves.

Child abuse, and repressed memories of child abuse, are supposed to have powerful effects on the developing adult. What interests me is less the truth or falsehood of that proposition than the way in which assuming it leads people to describe their own past anew. Individuals explain their behavior differently and feel differently about themselves. Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past. I find the so-called social construction of child abuse a topic of limited interest. But I shall constantly return to the question of how that constructed knowledge loops in upon people’s moral lives, changes their sense of self-worth, reorganizes and reevaluates the soul.