yet despite such formal protections and despite strong cultural, social, and religious prohibitions against causing permanent harm to children, children are still often the victims of violence and neglect, often at the hands of those who are charged with their protection. Despite the made-for-TV movies in which we see children abducted and harmed by strangers, in the real world most children are harmed by those they trust and those who at least claim to love them. It is the commonality of child abuse along with the fact that the results of child abuse can be permanent (this "permanence" ranges from the most terrible cases in which a child is killed to cases in which a child is not physically harmed but suffers from lifelong emotional problems) that makes research into how to prevent child abuse so vital.
The above should not be read as implying that researchers and public officials do not already have some relatively good idea of what prompts child abuse. The problem in preventing child abuse is that the conditions that lead to child abuse are complex and pervasive. Certain general conditions, such as poverty, tend to make child abuse more likely (Jaffee etal, 2002). If somehow human societies could defeat poverty, racism, and domestic violence, then the rate of child abuse would no doubt drop dramatically. But given that such an outcome (however devoutly to be wishes) is unlikely in fact to occur, any attempt to reduce the rate of child abuse must address the dynamic of what causes certain people who experience those conditions likely to produce to prompt abuse to cross the line and become abusers (Jones etal, 2002). Obviously not all those who are poor abuse their children, for example, even though poverty is in many cases one of the instigating conditions in many cases of child abuse.
This proposal argues that research on the issue of child abuse might most profitably be focused on the stopping what might be seen as a chain r...