his failure of linkage carries the potential for child abuse. Feeling powerless, in other words, in an environment that celebrates power and money, the male in a household may strike out at an easy target; these factors argue special reasons for the failure of family socialization and child abuse by males.
Writing in 1990, Hutchison (71-2) complains that child abuse and delinquency alike have different meanings to different groups, whether policy makers, case workers, law-enforcement agencies, or researchers, but that these definitions have been used interchangeably in the professional literature. Hutchison's own research is more theoretical and ideological; writing in 1992, she (67-68) looks at alienation from dominant social structure in a feminist analysis of child-welfare issues, including the point that emphasis on child abuse as a social problem in modern history coincided with the emergence of single-mother households and the rise of the number of women and children living in poverty. The interpretation is that even as the prevailing social structure was put
...