Child abuse is not a public health problem, it's a social justice problem

  This afternoon, I gave a presentation with the above title
At the Kempe Center International Virtual Conference:
A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare
Here is the text of that presentation

           The summary for this program starts by noting that in the United States, no matter what the problem, sooner or later we’ll see a news story with a headline that says: “Doctors say treat [name of problem here] like a public health problem.”  Funny how it always seems to be doctors who are first to suggest this. Or, to paraphrase a common saying: If you’ve spent eight years training to be a hammer, you’ll see everyone you meet as a nail.

          It isn’t just doctors, of course. 

          One presentation at this conference talks about how “all families need support at different … dosage levels.”  That presentation repeatedly referred to taking a public health approach.

The problem with this approach is not that the people supporting it want to hurt children.  On the contrary, they almost always act with the best of intentions.  But children keep paying the price for those good intentions.  Because as soon as you label something a “health” problem that means somebody has to be sick. 

After following this issue for decades, I’ve heard over and over some variation of this: “You don’t understand.  We just want to help those people. They’re not evil, they’re just sick.”

Well, a tiny percentage of those caught up in the net of child protective services is, in fact evil.  Another small percentage is sick.  And some others were made sick by the failure to address the social justice issues that are the real root of the problem.

But overwhelmingly, what America labels “child maltreatment” is a social justice problem rooted in poverty and racism.