Volume 12, 2007
Stephen Krason
Pages 307-350
The Critics of Current Child Abuse Laws and the Child Protective System
A Survey of the Leading Literature
The author discusses the writings of several of the leading critics, both scholarly and popular, of the American child protective system in charge of enforcing child abuse laws against parents. The common thread running through all their writings and motivating their critical stance is that the system massively, without legitimate grounds, intervenes into innocent families. The vagueness of what child maltreatment is under the laws and the ease of making reports under them is what has stimulated this. The writers surveyed point to different solutions for this overreaching of the child protective system.