Indiana University historian Michael Grossberg has been awardedprestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and theAmerican Council of Learned Societies to complete his book, SavingOur Kids: Child Protection in America . The book examineschild protection from the 1870s to the present, chronicling publicand private efforts to protect children from a variety of threatsto their well-being: physical and sexual abuse, obscenity, labor, sexuality, disability, and delinquency.
None of these concerns were new in the 1870s, but efforts toaddress them were transformed throughout Western Europe and NorthAmerica during that time, according to Grossberg. In the UnitedStates, child protection became part of an emerging welfare statethat created new forms of family policing while retaining a fundamentalambivalence about the legitimacy and effectiveness of publicauthority and a fundamental faith in family autonomy.
The approach to child protection created in the 19th centuryhas lasted, with modifications, into the 21st century. AmberAlerts, Meagan's Laws, and the various federal communicationdecency acts are but the latest examples. So are the persistentdisagreements about the nature and even the legitimacy of children'srights that routinely surface in struggles over such policies.The history of child protection shows how problems of privatelife, such as childrearing, become matters of intense publicdebate and struggle.
In his book, Grossberg examines the creation of child protectionin the late 19th century and describes its expansion to includerisks from labor to disability. He also investigates the rediscoveryof child abuse in the post-World War II era and the subsequentrevival of child protection; the construction of a refashionedchildren's rights approach to child protection in the 1960s and1970s; and finally the recent reconstitution of child protectionamidst fears of family crisis and concerns about kidnapping,sexual abuse, pornography, and other threats.
The book combines critical events in the history of child protectionwith children's own experiences and words, such as the rights claimsof striking newsboys in early 20th century New York City andthose of disabled children in the 1980s. Grossberg notes thatthe book's primary goal is to explain why various child protectioncampaigns succeeded in making the fate of children a centralconcern of American society and protection the primary meansof expressing that concern.
Grossberg demonstrates why these child protection policies havecontained a fundamental and unresolved tension between protectingchildren from society and protecting society from children. Childprotection has been dominated by idealized notions of childhoodwith real consequences for children's lives, he observes, andthe distinction between being a child and being an adult hasbecome more and more important in American society.
Grossberg, also editor of the American Historical Review ,says the interplay of public and private authority, the powerof sensational media stories and the social movements they sparked,and the impact of gender and racial beliefs on policymakers makethe history of child protection a compelling means of examiningthe construction of public life in the United States.
