Mical Raz, Abusive Policies

In Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way, Mical Raz debunks the pervasive idea that child abuse is a medical disorder and personal problem disconnected from poverty and race. Raz, a physician and a historian, details how these myths have created our disastrous child welfare system. In her first and most powerful chapter, Raz presents the strange history of Parent’s Anonymous, the self-help group for primarily white and middle-class women who self-identify as child abusers. Founded by the pseudonymous Jolly K. in the late 1960s, the organization ultimately gained national media attention that peaked when Jolly K. delivered testimony at the 1973 Child Abuse and Treatment Act (CAPTA) hearings organized by liberal Walter Mondale. The hearings on this landmark legislation, the first to explicitly address child abuse, is pivotal in understanding how child welfare policies never integrated the well-documented correlation between poverty and child abuse

Child abuse · Criminology · Environmental health · Legislation · Mythology · Poison control · Political science · Poverty · Psychiatry · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Welfare · Child Welfare and Adoption · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse · Medicine · Psychology · History · Law