I Was a Child Abuser!: What We Read When We Read About Child Abuse

This article studies the past 2 decades of mainstream magazine coverage of child abuse in American magazines, connects it to a broader historical and social context, and theorizes that analyzing these stories is a useful way to understand the causes and consequences of the historic and persistent hysteria and irrationality about this issue. The first part of this article describes how child protection efforts emerge from the telling of sensational stories about abused children and abusive adults, transmitted in ways that support American cultural beliefs about individual responsibility for personal behavior and economic circumstances. This second part examines how this narrative persists in high-circulation, popular magazines, by examining the content and frequency of stories about child abuse during the past 2 decades. This article seeks to show how such a narrative regarding the behaviors of evil and immoral people creates and maintains misguided and ineffective approach to child protection, in the structural realms of American social welfare, criminal, and legislative policies and also influences adult and child interaction at the individual level.