Landmarks in Child Abuse Prevention and Recovery
Includes both postive occurances and backlashes or negative events concerning awareness of child abuse and it's consequences.
Excerpted from "Abuse and Memory" by Dr. Charles Whitfield
(edited and reorganized for this format)

Children were seen and treated as property for centuries

1866 Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founded

1874 Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children founded

1896 Freud and Janet believe their patients histories of abuse and the patients condition improve

1897 Negative: Freud's retraction of this theory due to external and his own internal intrapsychic pressure:he says"They made up the abuse."

20th Century Negative:The myth of "The Family" as always ideal and sacrosanct

1940's Early descriptions of the grieving process and of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

1940's Negative: Continued resistance to recognizing much of our pain as "stuck grief" from the trauma.

1946 Caffey reports x-ray film findings of physical trauma inflicted on children

1951-53 Silverman showed that this trauma was intentional

1962 Kempe et al describe the battered-child syndrome

20th Century Negative: Resistence to these reports of trauma and laws against child abuse has been ongoing, and persists in numerous groups and individuals even today.

1973 Laws against child abuse enacted

1977 First Adult Children of Alcohalic meetings are held

1977 to present Negative: Psychiatry, and to some extent other mental health professions, regress into a biological model to explain and treat human suffering.

1977-81 Information on Freud's retraction made public by several analysts

1978 Alice Miller begins demystifying mental and emotional child abuse. Numerous books follow and expand this demystification.

1983 Recovery movement expands. Many helping professionals enter their own program of recovery.

1984 Negative: Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL) formed

1985 Increasing presence of organizations (e.g. The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children ), information and education

1989 Negative: Anti-Recovery Movement backlash increases

1992 Negative: FMS Foundation begins

1994 American Coalition for Abuse Awareness established

A Pivotal Denial
Extracted from "Abuse and Memory" by Dr. Charles Whitfield
(slightly altered to create this shortened excerpt)

One of the most pivotal conflicts around denial of the truth in the history of child abuse happened at the end of the 19th century, when Sigmund Freud retracted his belief of the seduction-trauma theory. In the 1890's he had seen 18 adult patients who came to him with hysteria, and discovered that not only did they all have a history of having been sexually abused as children by their parents or other parent figures, but that when he listened to them and validated their experience, they imprvoved. His predeccessors and colleagues had treated such kinds of histories as though the patients were making them up-as a fantasy-and they were so shocked at hearing Freud's findings that they threatened and shamed him not to publish them.

But Freud did publish his findings as "The Aetiology of Hysteria", in which he said, "...at the bottom of every case of hyseteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood...Chirlren cannot find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they have been seduced previously. The foundation for a neurosis would accordingly always be laid in childhood by adults..." he concluded that "...we cure them of their hysteria by transforming their unconscious memories of the infantile scenes into conscious ones...hysterical symptoms are derivatives of memoires which are operating unconsciously."

Freud found that by carefully listening to his patients stories and validating their experience, they improved.

Under the influence of pressure from his colleagues, his best friend, and his own internal conflicts, a year later Freud retracted his belief that the trauma of the abuse caused the sypmtoms, and substitutied the oedipal therory. He wrote "I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up." It was almost a century later that several psychoanalysts made all of this information public.

From this early denial of the truth we have suffered the double trauma of the abuse itself and of countless psychoanalysts and other helpging professionals treating us as though we were making it all up. Not only were our experiences invalidated, but they blamed us (saying we had) desired to have sex with out abusers! Although ripples of this toxic legacy continue, over the last 15 (now 20) years increasing numbers of helping professionals now believe most of their patients' and client's stories and memories of having been abused. The majority of these abuse survivors who have persisted in their recoveries have shown a successful resolution of thieir symptioms and signs. A positive factor here is that many of these helping professionals also recognize that they themselves have been abused and are working to heal the effects.