Child and Adolescent Social Work Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 1986

R e s e a r c h R e v i e w s

C H I L D A B U S E A C O M M U N I T Y C O N C E R N . K i m Oates , Edi tor . N e w York: B r u n n e r / M a z e l Inc. , 1982. 321 pages . $25.00.

Child Abuse A Community Concern by Kim Oates (ed.) is a compilation of articles which explore research findings and their implications for prenatal through post- na ta l hospital programs as well as prevention and intervention strategies in the form of programatic and community responses. This volume is an excellent re- source for social workers and other helping professionals engaged in services to children and their families.

There are twenty-six articles written by authors representing a vast array of disciplines. This reflects the fact that child abuse, as a socia~ problem, has become a concern to professionals dealing with every facet of the biopsychosocial con- t inuum.

Specifically, nine articles explore the role of hospitals and medical personnel in the prevention and t rea tment of child abuse. Of particular note is "Hospital Prac- tices That Strengthen Parent-Infant Attachment" by Solby, English, & Murray. It explores the critical role hospitals can play in setting the stage for positive par- enting, for identifying high risk families and in providing a preventive approach.

Five articles consider nonmedical programmatic responses to child abuse. Giaretto describes a comprehensive approach to the t reatment of child sexual abuse. Carter 's article on family day care centers explores what is often a missing component in many contemporary programs.

A community perspective is explored by three articles dealing with violence, a media campaign, and an overview of the various community responses to the problem.

A significant article by Korbin discusses cross cultural aspects of child rearing and its implications for identifying abusive patterns. A second article related to cross cultural issues explores arriving at international action on child abuse.

This book has a number of strenghts. It presents an excellent overview of ap- proaches to the prevention, identification, and the t reatment of child abuse. Em- pirical research is well integrated and forms a basis for many of the conclusions arrived at by the authors. There is an interdisciplinary presentation, increasing the relevance of the volume for a variety of disciplines.

The major l imitation is in the areas of theory development and clinical practice. There is an absence of an a t tempt to integrate knowledge of child abuse with cur- rent theories of human behavior, or to evolve practice principles that would be helpful in working with this population.

Steven Clark, Ph.D. University of California Irvine Medical Center Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Orange, California

196 �9 1986 Human Sciences Press

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T H E C H I L D ' S C O N S T R U C T I O N O F S O C I A L I N E Q U A L I T Y , Rob- er t Leahy~ Editor. New York: Academic Press, 1983 .349 pp., $35.00

A background in Piagetian concepts of cognitive development and a willingness to plug through and make sense of often conflicting information are suggested prerequisites for approaching this very packed book. This book provides few un- ambiguous threads with which to grasp onto in trying to understand how children do in fact construe the many facets of social inequality. However the book reflects both the complexity inherent in the subject matter itself as well as the inevitable uncertainty in a field that only relatively recently has received much concen- trated attention. Though it is unlikely to send most readers away with any con- clusions cast in cement, it will send them away with an enormous amount to think about in an area deserving of an enormous amount of thought.

The book is an edited compilation of chapters contributed by different authors, most of whom approach their subject matter primarily from a cognitive develop- mental point of view. Each examines a different area related to children's under- standing of social inequality. Most look at the literature, past research and state of the art ideas, their own included, that pertain to their designated area and then go on to explain their own research~ The content area of the book is quite broad and its variation is a major contribution of the book. Included are how children see friendship and its obligations, what and whom they define as deviant, what characteristics kids at different ages use in alluding to class, what explains the ex- istence of class and how children view that as influencing their own and others' lives, whom children are more likely to assist when a need is recognized, when race and gender become meaningful categories and how those categories do or do not change over the course of development, and how children perceive the role of social institutions in the promotion of human rights. The list is much longer. One theme that runs through many of the topic areas has to do with the ability of chil- dren to comprehend equity as opposed to equality and whether or not equity is an advanced form of thinking in terms of social unequality.

Because the subject matter is covered in so many different ways and the re- search findings so varied, the connections between the different content areas are often illusive. The most fundamental claim of the book however is clear. It is as follows: although culture and social learning impact heavily on how children un- derstand and act on concepts of social inequality, perhaps more fundamental are the child's developmental cognitive abilities which organize the social cultural experiences. There are what is called "cognitive prerequisites" that serve as the. tools which expand and transform perception from one age to another. This un- derlying cognitive structure determines what is possible. For example, because of cognitive capacities, children under six classify people most readily according to concretely manifested characteristics and easily discernable clues. Consequently, it is logical that differences in race and gender have meaning to young children before categories such as religion and class. Some categories are simply more ac- cessible to children than others. Research also indicates that for pre-schoolers, al- though race is accounted for, race is much less important than the categories of gender, cleanliness, and physical attractiveness. Much of that is attributed to cog- nitive givens, although culture and socialization are also held to be important. It is encouraging to think that pre-schoolers are still very open in terms of ideas about race and that societal and even familial prejudices are at that point still weak. Less encouraging however is the research that suggests that once a racial

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idea is formed, it changes very little over the course of a child's development and content in terms of race, usually remains quite primitive in form. This latter ex- ample of course, says much more about culture and socialization than it does about inherent cognitive capacities.

Since most of the chapters conclusions are dependent upon research, there is much attention given to both the strengths and weaknesses of both conceptual framework and methdologies of the many different studies. One can learn as much about the health of cognitive developmental research as one can about chil- dren's conceptions of social inequality. The education is a very useful one.

Much of the research in this area is weakened by its lack of a strong cross cul- tural component, a weakness recognized by the book's editor. This lack leaves vulnerable to attack the book's major though tentative claim, which is that cogni- tive development may be more central to the child's view of social unequality than either culture or social learning. Without more cross cultural studies, it be- comes next to impossible to sort out what unfolding cognitive development ac- counts for and what experience accounts for, since there is no proof of a constant variable.

An integration with theories and findings of other developmental approaches would deepen the level of understanding about children's views of social inequal- ity. In many instances, it would alter the rather puzzling conclusions drawn from some of the research findings. There was, for example, an exceptionally interest- ing study done on the cognitive prerequisites necessary for children and adoles- cents to recognize parental defense mechanisms. There was a hint of a suggestion, though perhaps misunderstood on my part, that there were cognitive prerequi- sites for having particular defense mechanisms. If one accepted this idea as pre- sented one would have to conclude that projection wasn't possible until the onset of formal operations, a most complex cognitive transformation, in adolescence. That flies in the face of powerful clinical and even common sense observations that see projection as one of the earliest and most pervasive defense mechanisms.

The study does make a contribution in pointing out that until the advent of for- mal operations a child cannot understand or identify a parental projection. The value and impact of this finding is obscured by the cognitive developmental inter- pretation of it because the ideas about development lack a fuller context. The in- terpretation offered is that there is a mismatch between a parent who projects a great deal and a child who doesn't yet have formal operations. The result of the mismatch is minimal because the parental defense goes right over the child's head and therefore has little impact. There is an enormous difference between be- ing able, however, to cognitively sort out the origins and mechanisms of a defense and between being immune to it. Clinical listening and psychoanalytic develop- mental theory point to the profound impact a parents' projection has on a young child. All too often it becomes part of the core sense of self that the child organizes around. The parental projection becomes the child's reality or at best confuses ter- ribly the child's struggle to achieve a self reality. The above mentioned example serves as an invitation for cognitive developmentalists to integrate their findings across more theoretical boundaries as richer context can be found in providing meaning to their findings. The invitation to strive for more integration does not fall however more heavily on the cognitive developmentalists than on any other developmental orientation.

In spite of these criticisms, the book should be seen as making an honest and useful start at both thinking about how to look at this crucial area as well as in

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doing some of the work of looking at ito Many of its findings are startling~ at least for anyone who cherishes the fond notion that we live in a society relatively com- mitted to social awareness and social justice. Consider the following! One of the few cross cultural studies included, looked at 300,000 male and female respon- dents from ages 6 to 17. This 1975 study asked of these children, from the United States, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, if they thought women should take part in government as men do. Half the respondents said yes (and so of course another 50 percent said no.) In the United States how- ever only 27% held the view that women should participate on an equal basis with men. Another study looked at children's perception of social class at different ages. The subjects varied according to both class and race. Of the high school stu- dents included 97c~, though believing that society did not provide equal access to opportunity, believed they personally had as good or better chance to rise in the world than most people. Several studies showed that a majority of adolescents thought people were poor because of personal or psychological characteristics and people were wealthy for similar reasons. An exception to this view were a cohort of black teenagers as well as lower class whites both of whom were more "socio- centric" in their explanations of society. Less encouraging, however, is the fact that they were in a minority of both the black and/or lower class students.

Though the cognitive developmental point of view stressed that a child's ideas about social inequality come about through the interaction of cognitive abilities with social learning and cultural experience, the former is emphasized over the latter. Many of the findings however leave more questions unanswered than an- swered and beg for more work to be done on the contributions of race, gender, so- cioeconomic position, and culture. Social work with its multi-dimensional view of the individual and society should greet these unanswered questions as a chal- lenge. This book is an excellent beginning.

Susan Donner Smith College School for Social Work Northampton, MA