Child abuse has received much publicity in the press, captured the interest of the public, and stimulated politicians to respond with much new legislation. Improved and expanded reporting gives the impression of a growing crisis and medical and scientific resources have been marshalled to deal with the problem. A symposium was organized for the 1981 meeting of The American Society of Primatologists to demonstrate the contributions that primatologists could make and this book is a report of that symposium.
The problem of definition is crucial here and James Rogers begins the first chapter by providing clinical and legal definitions, but acknowledges the inherent difficulties in definitions which rely on value judgments. Problems with boundary areas are indicated when spanking and slapping are considered to be violent behavior indicative of abuse, thereby making 90% of American families child abusers. If malnutrition is considered to be evidence of neglect then many poverty-stricken families, especially in Third World countries, would fall in the abuser category. Even infanticide, the deliberate killing of neonates, whether as a means of family planning or otherwise, is not easily classified as child abuse or not.
Rogers' perspective is an excellent summary of the clinician's view of human child abuse and the chapters that follow use the human data to argue for the applicability of a nonhuman primate model. The definitional problems are not easily overcome and the concept seems to grow fuzzier from chapter to chapter. Nancy Caine and Martin Reite, and Steven Schapiro and Gary Mitchell, do retrospective searches of primate center veterinary records to argue that nonhuman primate mothers abuse and neglect their infants in ways similar to those reported in the human clinical literature. The application of correlational techniques to such clinical records quickly reveals major shortcomings. Injured infants may have been injured by their mothers or by other cagemates and one cannot call all instances where a female failed to or was unable to protect her infant an instance of child abuse. The correlation of maternal and infant injuries certainly does not allow one to conclude that injured females are more likely to abuse their infants. The lack of data on the frequency of first-borns in the population and females of each age makes percentage of incidence of infant injuries in these categories impossible to evaluate.
Stephen Suomi and Chris Ripp, in contrast, report on the long and carefully documented histories of colony-born mothers and motherless mothers at Wisconsin. In fact, these data are cited repeatedly in other chapters and the studies of the maternal behavior of motherless mothers are the strongest data cited in this book concerning infant abuse in nonhuman primates. Suomi and Ripp emphasize the success of recent 0 1984 Alan A. Liss, Inc.