Poor families had yet to experience the surveillance of child protection workers. There was no family court, and the Administration for Children’s Services had yet to be created. “If there was an ACS case, we would have had one,” Margo later told me. The term “child abuse” had surfaced in the 1960s, after Dr. C. Henry Kempe, a Colorado-based pediatrician, launched a study of unexplained injuries among hospitalized children. The resulting paper he co-published, titled “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” sparked a national outcry, leading to mandatory child abuse reporting laws and federal funding
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