Alan Dettlaff
speaker
269 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Alan Dettlaff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So much so that in some states laws were passed to prevent children from being separated from their parents because enslavers were trying to quell some of the outrage about this practice.
And then I tell a story in my book about Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was the second most widely sold book of the 1800s, second to just the Bible, that featured stories of family separation.
One story in particular of a baby who was going to be sold away from
his mother, the main protagonist of the novel, Eliza.
And that story captured people's attention so much that it's said that when Abraham Lincoln first met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, that he said to her, so you're the little lady who's responsible for this great war.
That's how much impact these stories of family separation had
on the abolition movement and then ultimately the start of the Civil War.
yeah so as you mentioned the better child syndrome was published in 1962 and really for the first time brought the issue of child abuse to the national public's attention and it got an incredible amount of attention on nightly news and the saturday evening post and there were billboards about protecting children from abuse and it really led to what people at the time called the child abuse panic
Whereas before, there was just not a lot of recognition that children could be severely harmed like that by their parents.
And as you said, the Better Child Syndrome talked about very severe abuse, multiple broken bones, head injuries, things like that.
These children showing up at the hospital and it being determined that it was their parents who were responsible for these injuries.
Prior to that, even the concept of child welfare didn't exist.
Prior to the 1960s, child welfare was really a pension.
for widowed mothers or mothers who were unable to enter the workforce for other reasons so that they could stay at home and raise their children.
So there was no child abuse investigation syndrome.
What the Better Child Syndrome paper did was launch the concept of mandatory reporting laws.
So prior to 1962, there were no mandatory reporting laws in the country.
The year following it, the US Children's Bureau, which is the federal agency that oversees children's welfare, put out model statutes for states to develop.
By 1968, it went from zero states having a mandatory reporting law to 50 states having a mandatory reporting law.
Prior to the Better Child Syndrome, there were about 500 or 600 cases of severe child abuse that had been reported to law enforcement.
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