Battered Child Syndrome

The battered child syndrome was the name given in 1962 to a clinical condition in young children who have suffered serious, repeated physical abuse, and its publication is the point at which the medical profession began to treat child abuse as a diagnosable problem. The paper appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association under the byline of C. Henry Kempe and colleagues at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, who drew on a survey of seventy-one hospitals reporting hundreds of suspected cases in a single year. They described fractures, subdural bleeding, swelling, bruising and failure to thrive, often in children under three, and a history that did not match the injuries. Earlier physicians, from Ambroise Tardieu in 1860 to radiologists in the 1950s, had noted such injuries, but the 1962 paper gave the pattern a name and a duty to report. Mandatory reporting laws, hospital child protection teams and later the Kempe Center followed from it.