Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Nonaccidental physical injuries children suffer at the hands of their parents occur along a continuum that ranges from mild to severe. At the outer edges of this continuum, one might find, on the one hand, a slight swat to the buttocks, and on the other, a brutal beating.
The integrity of the distinction and of the methodology employed to make it is also critical for a society that is prominently committed to both family autonomy and child welfare, and in particular to protecting the integrity of the family when it promotes or at least does not harm child welfare, and to intervening in the family when it fails in its related obligations. That administrative regulations and policies promulgated by state and local CPS departments often narrow agency discretion helps CPS itself to be more consistent and may help families know what to expect when they are dealing with CPS.
Moreover, to the extent that the law in statutes and judicial opinions is either less precise or even different from the law as it is applied by CPS, the public and parents are inevitably confused or misled. As a result, decisionmaking about whether an injury or incident remains in the realm of family business or has crossed the line into the impermissible varies, reflecting a multiplicity of purely personal viewpoints, religious and political ideologies, and academic or disciplinary training and requirements.
In turn, institutional treatment of and outcomes for children and families are often inconsistent. The status quo has been defended or at least explained on several grounds. The vagueness of abuse definitions has been consistently upheld on policy groundsโspecifically on the argument that it is important for authorities to retain flexibility to call injuries as they see them given that, particularly in a diverse society, abuse might appear in unexpected forms. This difficulty stems both from the relatively mundane problem of how textually to craft the definitions so that they capture all and only what we want them to capture, and from the related but infinitely more complex problem of how to resolve the ideological tensions at play in this area.
Each of these explanations has merit. First, we do not want to be left with definitions so fine that they disallow necessary protective interventions based in different nonnormative or unprecedented and harmful parenting practices. It is especially tricky to do so in an ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse setting like the United States, particularly when the context relates to the intersection of intimate family matters and the relationship of the state to the family.
