Abstract
After the Cradle Falls: What Child Abuse Is, How We Respond to It, and What You Can Do about It is a comprehensive look at child abuse and neglect in America. It thoroughly covers the history of the phenomenon in the United States with good definitional chapters on physical abuse, forms of neglect, sexual abuse, domestic violence dilemmas, and child protection organizational structures. Additionally, the book weaves in pertinent references from current and historical popular culture in the form of songs and fairy tales that highlight the abuse of children. Most fascinating is a lengthy introductory chapter by a Chinese scholar on multiple forms of child maltreatment in China. The latter two features, references from popular culture and the information about child abuse and neglect in China, help to alleviate the otherwise dense and tedious qualities of this volume.
It is unclear to these reviewers as to the intended audience for this book. Seasoned workers are unlikely to read this volume cover to cover as so much of it would be known to them already. As a textbook, it would be excellent if the focus of an entire semester course were solely to study child abuse. It rarely is.
This volume would be a good reference text for a course on child welfare in general. Indeed, 24% of the pages in the book are references embedded in the book itself. And the eight pages of index should satisfy any student-researcher doing a paper on the topic of child maltreatment.
