Violence against children

Abstract

In 1991 the new interdisciplinary field of Children’s Studies (Lenzer, 2001)1,2 was founded at The City University of NewYork. The field rested on the connected philosophical, methodological and empirical premises that children must be understood, represented and heard in their wholeness as human beings. It was not sufficient to have a conglomeration of disciplines focusing on different and often disparate aspects of children, ranging from child psychology, children’s literature, pedagogy and education, the sociology of children, the history of children to child protection or juvenile justice, medical science and the law. An aggregation of the findings from these disciplines, while perhaps multidisciplinary, does not offer the fullness of understanding we owe to children and young people. In light of the fragmentation of knowledge, a novel and interdisciplinary approach was seen as a new challenge and mandate for the world of scholars, reformers and policy makers.