The champions of the juvenile court thought it would help mistreated children, not just reform those who bad behavior demanded gently corrective treatment. However, a new system of children's justice was not the only reform Progressives proposed to combat child abuse. As the century began, tens of thousands of “anticruelists” searched city neighborhoods for evidence of child abuse.

The results of their investigations riveted a public that opened newly fat daily newspapers to read the terrible details of a particularly heinous assault: a toddler impaled to a table with a heavy serving fork; a baby mutilated by over five hundred human bite marks; an infant plunged into a tub of boiling water. Then for about forty years, between 1925 and 1962, child abuse disappeared as a burning public policy topic, only to reemerge as an enduring late-twentieth-century political controversy.

Perpetual disagreement confused efforts to assess the extent and impact of child abuse. Some experts claimed that more than three million children a year suffered abuse, while others countered that the real number was closer to six thousand. Some thought that U.S. prisons teemed with criminals who had been intentionally injured when young. Others weren't so sure. Warnings echoed that battering killed more of the country's children than did infectious disease and that the United States led all other developed nations in the number of infants who died at the hands of their parents. However, no one came close to providing statistics that definitively proved these claims.