Abandonment, Infanticide, and Filicide

Violence to children has always existed and is one of the most intractable aspects of human behavior. Man has no aversion to child abandonment, infanticide, and filicide; nor has man hesitated to injure, cripple, strangle, smother, beat, overlay, burn, starve, drown, expose, enslave, poison, bury alive, bomb, and gas defenseless children, or to expose them to gene-altering Agent Orange, the deep, body-burning and deforming white phosphorus and napalm, and the horrible effects of atomic bombs. 2-8 This unending story through all the stages and structures of society from the primitive times to the 20th century, the motivations and forms of inhumanity to children, and some remedial measures are discussed herein. Primitive man possessed little knowledge or skills and suffered severe handicaps in the struggle for subsistence. He lived as a nomadic hunter-gatherer, searching for food everywhere; and when children became an encumbrance to his essential migratory habits, they were abandoned to