Revisiting the past uncovers scars of child abuse

It is hard to think of a local incident over the past decade that has saddened and angered more people than the senseless death of 3-year-old Marcus Feisel. How could someone responsible for this child bind him up in a blanket, lock him in a closet and leave for three days? Against the backdrop of all the other news stories about relatives, clergy and teachers sexually abusing children, certainly American society has reached a historic moral low. If that was true, we would just have to find our way back to a morally superior time, but it is not. In the early 1990s I worked with the Children's Home of Cincinnati to write its history, "One Child at a Time." Fortunately, earlier leaders of the home had donated its records to the Cincinnati Historical Society Library. In addition to the usual board minutes and directors' letters, the records contained hundreds of individual case histories, a gold mine for a social historian.

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