St. Francis College welcomed Dr. Mical Raz on November 28, 2017 for the talk, Making Child Abuse White? Parents Anonymous, Physicians and Child Abuse Policy in the 1970s.

(Watch Mical Raz on Child Abuse)

Dr. Raz, MD, PhD, completed her medical training at Tel Aviv University, where she also received a Ph.D. in History of Medicine. She's worked at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. She is the author Psychosurgery (U of Rochester 2013) and What's Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (UNC 2013). A historian of American psychiatry, Raz is interested in the intersection of psychiatry, poverty and politics. Broadly, her new work focuses on how perceptions of mental health shaped child welfare services provided in the city of Philadelphia in the 1960s and early 1970s; she is interested in the history of child abuse laws in the mid-1960s, and their implication for treatment and prevention. She examines how child abuse came to be perceived as an individual problem rooted in the abuser's psychopathology, rather than a broader social problem. She hopes to use her historical research to help inform current child welfare policy.

The talk was organized by Professors Athena Devlin & Emily Horowitz for their Fall 2017 Lecture Series: Perspectives on American Politics & Policies.