Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Historical Context

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Historical Context

Child Abuse in America

Although Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant traces the evolution of the fictional Tull family from roughly 1925 to 1979, its theme of child abuse is particularly relevant to the 1980s, the decade in which the novel was published. The first national studies to determine the prevalence of child abuse were conducted in 1974, five years later, the federal Child abuse Prevention and Treatment Act mandated periodic National Incidence Reports. By 1984-two years after Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was released-the American Humane Association (AHA) claimed that there were roughly 1.7 million abused or neglected children in the United States. The 1988 Study of National Incidence and Prevalence of Child abuse and Neglect arrived at a total of 1.5 million abused or neglected children, and their report broke down the statistics into three categories of abuse-physical, sexual, and emotional. The report also found that more than one thousand children died as...
(read more)