“How many people in your country support smacking?” keynote speaker Michael Freeman asked us at last week's International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) conference in Hong Kong.

Even more interesting than the answer was the sample. “Did you include children when you thought about people’s attitudes?” he went on to inquire. I’m ashamed to say that I did not.

Children were, apparently, human becom-ings not be-ings, he added.

Quite a number of speakers shook up my assumptions and, when they settled again, subtle reconfigurations emerged.

For example, I was among those who took it for granted that the vulnerability of children decreased as they grew up. But James Garbarino usefully pointed out how mid-childhood could be a particularly risky time. Older children would no longer be comforted by the protective strategies of care-givers – telling all those stories to mask the cruelty of the world – but nor were they yet expert at protecting themselves.

Genetic differences really did play a role, according to many. Richard Krugman went too far for me when he extrapolated findings about genetically-impaired, neglectful mother mice to human beings; but the insight of those who spoke about how brain development predisposed responses to trauma and even differed for girls and boys was highly illuminating. Perhaps it’s time that we social scientists (and for an anthropologist like me this is difficult) grappled with the taboo of biology.

In terms of practice, I was intrigued by the stories of failure fr