I think you are missing an important class difference here, namely that the upper and middle classes have a much wider arsenal of sanction to to control their underlings - so they do not have to resort to physical violence. Consider a middle class teen with all his/her expensive gadgets making up his/her social status - clothing, electronic equipment, cars, etc. everything courtesy of his/her parental income. Compare that to a working class teen who often has to work not just to buy gadgets, but to contribute to the meager family budget. It is clear that middle class parents have a wide variety of means to control their children behavior - by gradual scaling down of privileged and allowances - before they have to resort to more radical forms, such as physicial coercion. A working class parent simply do not have those means - his/her only choice is to either relinquish control of his/her own child - which often goes against his/her core values, or restore that control through the only means available to him or her, namely physical coercion.
I think you are missing an important point when you equate the hidden perverted violenece under the cover of middle class respectability and the stern and often harsh - but overt- discipline often exercised in working class families. There is nothing wrong with a working class parent physically punishing his/her child for disrespect, but there is everything wrong with a middle class dad endowing his child with all the gadgets money can buy and then secretly beating him/her for disobedience. However, the helping professions - with their middle class bias against the perceived "social conservatism" of the working class that rejects the "anything goes" moral relativism - often miss that important distinction and are more likely to go after the "brute" working class parent than the "respectable" middle class one.
Another point - what makes you think that I am denying the existence of rape and other forms of violence against children in middle class families and elsewhere? I said time and again that in most cases investigated by the child abuse prevention authorities the complaints are justified. My critique was directed at two things:
1. the notion of adolescence or "teenagehood" which is a thinly veiled reverence for idle, responsibility-free, and centered around conspicuous consumption life styles in affluent societies such as the US (as Yoshie aptly pointed out, most less afluent societies or social groups cannot afford such a life style); and
2. the notion of "child rights" and "child protection" used to persecute the parents - it is an old conservative trick to hide their discipline-and-punish mentality under the guise of benevolence and protection of the innocents; you do not need "child protection" laws to punish for obvious cases of abuse (the criminal code will suffice), you need them only to punish parents for their perceived "immorality" which supposedly threatens the children.
wojtek