"This society" is going to put this woman in jail for the rest of her life.
In a former generation, she might not even be prosecuted.
"This society" is rightly telling parents they can't treat their children like dirt.
Who knows what all went on? My mother-in-law was raised on a farm in Nebraska. Her older brother, at age 10, was kicked in the head by a mule and then developed epilypsy. His father despised him as a weakling and used to beat the daylights out of him until the mother finally stepped in. She hauled out a shotgun and said that if he ever hit that boy again she'd kill him. The old bastard never did hit him again. Things were so bad though, in those Depression days, that my mother-in-law ran away at 14, like her two older brothers before her. Her older sister and mother stayed and were finally taken away to a county mental asylum where they stayed for the rest of their lives.
Meaning, all kinds of things go on and this is no different, we just hear about it know.