Child abuse facts

Most of us can’t imagine what would make an adult use violence against a child, and the worse the behavior is, the more unimaginable it seems. But the incidence of parents and other caregivers consciously, even willfully, committing acts that harm the very children they’re supposed to be nurturing is a sad fact of human society that cuts across all lines of ethnicity and class. Whether the abuse is rooted in the perpetrator’s mental illness, substance abuse, or inability to cope, the psychological result for each abused child is often the same: deep emotional scars and a feeling of worthlessness.

In the United States, the federal legislation that sets minimum standards for how states handle child abuse defines child abuse and neglect as “any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation, or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.” In 2005, the most recent year for which the U.S. government has figures, 12.1 of every 1,000 American children, almost 900,000 in all, suffered abuse by adults, with parents of victims accounting for almost 80 percent of the abusers. Every day, about four children die in the U.S. because of abuse or neglect, most of them babies or toddlers. And those are just the cases authorities know about: for every incidence of child abuse or neglect that gets reported, it’s estimated that two others go unreported.

There are four primary types of child abuse:

1. physical abuse
2. sexual abuse
3. emotional abuse
4. neglect

While the first two categories get the most attention, perhaps because they involve physical violence, neglect is far and away the most common form of child abuse, accounting for more than 60 percent of all cases of child maltreatment.

Child neglect: types and warning signs

Neglect is a pattern of failing to provide for a child’s basic needs, to the extent that the child’s physical and/or psychological well-being are damaged or endangered. In child neglect, the parents or caregivers are simply choosing not to do their job. There are three basic types of neglect.

Physical Neglect	Failure to provide adequate food, clothing, or hygiene Reckless disregard for the child’s safety, such as inattention to hazards in the home, drunk driving with kids in the car, leaving a baby unattended Refusal to provide or delay in providing necessary health care for the child Abandoning children without providing for their care or expelling children from the home without arranging for their care
Educational Neglect	Failure to enroll a child in school Permitting or causing a child to miss too many days of school Refusal to follow up on obtaining services for a child’s special educational needs
Emotional Neglect	Inadequate nurturing or affection Exposure of the child to spousal abuse Permitting a child to drink alcohol or use recreational drugs Failure to intervene when the child demonstrates antisocial behavior Refusal of or delay in providing necessary psychological care

Some signs of child neglect:

• Clothes that are dirty, ill-fitting, ragged, and/or not suitable for the weather
• Unwashed appearance; offensive body odor
• Indicators of hunger: asking for or stealing food, going through trash for food, eating too fast or too much when food is provided for a group
• Apparent lack of supervision: wandering alone, home alone, left in a car
• Colds, fevers, or rashes left untreated; infected cuts; chronic tiredness
• In schoolchildren, frequent absence or lateness; troublesome, disruptive behavior or its opposite, withdrawal
• In babies, failure to thrive; failure to relate to other people or to surroundings

A single occurrence of one of these indicators isn’t necessarily a sign of child neglect, but a pattern of behaviors may demonstrate a lack of care that constitutes abuse.

Physical child abuse: types and warning signs

Physical child abuse is an adult’s physical act of aggression directed at a child that causes injury, even if the adult didn’t intend to injure the child. Such acts of aggression include striking a child with the hand, fist, or foot or with an object; burning the child with a hot object; shaking, pushing, or throwing a child; pinching or biting the child; pulling a child by the hair; cutting off a child’s air. Such acts of physical aggression account for between 15 and 20 percent of documented child abuse cases each year.

Many physically abusive parents and caregivers insist that their actions are simply forms of discipline, ways to make children learn to behave. But there’s a big difference between giving an unmanageable child a swat on the backside and twisting the child’s arm until it breaks. Physically abusive parents have issues of anger, excessive need for control, or immaturity that make them unable or unwilling to see their level of aggression as inappropriate.

Sometimes the very youngest children, even babies not yet born, suffer physical abuse. Because many chemicals pass easily from a pregnant woman’s system to that of a fetus, a mother’s use of drugs or alcohol during pregnancy can cause serious neurological and physiological damage to the unborn child, such as the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome; mothers can also pass on drugs or alcohol in breast milk. A woman who drinks or uses drugs when she knows she’s pregnant can be charged with child abuse in many jurisdictions if her baby is born with problems because of the substance use.

Another form of child abuse involving babies is shaken baby syndrome, in which a frustrated caregiver shakes a baby roughly to make the baby stop crying. The baby’s neck muscles can’t support the baby’s head yet, and the brain bounces around inside its skull, suffering damage that often leads to severe neurological problems and even death. While the person shaking the baby may not mean to hurt him, shaking a baby in a way that can cause injury is a form of child abuse.

An odd form of physical child abuse is Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, in which a parent causes a child to become ill and rushes the chlld to the hospital or convinces doctors that the child is sick. It’s a way for the parent to gain attention and sympathy, and its dangers to the child constitute child abuse.