Children

Child Maltreatment

There are around there million official reports of child maltreatment each year in the United States, which bring many children into the legal system. Social scientists have investigated a number of issues relevant to child victimization, many of them controversial. Even defining child abuse is complex and variable across time, political milieu, culture, and country. Nonetheless, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional or psychological abuse, and neglect are widely accepted categories of maltreatment. Psychologists have researched the characteristics, etiology, outcomes, and treatments for each of these forms of child maltreatment. For example, there are a variety of motivations for maltreatment perpetrated by parents, including ignorance of appropriate parenting methods, poor anger management skills, and financial inability to provide food, clothing, shelter, or medical care. Understanding such motivations is the first step in understanding how to rehabilitate abusive parents.

Psychologists are particularly interested in identifying effective methods to prevent child maltreatment before it happens. One approach is to identify characteristics of both at-risk perpetrators and victims so that one can target preventions appropriately. For example, researchers have found that parents most at risk for mistreating their children are often distressed themselves, have a lack of social support, are unable to empathize with their children, and have unrealistic expectations of children's developmental capabilities and behavior. One can use assessment tools to screen caretakers for these risk factors so that they can be directed into parenting programs. Another approach in investigating prevention methods is to test the effectiveness of laws devised to protect children from maltreatment. For example, mandated reporting laws require many professionals who work with children in the United States to report signs of child maltreatment to authorities. Researchers have found that not all people consider the same acts to be abusive and that reporting tendencies are influenced by factors such as perpetrator gender, abuse setting, and abuse severity. Thus, although research suggests that such laws are effective in decreasing child maltreatment nationwide, these laws might not be successful in helping all children equally.

Other laws aimed at prevention include sex offender registration and community notification laws, which require perpetrators of sexual abuse, after they have finished serving their prison sentences, to register publicly as sex offenders everywhere they subsequently live. These laws are controversial because of civil rights issues, and there is no solid evidence that they really reduce child maltreatment. Other prevention programs and policies include widespread child-abuse awareness programs in school systems. Although such programs may increase children's knowledge about sexual abuse, there is little evidence that they decrease victimizations.

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