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 “Children are the most victimized segment of the population,” said
study leader David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research
Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
“The full burden of this tends to be missed because many national
crime indicators either do not include the experience of all
children or don’t look at the big picture and include all the kinds
of violence to which children are exposed,” Finkelhor told Reuters
Health by email.
Compared to 2011, the violence rates appear to be stable, and
certain kinds of violence exposure may be decreasing, he said.
While the rates are not going up, “the problem is that there is
still way too much,” he said.
The National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence includes
phone interviews with contacts at a representative sample of U.S.
numbers in 2013 and 2014. Overall, researchers collected information
on 4,000 kids age 17 and younger.
If the child was between age 10 and 17, he or she was interviewed
over the phone. An adult caregiver answered questions for younger
children.
The interviewers asked about conventional crime, child maltreatment,
peer and sibling abuse, sexual assault, indirect exposure to
violence and witnessing violence to others, and Internet violence.
If the child had been exposed to any of these events over the
previous year, the interviewers also asked about who committed the
violence, weapons and injuries.
About 37 percent of kids had been physically assaulted over the
previous year, and almost 10 percent were injured as a result, the
researchers found. Two percent of girls had been sexually assaulted
or abused, including more than 4 percent of girls age 14 to 17.
About 15 percent had experienced maltreatment by a caregiver. Almost
6 percent had witnessed violence between their parents.
These numbers are similar to what’s been found in previous studies
in the U.S. and elsewhere, Dr. Andreas Jud of Lucerne University of
Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland told Reuters Health by
email. Jud was not part of the new study.
Most maltreatment incidents occur within the family, according to
John Fluke, a child welfare scholar-in-residence at the University
of Denver in Colorado.
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In the social service population and in his own study, neglect is
the predominant form of maltreatment, Fluke told Reuters Health by
email.
“This is really complex and what is needed is some considerable
effort to use surveillance data in targeted ways to help determine
what prevention and treatment approaches are most effective for
specific populations,” Fluke said.
The researchers called land lines as well as cellphone-only
households, but people are increasingly reluctant to participate in
surveys, which is a limitation of this kind of study, Finkelhor
said.
“Violence and abuse in childhood are big drivers behind many of our
most serious health and social problems,” he said. “They are
associated with later drug abuse, suicide, criminal behavior, mental
illness and chronic disease like diabetes.”
Parent education and support programs have been shown to prevent
family abuse, and school-based programs can reduce bullying while
dating violence prevention programs can help teens, Finkelhor said.
“The challenge is to get children and families access to these
programs and make such education more comprehensive and integrated
into the curriculum,” he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1adWrco JAMA Pediatrics, online June 29, 2015.
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