Recession Tied to Rise in Child Abuse Injuries

This tells us nothing we don’t already know: Recession increases stress, stress is a risk factor for all forms of child maltreatment. By far the biggest impact of recession on “child abuse” is that more people don’t have adequate food, clothing and shelter. That poverty is then confused with “neglect” and more children are torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care. For details, see my organization’s Blog for the trade journal Youth Today, available here: http://t.co/lrZaWYN

In contrast, the kind of maltreatment described in this study remains extremely rare.

This study covered a five-and-a-half year period in an area with a total population well over a million. Over that long time in that large area they found an average of 78 cases of abusive head trauma per year, of which an average of 13 were fatal.

Each of these was the worst imaginable tragedy. But precisely because the raw numbers are so low, it would take a relatively small number of additional cases per year in each of the three jurisdictions to create what appears to be a large percentage increase.

Both before and after the recession, each of these terrible tragedies was a needle in a very large haystack. The danger in hyping such studies is that they encourage efforts to try to find the needles by vacuuming up the haystack. (And sure enough, instead of urging help with poverty, in another story the authors urge more “vigilance” – which translates into overloading child protective services with even more false reports while needlessly traumatizing children in even more families and throwing more children needlessly into foster care). That never works.

To the extent that there is any real lesson here it is that the best way to prevent *any* form of child maltreatment is to ameliorate the worst hardships of poverty. So that raises a question: I wonder how many rent subsidies or day care subsidies for impoverished families could have been purchased for the amount expended in staff time and other expenses producing one more study telling us what we already know?

Richard Wexler

Executive Director

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

www.nccpr.org

Richard Wexler of VA 7:06PM September 19, 2011