Child Maltreatment

I would like to share a few things with you that I learned about child maltreatment recently, through classes and readings that I have done.

Firstly, I use the world "Child maltreatment" because it is a catch-all for various forms of abuse that include; sexual, neglect, etc...

Imagine that you have a young child who you are going to put into a day-care for the first time. As a new parent, you definitely have a lot of anxiety around leaving your young one with a group of relative strangers. But according to a lot of very well-gathered data, your child is more likely to be abused by you than by a stranger!!

Now, let me qualify that statement a little bit.  I'm not saying that we are all inadvertently abusing our children without knowing about it. What I am saying is that 84% of children who are abused are abused by parents. Only 10% of abuse cases are perpetrated by non-parents and strangers. The other 6% are the cases where the perpetrator is unknown. This data is from a 2005 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

When you think of the amount of time a child spends with certain people, it is clear that the majority of this time is spent with parents rather than strangers. In fact, we tend to reduce the amount of time our child spends with strangers due to the fear that they will do something bad to our child, or at least not abide by our specific parenting plan. 

Now don't go giving your child to the first homeless person you see to take care of for the day while you're at work!! but the moral of this passage is that the next time you see a parent treating a child badly, instead of attributing it to the fact that the child may be having a really bad day in terms of behavior, maybe realise that there could be a pattern of negative behavior that needs to be stopped before permanent damage occurs to the child's well-being, both physically and mentally. Don't play into the by-stander effect!!! DO something about it when you see it.

I will leave you all on a much better note. The incidence of child maltreatment has gone down significantly over the past few years. No doubt this is because of new social programs that have been put into place. We are making progress.... now lets not get lazy!