How to Recognize and Report Child Abuse
Violence hits home for too many children across the country, creating scars that will affect children, families, and communities a lifetime of anguish.
There are ways to prevent child abuse before it happens. In the very least, we can help prevent a child from coming into fatal danger by recognizing what child abuse is, why it’s such a problem, and what we can do to help stop it.
What Child Abuse Is and Why It Happens
Physical abuse of children has been something that we’ve learned to recognize as a problem. It wasn’t until the late 60’s that child abuse was given a name: Battered Child Syndrome. Since it was pinpointed and shown to be wrong, not something that we can turn the other way and allow to happen, society as a whole has learned a lot about what causes child abuse and how it can be prevented.
In simplest terms, child abuse is a pattern of injuries to a child that is not accidental. This might seem like common sense, but when we stop to think about what it really means, there are some patterns of injury that we might not have expected. In addition to physical injury and sexual abuse, neglect and emotional abuse are also considered to be mistreatment of children.
There are no hard and fast rules about “where” children are abused. When there’s violence in the home, it has no prejudice about ethnic or economic lines. Recent studies by the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect, though, have shown that children from families with incomes below $15,000 were 25 times more likely to experience child abuse than those families who earned $30,000 or more. This fact might be linked to the stress of poverty that can lead a parent to physically hurt a child, but marital problems, difficulties at work, social isolation, grief or illness can also lead to a parent lashing out at a child.
Some people enter adulthood with unreasonable expectations of their children. When parents expect children to be able to perform in ways that children aren’t able to, they can become angry and violent.
No excuses – stress is a part of everyone’s life and we all have to learn to deal with it like adults. Helping stop child abuse before it happens, though, means recognizing what causes child abuse to begin in the first place. Then, we can help our friends, families, and even ourselves to overcome forces like poverty and addiction which might lead to abuse.
Stopping Child Abuse
In every community is a dedicated group of people who exist solely to provide counseling and services to families – the Child Protective Service. These agencies help at-risk families overcome the barriers causing stress in their lives to help prevent child abuse in the first place. In severe cases, they will not stop at removing children from violent homes, either temporarily or permanently.
Tying tightly into the Child Protective Service are community institutions like schools and hospitals. When all of these work together with informal networks of residents in your community, a safety-net can be created to help prevent child abuse from happening at all by identifying families at risk of abuse or neglect. Unfortunately, prevention doesn’t always work – and it’s important to take steps before abuse happens again.
Before you come to the conclusion that a child is being abused, look for the following warning signs. These signs don’t necessarily mean that a child is being abused, but they definitely raise some questions.
� Unexplained injuries.
� Injuries in unusual patterns or locations.
� Multiple injuries (several bruises, for example) at different stages of healing.
� Multiple bruises, any welts, broken bones, moderate to severe cuts, bite marks, burns, missing hair or bald spots, black eyes, or swollen lips.
� Any burns from cigarettes, ropes, radiators, or scalding water.
� Wariness of adult contact.
� Hostility and aggressiveness toward other children.
� Self-destructive behavior.
� Extremely low self-esteem.
� Fears of going home.
Reporting Child Abuse
First, a word of caution: Up to 3 million cases of child abuse are reported each year, and of these cases only 1 million can be confirmed. You need to exercise caution when reporting an issue with children; kids are clumsy, and oftentimes when they say that the bruises on their legs are from soccer, they really are from soccer. Make sure that any report you make is backed up by facts, and not emotion. It’s too easy to become frightened for a child and overreact when there is not a problem to begin with.
Once you have moved past the emotion stage, and still feel strongly that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with, here’s 3 important tips for reporting abuse:
1. If a child says that s/he is being hurt, believe them. Children almost never lie about being hurt or abused, and this should be taken seriously.
2. If you suspect abuse by a member of your family, go outside of your family to talk to someone. The child protective agency is a good place to start.
3. Attempt to find out if a parent is being abused as well. Many times, a spouse is abused before children, and s/he should be given the chance to remove the child out of the home. In every metropolitan area, and many smaller communities, there are battered men, women, and children shelters to go to who will not ask for a dime.
