Study reveals shocking number of child abuse cases

Study reveals shocking number of child abuse cases

By Liz Lockhart

A new study has reported disturbing data relating to child abuse in America.  Yale School of Medicine researchers report that in just one year over 4,500 children in the U.S. were hospitalised due to child abuse.  Even more alarmingly 300 of these children died from their injuries.

Never before has the quantity or the severity of abuse, nor whether the child went to hospital as a result, been measured, although national occurrence of child abuse has been measured previously.

The study was led by Dr. John M. Leventhal, professor of paediatrics and medical director of the Child Abuse and Child Abuse Prevention Programmes at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital.  Leventhal and fellow researchers used 2007 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID) to estimate the number of hospitalisations which occurred as a result of serious physical abuse among children below the age of 18.   

The researchers found that 4,569 children were hospitalised in the U.S. due to serious abuse in 2006.  Of these cases, 300 children died from their injuries.  The children that were at the greatest risk of abuse were those in their first year of life.

The definition of serious abuse was any child who was admitted to hospital with an injury that was coded as abuse.  Cases included a child with multiple bruises due to abuse and another with life-threatening abusive head trauma.  Children admitted with suspicious injuries that were ultimately classified as having non-abusive injuries were not included.

Leventhal said ‘These numbers are higher than the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (about 50 per 100,000 births) which is alarming.’  He also noted that children covered by Medicaid had rates of serious abuse about six times higher than those not on Medicaid – ‘This speaks to the importance of poverty as a risk factor to serious abuse’.

‘These data should be useful in examining trends over time and in studying the effects of large-scale prevention programmes,’ Leventhal concluded.

The study findings are published in the March 2012 issue of the journal Paediatrics.

  

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