Risk and abuse in organizational contexts

Risk & Abuse

Child Abuse Through Three Studies

The raising of children is an intimate practice in which social, cultural, religious, and ethnic beliefs are often a part. Though the fact that different ways of raising children exist is certainly positive, as no one model could be determined that would fit all children and families, it is still necessary to insure that children are protected. Because many cultural methods of punishing children exist, however, this can be quite difficult to accomplish. The news is packed with children who have died as victims of child abuse, some of whom had even been reported to child services agencies. Still, child services agencies are also flooded with claims that cannot be substantiated. How can the agencies tell the difference? Further, and perhaps even more troubling, how can child services agencies tell the difference between child abuse and cultural practice -- when is a practice considered abuse? These are the questions that I had when undertaking this study. I wanted to learn more about child abuse, and especially the connection of child abuse and culture. More specifically, I wanted to determine how child protection could be achieved in light of so many mitigating circumstances that often cause child abuse to be classified as something other than what it is, in addition to allowing substantiated cases of child abuse to go unreported.

To answer my question, I first wanted to determine what makes parents abuse a child and what affects that abuse might ultimately have on the child. To answer this question, I looked at Kim et al.'s article, "Early Child Maltreatment, Runaway Youths and Risk of Delinquency and Victimization in Adolescence: A Mediational Model." In this article, the authors tested two hypotheses. First, they believed that child abuse could be used as a predictor of children that run away during adolescence. Second, they authors suggested that running away can then lead to "later delinquency and victimization" (19) in their teenage years. Thus, the authors ultimately predict a vicious cycle in which children are abused, run away, and become likely sufferers of crimes and delinquents themselves later in life. The authors drew a sample from the Lehigh Longitudinal Study, which "is a prospective study of children and families begun in the mid-1970s to examine correlates and consequences of child maltreatment" (Kim et al. 21). The entire sample numbered 457 children from 297 families. Children from welfare programs, protective services programs, Head Start, day care, and nursery schools were sampled. A total of 248 boys and 209 girls were studied, and most of the children were from two parent households with relatively low incomes in the 1970s. Information was collected on these children when they were in the early childhood years, school years, and teens (Kim et al. 21-22). Variable such as physical and psychological abuse, sexual abuse, running away, juvenile delinquency, juvenile victimization, and gender were considered. The authors used chi-square tests, as well as least squares mean variance-adjusted estimator was used "to accommodate the modeling of ordered categorical variables of child maltreatment" (Kim et al. 23). Further, the analysis followed a "two-step" process in which "a confirmatory factor analysis model was estimated to assess the overall fit of the measurement model and association among model constructs," and a structural model was used to test the hypothesized relationships (Kim et al. 23). The authors did, indeed, find that abuse predicted running away, which then predicted both juvenile delinquency and victimization.

Despite the fact that the authors proved their hypothesis, the method of data collection in this example is rather suspect. First, the authors used self-report data in order to gauge the level of child abuse, data that asked mothers to report the types of abuse that had been used against their children. In this type of data reporting, it would be incredibly easy for mothers to report incidents that had never occurred or fail to report incidents that had occurred. Further, the mother could have altered the type of incident that occurred. Second, the variables of abuse -- physical, psychological, and sexual, are rather subjective. That is, some of what was considered abuse by the researchers may not be considered abuse for the general public, meaning that the results of the test were skewed. In order to remedy these problems, the researchers could have used medical reports or social services reports in order to gain data, in addition to using types of abuse that have been identified and recorded by an authority on the subject, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Having gained an appreciation for the vicious cycle that child abuse often generates and having understood the difficulties that researchers face when trying to measure child abuse and correlate it to other factors, I was interested in the connection between mothers and child abuse. When I read that mothers were abusing their children and reporting the instances of abuse themselves, I was curious as to what causes this kind of abuse. How could a mother abuse a child that she had given birth to? What factors were involved in mothers' abuse of children, and how could they be rectified in order to prevent child abuse in the future? To answer this question, I chose to examine Taylor et al.'s "Intimate Partner Violence, Maternal Stress, Nativity, and Risk for Maternal Maltreatment of Young Children." The purpose of this study was to determine the correlation between violence waged on mothers by their intimate partners, as well as other types of risk factors, with child abuse or child maltreatment. The authors achieved this through choosing a sample from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which has collected information in 20 major cities in the United States since 1998 (Taylor et al. 175-176). The study sampled only mothers who had intimate partners, and who were mothers of three-year-olds between 2001 and 2004. Most often, the mothers' partners were the children's biological fathers (Taylor et al. 176). The variables for this study included child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and other maternal risk factors. Child maltreatment was assessed using "mothers' self-reported acts of psychological aggression, neglect, and spanking toward their children" (Taylor et al. 176). Psychological aggression was defined as shouting, yelling, screaming, swearing, cursing, threatening, and using derogatory terms toward children. Physical aggression was defined as shaking, hitting, spanking, paddling slapping, or punching, and neglect was considered leaving a child alone, refusing to tell a child that he or she was loved, being unable to feed or medically care for a child, and being too high or drunk to care for a child (Taylor et al. 176). Major stress, depression, and having considered an abortion were considered other maternal risk factors (Taylor et al. 176). The associations between these variables was tested with regression analysis, and the results indicated that "further integration of IPV and child maltreatment prevention and intervention efforts is warranted" (Taylor et al. 175).

While this study certainly highlights how mothers could become their children's abusers, several statistical fallacies also occur with this study. For instance, mothers were, once again, asked to report the data themselves, suggesting the data could be skewed. Further, although the survey for this study was administered in both English and Spanish, the test was only administered in large cities. While this may help to increase the diverse population that was tested, it also discounts those mothers from rural areas. This is an entire population that is not being assessed. In addition, the authors' definitions of what is considered abuse consider certain actions abuse that might not be considered abuse by bother members of society, in addition to omitting certain actions that might be considered abuse. For instance, sexual abuse is not studied, and physical types of abuse such as burning are left out or the definition. In addition, spanking is considered abuse, while certain members of society may not think that it is, indeed, abuse. This is also true about certain types of psychological abuse that the author mentions. While consistent shouting, hitting, and cursing may be psychological abuse, it is difficult to find a mother who has never shouted at her three-year-old. Finally, the sample of this study is far too narrow. While the previous study asked mothers to report data during early childhood, school age, and adolescence, this study only examined mothers with three-year-olds. As some suggest that violence against children tends to occur most often when the children are youngest, this could skew results. Thus, while this study does help give insight regarding how mothers could abuse their children, it is subject to the same fallacies as the first article dealing with abuse, running away, and victimization or delinquency.

Thus, having determined how child abuse affects children in adolescence and having received an answer to my question regarding what influences a mother to abuse her child, I wanted to examine the long-term affects of child abuse. That is, I wanted to determine whether or not the victims of child abuse suffered from various psychological issues during adulthood. While many articles tend to deal with the fact that victims of child abuse tend to become abusers, I wanted to go in another direction, looking at how child abuse can actually affect the life of the abused. In order to consider this, I contemplated Belik et al.'s study, "Relation Between Traumatic Events and Suicide Attempts in Canadian Military Personnel." In this article, the authors' purpose wanted to "determine whether exposure to particular types of traumatic events was associated with suicide attempts in a representatives ample of active military personnel" (Beilik et al. 93). In order to test the connection between certain traumatic events and suicide attempts, the authors drew data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, which asked respondents to mark whether they had been victims of 28 different traumatic events during their lives. One of these events was child abuse. The survey was representative of such variables including sex, reserve or non-reserve member, rank, and region (Belik et al. 95). Because the interviewers collected the data on a face-to-face basis in private areas, it is likely to be representative of what actually happened in the military members' lives. In order to measure the association between trauma and suicide attempts, the researchers used regression analysis and in concordance of Statistics Canada regulations (Beilik et al. 96). After completing this analysis, the researchers found that "sexual and other interpersonal traumas," which include child abuse, were associated with men and women's suicide attempts (Belik et al. 93).