CU's Haugaard addresses child abuse prevention

By John Patrick Janowski

Although the number of child maltreatment cases had declined in the late 1990s, child abuse is unfortunately on the rise again, a Cornell expert said in a recent congressional briefing.

"The faltering economy might have had some influence on this, since most cases of child maltreatment are attributable, in part, to high levels of stress in families, and stress is often increased when economic problems in families grow," said Jeffrey J. Haugaard, a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell and associate professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology.

He reported at a June 11 briefing at the U.S. Capitol building on child abuse prevention sponsored by the Section on Child Maltreatment of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Consortium on Children, Families and the Law. Haugaard is the founding president of the APA.

Just how prevalent the child abuse problem is, Haugaard said, is not known, as statistics vary widely. "Different strategies for gathering data on child maltreatment yield different estimates of the number of children maltreated each year," he said. The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System's (NCANDS) estimates are the most conservative and are based on reports of all substantiated complaints of child maltreatment investigated by each state child protection service.

According to NCANDS, 826,000 children in the United States were neglected or abused in 1999 and, of those, 937 died. The number of substantiated cases peaked at more than 1 million in 1994, declined until 2000, then started to rise again. In 1999, there were twice as many cases of physical abuse as there were cases of sexual abuse and twice as many cases of neglect as physical abuse. Haugaard said that mothers were the most frequent perpetrators of physical abuse, and fathers were the most frequent perpetrators of sexual abuse.

He also said that other estimates are one-and-a-half to two times as high as those of the NCANDS. Haugaard concluded that child maltreatment comes in many forms, and children and perpetrators have many characteristics. As a result, he believes, only prevention efforts that address child maltreatment from a variety of angles will succeed.