Scientists with the Yale University School of Medicine have recently compiled a statistic of child abuse rates in the United States, and the data aren't pretty. Annually, more than 4,500 children were admitted into hospital around the countries following abuse.
No less than 300 of these kids died on account of their injuries, which were too severe for the doctors to handle. Additional details of the research were published in the February 6 online issue of the esteemed journal Pediatrics, and will appear in the March print issue as well.
Researchers used data from a variety of sources – including official numbers provided by US Child Protective Services – to compile their new statistic. Previously, scientists had only analyzed national occurrence of child abuse, and not subsequent hospitalization rates.
The 2006 Kids' Inpatient Database (KID) was also used in the study, so that experts could form an idea on how many children below the age of 18 had been physically abused. The work was led by chief investigator John M. Leventhal, MD,
EurekAlert reports.
He holds an appointment as a professor of pediatrics, and medical director of the Child Abuse and Child Abuse Prevention Programs at the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital. The data he and his team had access to covered the year 2006.
During that year, a total of 4,569 children were admitted into US hospitals, of which 300 perished. It was determined that newborns below the age of 1 were the most likely to experience physical abuse.
“These numbers are higher than the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (about 50, per 100,000 births), which is alarming,” Leventhal says. He finds it interesting that Medicaid-covered children were far more likely to suffer abuse than peers who were not a part of the program.
“This speaks to the importance of poverty as a risk factor for serious abuse,” the team leaders. The statistic also shows that the costs associated with treating abusive injuries rose to $73.8 million.
By using this dataset, and compiling similar ones for other years as well, researchers may be able to set up a system where they are able to observe the long-term progression of child abuse rates in the US.
Public education and outreach policies could then contribute to reducing these rates, experts believe.
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