June 16, 2008: 1 in 50 infants neglected or abused in US
Date line Atlanta, Georgia, February 4, 2008…
About 1 in 50 infants in the U.S. has been neglected or abused, according to the first national study of the problem in that age group. Nearly a third of the victims were one week old or younger when the maltreatment was reported, government researchers said yesterday. The study focused on children younger then one. Most of the cases involved neglect, not physical abuse. In the case of newborns, experts said drug abuse by the mother may have been the cause for reported neglect, but they couldn’t be certain. Maternal drug abuse is often discovered through blood tests while newborns are still in the hospital.
The researchers counted more then 91,000 infant victims of abuse and neglect during the study period of Oct. 1, 2005 to sept. 30, 2006. About 30,000 of those cases were newborns no more then a week old. The information came from a national data base of cases verified by protective services agencies in 45 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The results mirror what a study in Canada found, said study co-author Rebecca Leeb, and epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We were certainly distressed” by the study’s results, said Ileana Aries, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “It’s a picture you don’t want to imagine - that this number of infants is being mistreated,” Arias added.
Only about 13 percent of the newborn cases were counted as physical abuse, meaning the large majority involved neglect. Federal officials define neglect as a failure to meet a child’s basic needs, including housing, clothing, feeding and medical care.
The counted cases did not include new parents stumbling their way through breast-feeding or making other rookie mistakes. “Things like abandonment, and new born drug addition would also qualify as neglect, not things like parents learning to be parents,” Leeb said. Medical professionals identified about 65 percent of the cases of maltreated newborns to protective services staff.
David Finkelhor, who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the cases might in part reflect households that don’t have adequate health insurance to seek all recommended care for an ailing child. The study’s authors said they have information to verify that speculation.
Both Finkelhor and Dr. Hward Dubowitz, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, have worked with the same data base the researchers used. Dubowitz pointed to the data showing that most of the neglect cases in newborns were reported in the first two days of life. That is the time when results from blood tests of mother and child come back and are often shared with protection services. Such tests would indicate drug abuse, but that kind of information was too skimpy in the data base to draw conclusions, he said.
The research was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Article by Mile Stobbe, Associated Press