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Factors Responsible For Child Abuse And Neglect Among Parents
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Neglected children are also
at considerable risk. These children are more likely than other children
to suffer from a serious physical injury due to an accident such as
falling, drowning, fire, or ingesting poison. They are also at a greater
risk than other children of being physically and sexually abused from
an unrelated caretaker, often times a significant other or friend of
their parent(s) (Berger, 2010).
It is important to note that some
children will not develop behavioral problems, so it cannot be assumed
that a lack of behavioral problems is evidence against child abuse or
neglect. When there are behavioral problems as a result of child abuse
and neglect, they will most likely be related to difficulty following
rules, being respectful, staying in their seats and keeping on-task,
temper tantrums, and difficult peer relationships. As children become
older they are more likely to engage in self (Woodhouse, 2011).
Statement of the Problem
Many
child deaths, however, are not routinely investigated and postmortem
examinations are not carried out, which makes it difficult to establish
the precise number of fatalities from child abuse in Ika South Local
Government Area of Delta State. There are problems in properly
recognizing cases of infanticide and measuring their incidence.
Significant levels of misclassification in the cause of death as
reported on death certificates have been found, for example, in Ika
South Local Government Area of Delta State. Deaths attributed to other
causes – for instance, sudden infant death syndrome or accidents have
often been shown on reinvestigation to be homicides.
Despite the
apparent widespread misclassification, there is general agreement that
fatalities from child abuse are far more frequent than official records
suggest in Ika South Local Government Area of Delta State where studies
of infant deaths have been undertaken.
Among the fatalities
attributed to child abuse, the most common cause of death is injury to
the head, followed by injury to the abdomen. Intentional suffocation has
also been extensively reported as a cause of death. Injuries inflicted
by a caregiver on a child can take many forms. Serious damage or death
in abused children is most often the consequence of a head injury or
injury to the internal organs. Head trauma as a result of abuse is the
most common cause of death in young children, with children in the first
2 years of life being the most vulnerable. Because force applied to the
body passes through the skin, patterns of injury to the skin can
provide clear signs of abuse. The skeletal manifestations of abuse
include multiple fractures at different stages of healing, fractures of
bones that are very rarely broken under normal circumstances, and
characteristic fractures of the ribs and long bones.
One of the
syndromes of child abuse is the ‘‘battered child’’. This term is
generally applied to children showing repeated and devastating injury to
the skin, skeletal system or nervous system. It includes children with
multiple fractures of different ages, head trauma and severe visceral
trauma, with evidence of repeated infliction. Fortunately, though the
cases are tragic, this pattern is rare.
Children may be brought to
professional attention because of physical or behavioural concerns that,
on further investigation, turn out to result from sexual abuse. It is
not uncommon for children who have been sexually abused to exhibit
symptoms of infection, genital injury, abdominal pain, constipation,
chronic or recurrent urinary tract infections or behavioural problems.
To be able to detect child sexual abuse requires a high index of
suspicion and familiarity with the verbal, behavioural and physical
indicators of abuse. Many children will disclose abuse to caregivers or
others spontaneously, though there may also be indirect physical or
behavioural signs.
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