Child Abuse: The Reports

There are many agencies that report on child abuse statistics. These agencies attempt to find possible trends and of course find a way to help stop child abuse wherever and whenever possible. These statistics are generally used to try and find to whom and where social service resources ought to be directed. The statistics tell us that four children, right here in the United States, die each day as the direct result of abuse and three out of the four of these precious souls are under four years of age.

The increase in the statistics may have something to do with the fact that more people now report child abuse than ever before. Every year millions of innocent children are helpless targets of horrifying atrocities, suffering ill treatment, exploitation and brutality. The consequences of abuse on children are overwhelming. Naturally, it poses a threat to their lives, yet if they do survive the abuse it still leaves devastating adverse affects on their physical and mental health.

The statistics on child abuse also include what happens in the future. For example, the victims of abuse will often grow up and abuse their children as they were abused, making it a tough cycle to break. Even while the tragedy of child abuse is very real, many times it ends up being suppressed in silence, which many be a result of the prevention of child abuse laws, which are at times met with confrontation and reluctance. Perhaps it is because abuse takes place in private and may therefore be considered “secretly endured and openly denied.”

Amazingly, there are several loopholes, with regard to child protection issues, as UNICEF has identified six special conditions of child abuse. They include bonded or forced labor, as over 300 million children are forced into child labor. Human trafficking represents an estimated 1.2 million kids who are illegally trafficked every year. Sexual exploitation accounts for about 1 million exploited children every year in the multibillion dollar flesh trade. Children are also used as soldiers, and as many as 2 million have died as a direct result of war and armed conflict in the last decade. Separation from parents, which means being deprived from their primary means of protection for various reasons, and violence in homes and in schools are forms of punishment and torture that are very common forms of child abuse.

Medical professionals and all people who are responsible for child safety care have to be suspicious about a child with a broken bone, regardless if the child is from a well to do family or a lower income family. The increasing statistics on child abuse cross religious, ethnic and socioeconomic lines, thus no group can be considered exempt from the stigma of abuse. Any citizen who has the slightest suspicion that a child is being abused has the responsibility of filing a police report if it is ever going to be stopped.

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