Week 8 L14 C Maltreat Flashcards
Physical abuse includes
Punching, beating, kicking, burning, shaking, or otherwise physically harming a child
Often unintentional and resulting from severe physical punishment
Often by moms under distress and about of control
U.S. Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act:
Child maltreatment definition
Definition
Any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death,
serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation, or an act or failure to act, which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.
Neglect, pushy usual abuse, sexual abuse, educational neglect
Neglect
Includes?
Child’s basic needs are not being met
Physical neglect
Food, refusal of health care, inadequate supervision
Educational neglect
Not putting a child of manadatory age in school, not attending to special education needs
Emotional neglect
Failure to attend to child’s emotional needs, refusal or failure to provide needed psychological care
Sexual and emotional (harder to study) abuse
Sexual abuse
Touching genitals, intercourse, exhibitionism, production of
pornographic photos
Emotional abuse
Repeated acts by parents or caregivers that could or have caused serious behavioral, cogntive, emotional or mental disorders
Note that all abuse will cause emotional harm
Epidemiology of child abuse
Challenges of studying incidence and prevalence of
Reporting bias
People may not be willing to report this
Retrospective report
A lot of studies are completed by asking adults to report what they experienced as children, memories shaped hanged innacuracy? detail?
Use proxy, but poor estimates
One-year incidence rates for child abuse
Recall that incidence is new cases in a given time frame
In the U.S., 12.1/1000 children (more poverty, harder to get access to ehalthcRe)
In Canada, 9.7/1000 children
U.S. has higher rates of poverty, and it is much harder to get access to health care
Responding anonymously, 10% of parents report using forms of physical punishment that constitute child abuse (e.g., hitting the child with an object) not an infrequent experience
Most common type of maltreatment is
Neglect
Followed by:
Physical abuse
Sexual
Emo
Demographic characteristics of child dev.
Younger harder to manage, risk losing job late
Age
Younger children are more likely to be neglected
Older children (> 12 years) are more likely to be sexualy abused
, can be left lone for longe but not overnight
Gender
Girls are more likely to be sexually abused
Abused by male family members
Younger children are more likely to be
neglected
Sociological and financial aspects to child abuse?
Poverty
Crowded unsafe housing, restricted childcare opportunities
Single-parent families
Higher rates of physical abuse and neglect, due to stress and not being able to do it all. Mom is not supermom alone!
Parents have to make difficult choices, need money, leave baby alone overnight
Older children (> 12 years) are more likely to be
sexualy abused
Developmental Course of child abuse
Adaptation made, cause difficulties in other contexts.
Maltreated children must learn to cope with challenges in environment
These adaptations may cause problems in other contexts
1) Long term changes in physiological reactivity to stress, more or less reactive, not useful in older newer enviro
2) Understanding of emotion: anger association to being hit, less positive input,
Being abused or neglected by a parent exposes you to different emotional experiences
May change your understanding and experience of emotions
E.g., If you are constantly exposed to anger from a parent, and if recognizing that anger was adaptive, would that change your perception of emotion?
Study using emotion on faces
Reading Emotional Expressions and Child Maltreatment
Pollak et al. 2000
Participants
15 physically abused children
13 physically neglected children 11 children with no abuse history Between 3 and 5 years of age
Emotion recognition task
Children presented with 25 vignettes describing a protagonist experiencing one of 5 emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger
After each story, child shown three photographs of facial expressions (correct one and two distractors) and asked to point to the face appropriate for the stories protagonist
Emotion recognition task
(1) Sensitivity to differences between facial expressions
How accurate is the child?
Number of times a child says “angry” correctly
Remember that some of these will be lucky guesses
So subtract the number of times child days “angry” incorrectly
In general, neglected children were less sensitive to differences between facial expressions
In general, neglected children were less sensitive to differences between facial expressions than control.
Get less emo inout, and less able to identify faces!
Shows that emotional understanding has changed for abused hildren.
Bias towards labeling a particular stimulus as a particular emotion Ccording to the same study showing neglected children ls sensitive to faces recognition,
Extent to which a particular label may be more likely than others
Physically abused children show a bias for angry faces
Neglected children show a bias for sad faces
Specificity confident to expect abuse as not in neglect group! So good study
