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In this chapter, the authors focus on a range of Australian news articles selected for their relevance to key themes in the area of child abuse and examine two high profile cases of child abuse deaths that were extensively reported on by the media and led to system reform. Challenges for media reporting on child abuse in Australia including a changing media landscape, lack of available child abuse data and lack of publicly available serious case reviews are discussed. The authors argue that there is a need for attention to be paid to children's resistance and agency in the context of violence and abuse to counter the objectification of children and uphold their rights. Following Finkelhor (2008), the authors argue that media reporting on child abuse in Australia reflects a general approach to child abuse that is fragmented, with different types of abuse viewed as separate from one another, and call for a more integrated understanding of child abuse. The authors highlight the complexity of media responses to child abuse in Australia, noting that while the social problem of child abuse can be misrepresented by the media, media reporting has also triggered significant systemic reform and advocated for children in cases where other systems failed them.

Approximately 1,750–2,000 children die in the United States annually because of child abuse or neglect. Official statistics show that women are more often the perpetrators of abuse and neglect-related deaths, even though child welfare professionals largely attribute these deaths to men. Either acting alone or with another individual, mothers are responsible for roughly 60% of deaths and either together or alone, fathers are responsible for roughly 40% of deaths. Despite the consistency of this information, it is not widely accepted by child welfare workers – the professional group whose job it is to identify risk factors and to protect children from harm. Previous research shows that workers are more likely to believe that men are responsible for children’s deaths and that deaths are perpetrated by non-family members. In this chapter, we explore the potential explanations for workers’ misperceptions including the role of gender norms, ideology, confusion concerning how children die, and also which kinds of cases result in criminal charges and thus, shape the public’s understanding of fatal child maltreatment. Incomplete and inadequate information about the perpetration of maltreatment deaths potentially puts children at risk for future fatalities. Implications for child welfare and social service professionals, their training, and practice are discussed.

This is a study on perceptions of child abuse and interventions in cases of abuse in the Family and Childhood Support Centres in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It raises the following questions: what is the divergence between the level of abuse experienced by a child and that recognized by adults? What are the conditions for recognition of the child as a victim of abuse by social workers? What interventions will the family and the child receive when the child recognized as a victim? To answer these questions, we conducted qualitative interviews with children and parents along with the social workers supporting them. The study confirms that children face abuse much more often than is recognized by adults. The child is more likely to be recognized as a victim if the parent reported the abuse, the abuse led to physical injury, or if it happened in the family. The child may be recognized as a victim if the child’s entry point into the system is through runaway or delinquent behaviour. However, in these cases, the child would more likely be treated as deviant than victimized. The child is less likely to be recognized as a victim in cases of corporal punishment within the family or abuse outside of the family (i.e., school bullying). Intervention into a case of abuse is usually focused on the mother of the child and involves enhanced supervision and social control of both the mother and the child.

Although many educators feel insecure about reporting suspected child maltreatment, educators are in a unique position to identify and, subsequently, intervene in such cases. This is particularly true for those working in early childhood education settings, as the youngest children – those most vulnerable to the effects of maltreatment – are at the greatest risk for being victims of most types of maltreatment. Thus, early childhood educators should be familiar with child maltreatment and be prepared to act in these cases. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a general overview of child maltreatment. Definitions and prevalent issues will be discussed, and the potential effects of child maltreatment across a variety of domains, including cognitive, academic, social, and behavioral functioning, will be highlighted. Finally, the authors explore various responsibilities, such as mandated reporting and intervention and prevention activities, of early childhood educators.

The purpose of this chapter is to empirically estimate the propensity for alcohol-related policies to influence rates of child abuse. Child maltreatment is measured by the number of abused children and the number of child fatalities due to abuse. The alcohol regulations of interest include beer, wine, and liquor taxes and prices, drunk driving laws, and measures of alcohol availability. Results indicate that higher excise taxes on alcohol and reductions in availability may be effective in reducing the incidence of child maltreatment.

This paper analyses how social workers in the German child protection system rhetorically frame their cases, and how their rhetoric defines its categorical labels corresponding to positions of gender and generation: to what degree are mothers considered as perpetrators and children as victims? Seventy case narrations of social workers on the frontline are analysed regarding the rhetorical idioms they applied. The results show that violence is an irrelevant interpretive framework for the social problems at work in child protection. Instead, irresponsible mothers and their limited agencies are staged front and centre. Categories of limited agency serve as rhetorical devices for the social workers to justify diverse decisions ranging from implementing interventions to terminating the professional-client relationship due to the labelling of the mother as mentally ill. As the rhetorical idiom of unreason does not operate with categories of perpetration and victimization, equivalences for the labels of the practical objectives of victimization are analysed. Consequently, the responsibility of the mother is deflected as her limited agency is seen as a product of troubling conditions. In turn, children are either ignored as victims or even treated as a troubling condition for the mothers’ limited agency. This may lead to the blacking out of the adverse consequences of child abuse and neglect as well as of possible resources for the children to avoid or prevent violent situations. In this way, child protection helps the reproduction of the generational order, which is the basis for child abuse and neglect.

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.

Purpose – This chapter aims to present an overview of what constitutes child murder, including definitions, history, prevalence, risk factors, offender motivations, and theoretical understanding.

Design/methodology/approach – The author uses secondary data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, Uniformed Crime Reports, and Vital Statistics to show comparisons with previously conducted research. This allows for an overview of child murder.

Findings – There are numerous inconsistencies due to methodological issues. It is hard to find studies where a large sample was used. Definitions of child vary between studies, as does the age categories used. In addition, child homicide is predicted to be grossly underrepresented due to lack of communication between agencies, lack of formalized training, lack of a formalized classification system, and lack of reporting.

Originality/value – Research on child homicide can be instrumental in many areas including policy creation, implementation, and evaluation. It can serve as a benefit for those attempting to provide preventative measures. It may also help law enforcement with investigation. It is only through continued analysis of these types of cases and vigilant research, policy, and practice that society can more effectively protect young children from exposure to potentially murderous outcomes.

The present study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Ad Health) to evaluate the effects of exposure to violent victimization in childhood on adolescent delinquency and subsequent adult criminality.

Using Longitudinal Latent Class Analysis (LLCA), the present study investigates whether there are distinct and diverse longitudinal delinquency trajectories among those exposed to violence in childhood.

Findings from the current study indicate that there are three distinct trajectories of delinquency and offending from age 14 to 27 for both males and females exposed to violence in childhood. Further, it appears that violent victimization in childhood bridges the gender gap in delinquency between males and females. Thus, childhood violent victimization, and the fact that females are victimized by parents/caregivers and romantic partners at higher rates than males, might be partially responsible in explaining the narrowing of the gender gap between male and female offending in the recent decades. At the same time, childhood violent victimization also seems to impact males and females in somewhat different ways. Practically, all female victims stop offending by their late 20s, whereas a fairly large proportion of males exposed to violent victimization in childhood steadily continue offending.

Although this study was able to identify the diverse impacts of violence exposure on engagement in subsequent delinquency, it did not examine the unique contributions of each type of violence on adolescent outcomes or the chronicity of exposure to each of these types of violent victimization. We were also not able to measure all types of violence experiences in childhood, such as exposure to parents’ or caregivers’ intimate partner violence.

While early prevention would be the most desirable option for both genders for the most optimal outcome, the retrospective intervention and treatment programs should be gender-specific. For males, they should heavily focus on providing alternative ways to cope with anger, impulse control and frustration, as well as teach empathy, cognitive problem solving skills, verbal communication skills, and tangible life and job skills. For females, most successful intervention and treatment programs may focus on helping the girls through a transition from adolescence to adulthood while providing mental health, medical, and family support services.

The paper uses a unique methodological approach to identify distinct and diverse longitudinal delinquency trajectories. The findings demonstrate how more resilient individuals (in terms of externalizing behaviors) can bring down the mean scores of delinquency even though many other individuals can be severely affected by violence exposure in childhood.