Essay about Chilc Abuse - 1035 Words

Each year in the USA there are approximately one million reports of child maltreatment, about 25% relate to physical abuse and about 1000 children die of maltreatment each year (US Department of Health and Human Services 1999). During the past few decades, researchers have aimed at detecting the children, who are at high risk of becoming victims of abuse, so that appropriate interventions can be undertaken. The risk factors that have been emphasized include characteristics of the child, family, and social environment, and the relationship. One of the risk factors that have been widely studied is the parents’ upbringing, specifically whether he or she was abused as a child. This risk factor is often referred to as intergenerational†¦show more content†¦One reason may be that these adults believe that frequent experience with corporal punishment in childhood, beatings, was normal. Kadushin and Martin (1981) found that nearly every report of child abuse was precipitated by a behavior in the child that the parent felt called for disciplinary action. Therefore, in part, this appears to be related to cultural acceptance of violence (Hilberman 1980), but it also implies an identification with the parent’s views on corporal punishment. In one investigation (Kotelchuk 1982), parents were asked to describe their childhood experience. Investigators coding the descriptions were far more likely than parents to consider the experiences to have been abusive, on the other hand, parents’ responses to a dir ect question about having been abused were not related to punitive treatment of their children. Though there has been a tremendous amount of research done on this subject I believe that it is important to continue to research this with the hope of finding a reason for this abuse and putting an end to it. For this reason I propose to conduct a longitudinal experiment to determine whether children who are abused grow up to display the same abusive behavior with their children. Method The experimental group will consist of subjects who were previously abused now seeking counseling for emotional assistance. They will be randomly selected from a study of 347 families from lower income backgrounds. The children involved