Child Abuse/ Research Paper

CHILD ABUSE
By Claudia

Child abuse is a basic issue which needs to be discussed. I really think that child abuse is one of the most important problems there are in America today. It is very important to know about certain topics because I am sure that a lot of persons don’t really know and understand the reality of many children who are facing this problem today. Child abuse does notdiscriminate against a child because of age, sex, race, religion, or socioeconomic background. Any child can fall victim to this problem. Every child is vulnerable to abuse. It is one of the problems that had always existed and will always persist. The consequences of child abuse are just horrid.

The mistreatment of children is known as child abuse and there are three types of it, the emotional abuse,the physical abuse and the sexual abuse. Emotional child abuse includes mental torture or verbal abuse by using words that may hurt their self respect. The physical injury or ill-treatment of a child under the age of eighteen by a person who is responsible for the child’s wellbeing under circumstances which indicate that the child’s health or wellbeing is harmed or threatened thereby is thedefinition of child physical abuse, defined by The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (Newton). Sexual abuses include rape or any sexual exploitation. This is very common abuse today.

Some causes of child abuse are the use of drugs, alcohol abuse or sometimes the abuser was also abused when he was younger. Another problem is that when an abused child grows up they could join the nextgenerations of child abusers.

The effects of child abuse are more than anyone can imagine, they are just countless. There could be damage to the child’s growing brain, or emotional difficulties. Depression and anxiety for example, may make a person more likely to smoke, abuse alcohol or illicit drugs, or overeat.

Child abuse could be prevented in many ways, for example schools should make childrenknow about this problem. Teachers should make them understand what to do if someone is abusing them and report every suspected case of abuse. In many countries like in the United States, there are Social workers who are responsible of detecting some kind of abuse. Certain countries have child abuse prevention centers which reach out to children who have been abused.

I want to lean with the helpof this research about the most common type of maltreatment. I want to know exactly how many children are being abused in the United States and in Bolivia and how many children died from abuse in the United States. I want to know who the abusers are too.

First, I am going to look for the statistics. A very good site where I found good information of Bolivia was the centre of news of the OPS/OMS (Organizacion Panamericana de la Salud- Bolivia )in Bolivia. This is an organization from the United Nations. By far the best site for official United States statistics on child abuse is the Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of the Children's Bureau in the Administration for Children and Families, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. In this site I couldfind almost all the information I was looking for. Another good web site was the one from the National Child abuse by the Childhelp foundation. I could find there a lot of statistics of the United States.

It is really difficult to find all the statistics and information because there is a lot of information in each source and I have to check if the information is right and if the source isdependable. It is a real challenge because of the quantity of information there is.

One of the most interesting findings is that in Bolivia, more than 2 million children are or have been abused once being victims of physical or emotional maltreatment. That means that half of the total child population are victims of violence according to the last inform from the “Violence against Children in...