Recognizing and Understanding the Ten Forms of Child Neglect

Recognizing and Understanding the Ten Forms of Child Neglect

Categories of Child Neglect

Crosson-Tower (2020) notes that most experts define child neglect as “an act of omission” that often relates to “parental deficits” (p. 83) and is divided into the following ten categories:

1. Physical Neglect

This type of neglect includes abandoning a child or refusing to take custody, shuttling, and failing to meet their basic physical needs, such as proper nutrition. It also comprises the act of disregarding a child’s safety and well-being.

2. Inadequate Supervision

This involves leaving a child unsupervised, especially when they are at an age where they lack the appropriate abilities to perceive/handle situations that put them at risk. This includes leaving children unsupervised and exposing them to risks such as unsafe electricity wiring, secondhand smoke, drugs, poisons, and contaminated food/water, among others.

3. Medical Neglect

This type of neglect encompasses denying a child health care.

4. Educational Neglect

This neglect involves denying a child education by not enrolling them in school, enabling/allowing school absenteeism, and failing to meet the child’s educational needs, including those requiring special education.

5. Emotional Neglect

Emotional neglect encompasses failing to attend to a child’s emotional needs. Here, parents/guardians/caregivers fail to adequately bond with their children or help them develop self-esteem.

6. Mental Health Neglect

This comprises failing to care for a child with an emotional or behavioral disorder and/or not attending to their needs.

7. Stimulation Neglect

Stimulation neglect comprises the failure to motivate or inspire a child in various aspects and denying them quality interaction. Failing to provide adequate stimulation or motivation jeopardizes the child’s emotional and neurological development.

8. Language Neglect

This involves failing to adequately communicate with a child. This includes communicating only in commands, failing to read to a child, or not conversing with them at all.

9. Gross Motor and Fine Motor Neglect

Children experiencing this neglect are denied the opportunities to play, jump, and participate in activities like dancing, which threatens the development of their gross motor skills. Also, such children are denied the opportunity to engage in activities that help grow their fine motor skills, such as coloring and drawing, among other arts and crafts activities.

10. Environmental Neglect

This includes leaving a child exposed to environmental factors that risk their safety or expose them to various hazards. An example is living in a neighborhood with widespread drug abuse.

The Influence of Reporting on Statistics

Obtaining accurate statistics regarding the incidences of child sexual abuse is important in studying child sexual abuse and understanding aspects such as the factors that put children at risk of such abuse. Nonetheless, obtaining accurate data is challenging, as the reporting of child sexual abuse influences these statistics for several reasons, as outlined by Crosson-Tower (2020):

1. First, identifying and proving sexual abuse is difficult and is easily denied.
2. Second, children have few legal rights, and their assertions are prone to doubt.
3. Third, electronic media has increased perpetrators’ access to children.
4. Fourth, treatment efforts mainly focus on punishing the perpetrator. Besides, some families may fail to report child sexual abuse to avoid the financial and emotional distress associated with prosecution.
5. Fifth, although training in the field has increased, investigators of child sexual abuse may experience discomfort discussing sexual abuse issues and, in turn, fail to properly screen cases or identify indicators of sexual abuse.
6. Sixth, families or victims are less likely to report these cases when they feel that treatment methods are not sufficiently effective.
7. Victims and also offenders experience stigma; therefore, most may prefer not to report to avoid stigmatization.

Child Sexual Abuse Statistics in California

As of 2018, the number of reported cases of child sexual abuse among children aged 0-17 in California was 45,595 (KidsData, 2021). Of these, substantiated cases were only 3,415 (KidsData, 2019), leaving 42,180 unsubstantiated cases. Inarguably, these statistics demonstrate that proving sexual abuse, especially among children, is difficult and is a factor that significantly impacts statistics on reporting.

References

Crosson-Tower, C. (2020). Understanding child abuse and neglect (10th ed.). Pearson Education (US). https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/books/9780135170915

KidsData. (2019, July). Substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect, by type of maltreatment. kidsdata.org. https://kidsdata.org/topic/9/substantiated-abuse-type/table#fmt=1045&loc=2&tf=108&ch=12&sortColumnId=0&sortType=asc

KidsData. (2021, October). Reports of child abuse and neglect, by type of maltreatment. kidsdata.org. https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/4/reported-abuse-type/table#fmt=1040&loc=2&tf=108&ch=12&sortColumnId=0&sortType=

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Recognizing and Understanding the Ten Forms of Child Neglect

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