Recent Studies on Child Abuse and Neglect: The Role of Fathers in Risk for Child Abuse and Neglect (2005)

Recently, a fathers rights guy reemed me out for taking another look at The Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3), because that's just "old" data.

http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2009/09/another-look-see-at-nis-3-or-what-do.html

I know that often these guys don't have the best reading comprehension skills, so I'm not surprised that he missed the fact that I acknowledged the age of the data right from the beginning (the study itself is 13 years old; the raw data older than that). I also mentioned specifically that:

1)That NIS-4 is not available yet

2) That NIS-3 is still widely quoted all across the political spectrum, even though most bloggers never appeared to have looked at anything but the incomplete and badly written Executive Summary which is on the Internet (the complete study is available only in paper form).

3) That I wanted to look at all the data in NIS-3, not just the misleading, incomplete, and confusing statistics on perpetrators listed in the NIS-3 Executive Summary. So I examined the Family Characteristics data, which was adjusted for incidents per 1,000 children based on family type. THIS DATA IS NOT IN THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OR ON THE INTERNET. So hardly anybody seems to have looked at it.

3) Other research is newer that NIS-3, but necessarily less complete and smaller in scope and geography, generally because of funding limitations.

But let's make our complainer happy. Here at Dastardly Dads, we will start looking at the newer studies anyway just because I'm a self-admitted wonk and it's fun.

Today's featured study: The Role of Fathers in Risk for Physical Child Abuse and Neglect: Possible Pathways and Unanswered Questions. Neil B. Guterman and Yookyoung Lee. Child Child Maltreatment, 2005; 10; 136

http://cmx.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/10/2/136

I'm not going to post the whole thing (you are free to read it yourself), but let's start by looking at just the first paragraph (bold highlighting is mine). We'll look at other part of this study at a later time, as well as some of the studies and articles cited by the authors.

FATHERS AND MALTREATMENT:
OVERREPRESENTED AND UNDERCONSIDERED

Consideration of the role that fathers play in the risk for future physical child abuse and neglect is long overdue. A growing body of evidence has pointed out that fathers, as well as father figures, are highly overrepresented as perpetrators of physical child abuse, particularly in its most severe forms (e.g., Brewster et al., 1998; Krugman, 1985; Margolin, 1992). For example, Sinal et al.’s (2000) review of inflicted closedhead injury (shaken baby syndrome) cases in North Carolina reported that 44% were perpetrated by fathers and 20% were perpetrated by mothers’ boyfriends, in contrast to 7% perpetrated by mothers. Similarly, a review of child-maltreatment-related fatalities in the state of Missouri reported that while 21% of identified perpetrators were biological mothers, 23% were biological fathers, and 44% were unrelated males in the household (Stiffman, Schnitzer, Adam, Kruse, & Ewigman, 2002). Given that fathers provide, on the whole, substantially less direct child care than mothers (Margolin, 1992; Yeung, Sandberg, Davis-Kean, & Hofferth, 2001), these proportions of fathers and possible father surrogates as perpetrators of severe child abuse appear as rather startling.

Citations:

Brewster, A. L., Nelson, J. P., Hymel, K. P., Colby, D. R., Lucas, D. R., McCanne, T. R., et al. (1998). Victim, perpetrator, family, and incident characteristics of 32 infant maltreatment deaths in the United States Air Force. Child Abuse & Neglect, 22(2), 91-101.

Krugman, R. D. (1985). Fatal child abuse: Analysis of 24 cases. Pediatrician, 12(1), 68-72.

Margolin, L. (1992). Child abuse by mothers’ boyfriends: Why the overrepresentation? Child Abuse & Neglect, 16(4), 541-551.

Sinal, S. H., Petree, A. R., Herman-Giddens, M., Rogers, M. K., Enand, C., & DuRant, R. H. (2000). Is race or ethnicity a predictive factor in shaken baby syndrome? Child Abuse & Neglect, 24(9), 1241-1246.

Stiffman, M. N., Schnitzer, P. G., Adam, P., Kruse, R. L., & Ewigman, B. G. (2002). Household composition and risk of fatal child maltreatment. Pediatrics, 109(4), 615-621.

Yeung, W. J., Sandberg, J. F., Davis-Kean, P. E., & Hofferth, S. L. (2001). Children’s time with fathers in intact families. Journal of Marriage & the Family, 63(1), 136-154.