Research in Child Abuse and Neglect: Demographics of abusive head trauma (2008)

Part of our ongoing survey of the child abuse and neglect literature and what is says about perpetrators. An abstract was not available, so the relevant paragraph on perpetrators is reproduced below. The relevant data is highlighted in bold. (Both the studies cited have abstracts posted here at Dastardly Dads. Go the statistics tab to see all the child abuse studies cited here.)

http://thejns.org/doi/pdf/10.3171/PED/2008/1/5/349?cookieSet=1

J Neurosurg Pediatrics 1:349–350, 2008
Editorial
Demographics of abusive head trauma
ANN-CHRISTINE DUHAIME, M.D.
Pediatric Neurosurgery, Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center,
Lebanon, New Hampshire

[T]he perpetrators, as well as can be known, remain largely consistent among studies. The classic report by Starling et al.2 in 1995 found that those who inflicted the injuries were, in descending order of frequency, fathers, boyfriends, female babysitters, and mothers (37, 20.5, 17.3, and 12.6%,respectively). The data from the Pennsylvania Office of Children, Youth and Families database presented in the current paper reveal that fathers or father figures were the perpetrators in 49% of the cases; unspecified parent figures in 16%; mothers in 16%; and paramour, babysitter, or relative each in 6% of cases. When perpetrator sex alone was considered in the analysis, which was known for 76% of the cases, 70% of the perpetrators were males.