help
collapse
Press one of the expand buttons to see the full text of an article. Later press collapse to revert to the original form. The buttons below expand or collapse all articles.
expand
collapse
Child Abuse is Everywhere
May 9, 2014 permalink
A parody in the Onion declares that most serial killers were denied a toy in childhood, setting them on the road to crime. Not a parody is a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal Child abuse and mental disorders in Canada (local copy, pdf). It finds that a third of all Canadians were abused as children. This epidemic is found by defining child abuse to include spanking, grabbing, pushing, shoving, or witnessing one’s parents hitting one another or even yelling at each other frequently.
The absurd conclusions have serious consequences. As long as child abuse is perceived to be everywhere, professional psychiatrists, social workers and family therapists can justify intervention in just about every family. In the words of Barbara Kay:
Creating definitions that indict a full third of Canadians as abusers or victims points to an unrealistic understanding of human nature and human limitations. This study is easy to mock, but there is nothing funny about its potential ramifications. Its conclusions may well lead to official policies that in turn bring more children into care, children who will suffer far more in removal from their imperfect parents than will be helped by theory-driven state-appointed strangers.
Expand for the Onion spoof and a National Post news article on the CMA Journal report followed by Barbara Kay's comment. Pat Niagara captured a CHCH-TV Sauare Off broadcast (mp4) on the topic.
expand
collapse
Study: Most Serial Killers Did Not Receive Toy Every Time They Went To Store As Kids
MINNEAPOLIS—A study published Thursday in The American Journal Of Criminal Psychology has found a nearly perfect statistical correlation between children who were denied a toy they wanted when visiting a store with their parents and the later development of homicidal behavior. “We found that even after just one instance of being told ‘no’ in a toy store aisle, children may begin to exhibit their first violent impulses, which often later manifest as a compulsive need to kill others during adulthood,” said forensic psychologist Edgar Pruitt, whose study tracked the emergence of deviant, psychopathic traits that first began to appear when each future killer left a store without a new Nintendo game, G.I. Joe, or remote-control car. “John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Green River Killer—these were all people who did not get the toys or games they wanted. So as a parent, you have to ask yourself if the $15 you save by not purchasing Legos or a Spider-Man figurine is worth the potentially dozens of innocent lives your child might one day brutally take.” The study also found that young girls who were told they had to eat their dinner before they could have dessert went on in 100 percent of cases to become mothers who drowned their own children one by one in the bathtub.
Source: The Onion
link to video (webm)
One-third of Canadians have suffered child abuse, highest rates in the western provinces, study says
More than a third of Canadians have suffered some kind of child abuse in their lives and that abuse has a strong correlation with mental disorders, according to a new national study touted to be the first of its kind in Canada.
The study, published Tuesday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that 32% of Canadians had experienced physical abuse, sexual abuse, exposure to intimate partner violence or a combination of these while they were young — a number that includes behaviour once deemed socially appropriate forms of discipline, such as spanking with an object and slapping.
All types of child abuse were associated with all mental disorders, including suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, said Tracie Afifi, lead study author and professor of Community Health Sciences and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba.
“I know that the general public will be surprised with this number,” she said. “But as a child maltreatment researcher, this is what we were thinking it would be around, 30%.”
Indeed, comparable studies conducted in the United States and in Canada report findings around the 30% mark, including the 1990 Ontario Child Health Study which found 31% of males and 21% of females had experienced physical child abuse — similar data was reported in 2000-2001.
But quantifying and even defining child abuse can be extremely difficult, especially considering the effect different kinds of abuse can have on children in varying contexts, observers say.
“It does get to be tricky territory because the question gets to be how serious is it?” said Brad McKenzie, a professor emeritus in the department of social work at the University of Manitoba. For example, spanking is still legal discipline in Canada (though spanking with an object is not), and exposure to intimate partner violence, defined as hearing or witnessing caregivers hitting each other or another adult, is a recent addition to the definition of child maltreatment and has increased the rate of referrals to child protection services “significantly.”
“The degree of seriousness, the degree of harm is another kind of measure we need to consider when you think about what do we do with this information,” he said.
Using data from the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey on Mental Health collected from 23,000 people in 10 provinces (the overall household response rate was 79.8%), researchers categorized the abuse by type — physical, sexual and exposure to intimate partner violence. Physical included slapping on the face, head or ears and being hit or spanked as the least severe; pushed, grabbed, shoved or something thrown at as second-most severe; and kicked bit, punched, choked, burned and attacked as the most severe. Sexual abuse and exposure to intimate partner violence did not have similar stages. Questions about child abuse were only asked to respondents over age 18 (respondents were all over 15 and excluded people in the three territories, in indigenous communities, the Canadian Forces and people living in institutions).
The researchers also used a tool to weed out one-off occurrences, and used a combination of self-reporting and in-person interviews with trained professionals, Prof. Afifi said.
Abuse was more prevalent in Western Canada, with the highest rate of 40% in Manitoba, 35.8% in British Columbia and 36.1% in Alberta. The lowest was 20.5% in Newfoundland and Labrador.
All types of abuse were related to mental disorders, the researchers found, even after controlling for “socio-demographic” differences.
“Not every person who is abused — even ones that are severely abused — not every one will have a mental disorder, but it does increase the likelihood,” Prof. Afifi said. “No matter how we looked at it, we got these consistent relationships. Even though we can’t say ‘the abuse is causing this disorder,’ when you see this causal relationship, you can be very confident in the data.”
Nico Trocmé, director of the Centre for Research on Children and Families at McGill University in Montreal and principal investigator of the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, welcomed the “confirmatory” study as a great addition to national research on child abuse that is sorely lacking in Canada.
“There’s no doubt more severe acts are more likely to be associated with more mental health problems,” he said. “But the very fact there is this continuum points to the risks of being complacent about things we might consider to be very minor abuse.”
To some children, being slapped by their parents may not have had a major effect, but to others it can fit into a broader context of vulnerability and contribute to heightened risk of developing a mental disorder later in life. That so many people have been affected by child abuse “speaks to how resilient people are,” he said.
Prof. Afifi hopes the study, which she calls ” one of the most comprehensive papers on child abuse and mental health from any country” will sound the alarm on the need for greater child abuse prevention efforts, and reveal the relationship between abuse in a young person’s life and the potential for mental illness later on.
“When people think ‘You know 32% that’s a lot, exposure to intimate partner violence is that really a problem, is that really all that damaging or being slapped in the face, is that really a big problem?’ we find that all the types of abuse were associated,” she said.
Source: National Post
Barbara Kay: Study paints a portrait of Canada as a nation of child abusers
In a study, which lead author Tracie Afifi, professor of Community Health Sciences and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba claims is “one of the most comprehensive papers on child abuse and mental health from any country,” we find that “child abuse” includes spanking and slapping (hand spanking is legal in Canada), while witnessing one’s parents yelling at each other makes one a victim of child abuse. Guilty on both counts, your Honour!While perusing my morning newspaper today, I was surprised to learn, from an article about the findings of a newly published study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, that I am a child abuser. Reading on in the same article, I was further startled to discover that I was also a victim of child abuse (thank goodness my parents did not live long enough to find that out).
Reeling from this double whammy, I was ill-prepared for the final blow: that both my abuse of my children and my parents’ abuse of me may be causally related to mental disorders! And I am not alone. According to this study – entitled “Child Abuse and mental disorders in Canada” - about a third of Canadians are abusers or abused, and their experience is “associated” with mental disorder.
Forgive the sarcasm and the attendant skepticism it represents, but this would not be the first study to ring alarm bells on an alleged epidemic of abuse. Rape culturists believe one in four university coeds is sexually assaulted on campus; so-called domestic violence experts tell us one in three women will be the victim of intimate partner violence; and now here we go again with child abuse. The problem with all these forms of moral panic projecting epidemic abuse of women and children is that their study statistics arise from definitions that cast so wide a net for negative behaviours that the conclusions they lead to are virtually meaningless
Rape culturists dumb down rape to include any sexual behaviour indulged in while a woman is intoxicated. Domestic violence alarmists dumb down intimate partner violence to include any actions, words or even tone and gestures that hurt a woman’s feelings. In both cases, what any reasonable person would consider to be true and consequential abuse is radically less common than the sensationalized numbers bruited in the media would suggest.
And in this study, which lead author Tracie Afifi, professor of Community Health Sciences and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba claims is “one of the most comprehensive papers on child abuse and mental health from any country,” we find that child abuse includes spanking, grabbing, pushing or shoving, while witnessing one’s parents hitting (and presumably shoving, grabbing or pushing) one another or even yelling at each other frequently makes one a victim of child abuse. Well, my parents yelled at each other quite a lot in my presence and I am certainly guilty of having spanked (sometimes with a wooden spoon), grabbed and shoved my children on several occasions. And I don’t take kindly to being lumped in with “child abusers” or “victims of child abuse.”
Even collegial observers find the “comprehensive” nature of the study discomfiting. “[Exposure to Domestic violence] does get to be tricky territory because the question gets to be, how serious is it?” muses Brad McKenzie, professor emeritus in the department of social work at the University of Manitoba.” McKenzie notes that the expanding referential catchment for abuse, to include exposure to domestic violence, has had the real-life effect of “significantly” increasing the rate of referrals to child protection services.
He’s right about that. In Ontario alone, since the mid-1990s, the number of children taken into care rose from 11,609 children in 1998 to 18,126 in 2003 to 25,710 in 2012. What explains this dramatic increase? Human nature has not changed in the last 15 years. Parents in general are more educated and more sensitive to children’s rights than they were in my generation. Children are no more or less resilient than they were decades ago, and indeed throughout of all human history.
Willingness to report abuse is probably part of the answer. But another part is the changed definition of abuse. Physical abuse is no longer the primary reason children are removed from parental care in Canada. According to a 2005 scholar’s assessment, physical harm to children occurred in only 10% of cases of substantiated maltreatment, with only 3% of cases requiring medical intervention. That should ring alarm bells. Physical harm constitutes objective abuse, and should be the main reason for removal from a home. The definition of abuse has drifted away from physical harm into subjective realms because the vast majority of students in the “soft” sciences of sociology, psychology and child pedagogy are dominated by ideologically inspired curricula in which theories of social engineering capable of producing utopian outcomes permeate the discourse and texts to which these students are continually exposed. Utopianism breeds contempt for human imperfection, disdain for individual rights and the conviction that “experts” – efficiently clustered under the umbrella of the state – can improve on ever-so-flawed ordinary people in bringing about the ideal society they dream of.
Creating definitions that indict a full third of Canadians as abusers or victims points to an unrealistic understanding of human nature and human limitations. This study is easy to mock, but there is nothing funny about its potential ramifications. Its conclusions may well lead to official policies that in turn bring more children into care, children who will suffer far more in removal from their imperfect parents than will be helped by theory-driven state-appointed strangers.
I am sure the researchers of this study were extremely well-intentioned. But when perfection is made the enemy of the “good-enough,” good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.
Source: National Post
