NEW YORK, U.S.A. - A new study examined the rate of abusive head trauma seen among kids under age 5 in various regions of United States of America.Researchers found that the rate of such trauma rose from about 9 per 100,000 children to nearly 15 per 100,000 during that time period, coinciding with the onset of the recession and massive job losses.
While researchers had previously been aware of a tentative link between child abuse and economic hardship, the recent study is the first to give the link a statistical basis.
As the US economy began to tank, the number of abused children landing in the hospital with severe brain injuries spiked, according to a study.- Study co-author Rachel Berger, a child abuse expert at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, said that the number of children implicated in the recent upsurge of abuse cases was a lot, especially if the statistic held true throughout the US.
- Although there is no proof that financial hardship itself is causing the rise in abuse, earlier research has tied parental stress to child maltreatment..
Anecdotes linking child abuse to the recession had surfaced before, but the current study — based on hospital data from four US states and published in Pediatrics — is one of the first to provide hard data to back the connection. For the study, the researchers used data from four hospitals in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
They found that, from 2004 to 2009, more than 400 children, whose average age was nine months, were taken to hospitals and diagnosed with abusive head trauma. More than 15% of those children died from their injuries.The number of annual cases was constant at about nine abusive head injuries per 100,000 children from 2004 to the end of 2007. Since then, the number to nearly 15 children per 100,000.
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