Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

Chapter 4
Child Maltreatment in the Last 50 Years:
The Use of Statistics
Jeroen J.H. Dekker
4.1 Introduction
Maltreatment of children as an educational problem received new and on-going
attention with the publication in 1962 of the article on the Battered Child Syndrome
by the American medical doctors C. H. Kempe, F. N. Silverman and their colleagues
(Kempe, 1962). Following that publication, numerous studies were published on the
abuse and neglect of children. Moreover, an increasing institutional and legal framework
for diagnosing and preventing child maltreatment was set up in many countries
in the Western world. With the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child, in particular article 19, it was accepted that there should be international standards
on the protection of children and on the behaviour of their educators. States
should exercise more responsibility in this matter and professionals should have
more power to tackle the problem. These views were accepted across most of the
world with almost all UN member states ratifying the Convention.
For the historian of the early 21st century, looking back at almost 50 years of
child maltreatment research and policy, the question rises whether this increasing
world-wide interest in the maltreatment of children, this tackling the problem of
child maltreatment as a form of educational politics successfully resulted in a major
diminution of child maltreatment?
At first sight, the hypothesis that maltreatment of children was diminishing, at
least in the economically prosperous Western world, seems strong (see Section 4.2).
However, when looking more thoroughly into the information available, with the
focus on statistical studies on the prevalence of maltreatment of children in the
Western world (particularly when one interprets data drawn from the USA and the
Netherlands), we can see that this hypothesis is flawed (see Section 4.3). Part of
the answer to the question of why most studies on the prevalence of child maltreatment
reject the hypothesis of diminution, notwithstanding the existing controversies
between researchers on questions of method and definition, seems to relate to
the multiplier effect of a broader definition of child maltreatment since the 1970s
J.J.H. Dekker (B)
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Statistics, Educational Research 5, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9873-3_4,
C○ Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
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