Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

4 Child Maltreatment in the Last 50 Years 47
MEDLINE database is noteworthy. In 1963, the year in which these keywords were
added to the MEDLINE system, only 12 articles were published. In 2006 nearly
600 articles were published (Jenny, 2008, pp. 2796–2797). Also, an impressive
institutional framework of diagnosing and preventing child maltreatment was set
up (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002, chap. 9; Righthand, Kerr, &. Drach, 2003, chap.
4; Roelofs & Baartman, 1997, pp. 192–211; Baartman, 1996, chap. 5). In addition,
from the end of the 1980s, new international juridical standards came into existence
and could be used to justify the expanding criteria for child abuse and neglect. We
will look at these standards in the next section.
In her aforementioned article from 2008 on Kempe’s publication, Jenny concluded:
“Over the years there has been acknowledgement that overwhelming numbers
of children are abused physically and sexually”. In the USA, the National Child
Abuse and Neglect Data System reported 12.1/100,000–905,000 children were
found “by social service agencies to be survivors of child abuse or neglect”. Metaanalysis
from 1999 reported “30 to 40% of women and 13% of men experienced
sexual abuse during childhood”. According to Jenny, it is clear that “understanding
of the ways children can be maltreated has expanded greatly”. However, she
emphasises that “there is no evidence that the actual prevalence has increased, these
numbers would have been unbelievable in the 1960s” (Jenny, 2008, p. 2796). The
studies to be discussed below, however, report that abuse has become more prevalent
during the last decades.
David Finkelhor, one of the most famous experts on the subject after Kempe,
published his first comprehensive study on child maltreatment in 1979. In his publications
from the 1970s onwards he argued that childhood had become increasingly
prevalent (Finkelhor, 1979; Finkelhor, 1984). In a 2005 publication on a representative
sample of American children and young people within the age range of 2–17
years, Finkelhor and his team found that “More than one half [...]ofthechildren
and youth had experienced a physical assault in the study year, more than 1 in 4 [...]
a property offence, more than 1 in 8 [...] a form of child maltreatment, 1 in 12 [...]
a sexual victimization, and more than 1 in 3 [...] had been a witness to violence
or experienced another form of indirect victimization. Only a minority (20%) had
no direct or indirect victimization” (Finkelhor, Ormrod, Turner, & Hamby, 2005b,
p. 5). In an appendix, victimisation is defined as a complex of several dozen activities;
Finkelhor and his team define victimisation in a much broader way than Kempe
did in 1962. They maintain that “twenty-two percent of the children in this sample
had experienced four or more different kinds of victimizations in separate incidents
(what we term poly-victimization) within the previous year” (Finkelhor, Ormrod,
Turner, & Hamby, 2005, pp. 1297–1312).
Finkelhor is not alone in publishing alarming figures on child maltreatment.
Indeed, many publications from the 1990s and early 2000s, published in academic
journals such as Pediatrics, Child Maltreatment, theEuropean Journal of
Criminology, Child Abuse & Neglect, Child Development, and Science, tell a story
of expanding child maltreatment (Sternberg, Lamb, Guterman, & Abbott, 2006, pp.
283–306; Sariola & Uutela, 1992, pp. 823–832; May-Chahal & Cawson, 2005, pp.
969–984). In an article in Pediatrics from 2007 on Child Maltreatment in the USA
(this study was based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,