Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4)

Second, because multiple persons sometimes maltreated a child, the tableshere classify the perpetrator’s relationship according to a hierarchy. When a childsuffered multiple maltreatment events in a specific maltreatment category with differentlevels of resulting harm, then the perpetrator was the person whose abuse or neglectcaused the most severe outcome. For example, if a physically neglected child was bothseriously harmed by inadequate supervision and fatally harmed by delay of medical care,then only the person responsible for the fatal result (i.e., the delay of medical care) wasconsidered to be the perpetrator of the physical neglect. This strategy applied in a similarway at the summary levels of “all abuse,” “all neglect,” and “all maltreated.” Forinstance, for a child who was both sexually abused and physically abused, the perpetratorin the “all abuse” category was the abuser who caused the more serious harm. Even afterapplying this strategy to winnow down the number of perpetrators, some children stillhad multiple perpetrators. The analyses here identified a single perpetrator from the setby selecting the perpetrator who was most closely related to the child. The definition of“most closely related perpetrator” followed the hierarchy given by the ordering ofperpetrator categories in Table 6–1.Third, because some types of perpetrators in the listing on the left-side ofTable 6–1 maltreated only small percentages of the children, that hierarchy wassimplified by collapsing it into the three categories shown to the right of the brackets.Fourth, as in earlier chapters, all findings continue to use the child as the unitof measurement. This was necessary because the NIS sample design and weightingstrategies, which are fundamental to providing national-level estimates, are all predicatedon the child as the unit of analysis. (In order to provide estimates of perpetrators, adifferent approach to sample design and statistical weighting would be required.) Thus,all NIS findings concerning perpetrators are couched in terms of the child, as in “thepercentage of children maltreated by perpetrators who....”Fifth, this chapter merely describes the perpetrators of Harm Standardmaltreatment in the NIS–4. Perpetrator analyses of NIS data are very complex andresource intensive, so the chapter does not provide tabulations of Endangerment Standardperpetrators or assessments of changes since the NIS–3 in the characteristics of HarmStandard perpetrators.6-2