[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Child Abuse and the Effects
Child abuse is any form of physical, mental, or sexual exploitation of or cruelty towards a child by a parent or other adult, causing significant harm to its victim. See also battered baby syndrome , battered child syndrome , factitious disorder by proxy , sexual abuse. Child abuse is the physical or emotional maltreatment of a child by an adult frequently the same with the term child maltreatment or the term child abuse and neglect. There are a lot of forms of abuse and neglect and many governments have developed their own legal definition of what constitutes child maltreatment for the purposes of removing a child and/or prosecuting a criminal charge. In the United States, the Federal Government puts out a full definition of child abuse and neglect and creates a summary of each State definition.
The mass (78%) of physically abused children were ill-treated by their birth parents. Birth parents were responsible for 62% of the abuse cases and 91% of the neglect cases. Birth parents were the most closely related perpetrators for 72% of physically abused children and 81% of emotionally abused children. Of the children who were abused by their birth parents the majority (75%) was abused by their mothers and a sizable minority (46%) was abused by their father (some children were abused by both parents).
By contrast, children who were abused by other parents or parent-substitutes were more likely to be mistreated by a male (80-85%) than by females (14-41%). The pattern was distinctly different for child sexual abuse. Almost-one half of sexually abused children were sexually abused by someone other than a parent or a parent-substitute. Just over one-fourth were sexually abused by a birth parent and one-fourth was sexually abused by parent-substitute (corrected NIS-3 typo). A sexually abused child was most likely to sustain serious injury or impairment when a birth parent was the perpetrator.....
