Child abuse and neglect occur in epidemic numbers in the United States and around the world, resulting in major physical and mental health consequences for abused children in the present and future. A vast amount of information is available on the signs and symptoms and short- and long-term consequences of abuse. A limited number of instruments have been empirically developed to screen for child abuse, with most focused on physical abuse in the context of the emergency department, which have been found to be minimally effective and lacking rigor. This literature review focuses on physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and neglect, occurring in one or multiple forms (polyabuse). A systematic, in-depth analysis of the literature was conducted. This literature review provides information for identifying children who have been abused and neglected but exposes the need for a comprehensive screening instrument or protocol that will capture all forms of child abuse and neglect. Screening needs to be succinct, user-friendly, and amenable for use with children at every point of care in the healthcare system.

Historians, mostly engaging with written evidence, have argued that the Christianisation of the Roman Empire resulted in changes in both attitudes and behaviour towards children, resulting in a decrease in their maltreatment by society. I begin with a working hypothesis that this attitude-change was real and resulted in a reduction in the maltreatment of children; and that this reduction in maltreatment is evident in the literature. The approach to investigating this hypothesis belongs to the emerging field of digital humanities: by using programming techniques developed in the field of sentiment analysis, I create two sentiment-analysis like tools, one a lexicon-based approach, the other an application of a naive bayes machine learning approach. The latter is favoured as more accurate. The tool is used to automatically tag sentences, extracted from a corpus of texts written between 100 B.C and 600 A.D, that mention children, as to whether the sentences feature the maltreatment of children or not. The results are then quantitively analysed with reference to the year in which the text was written, with no statistically significant result found. However, the high accuracy of the tool in tagging sentences, at above 88%, suggests that similar tools may be able to play an important role, alongside traditional research techniques, in historical and social-science research in the future.

Offenders and persons with serious mental illness experience disproportionate exposure to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). This study examines prevalence, distribution, and correlates of ACEs in 182 male and female forensic psychiatric inpatients in secure care. Descriptive statistics, chi-squares analysis, ANOVA, and logistic regression were used to describe ACEs by race and gender and to identify associations between ACEs and onset of aggression, arrest, and psychiatric hospitalization. Participants evidenced significant exposure to ACEs, with significant differences by race and gender. ACE score, race, and foster care or investigations of child abuse were significant predictors of outcomes related to aggression and criminality.

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Bakgrund: Det finns ett mörkertal av barn som utsätts för misshandel. Utan intervention riskerar de att drabbas av fysisk och psykisk ohälsa upp i vuxenlivet. Att möta barn som misstänkts vara utsatt för misshandel är en stark stressor för sjuksköterskor. Syfte: Att beskriva sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av att möta barn som utsatts för misshandel. Metod: En litteraturöversikt med kvalitativ design där 10 artiklar inkluderades i resultatet. Dataanalysen genomfördes enligt Fribergs femstegsanalys. Resultat: Erfarenheter av möten med barn utsatta för misshandel väckte motstridiga känslor inom sjuksköterskan och uppgiften ansågs också svår på grund av att sjuksköterskan kände en osäkerhet i hur de skulle handla i det enskilda fallet. Sjuksköterskors erfarenhet var att de gav stöd till barn och föräldrar genom förtroendefulla relationer men att de också själva var i behov av stöd och utbildning. Slutsats: Sjuksköterskor som ger omvårdnad till barn utsatta för misshandel löper ökad risk för psykisk ohälsa. Kollegialt stöd, handledning, debriefing och utbildning kan motverka detta. Dessa typer av stöd kan öka anmälningsfrekvensen till socialtjänsten gällande barn som utsätts för misshandel. / Background: There are an unknown number of children exposed to child abuse. Without intervention they risk suffering from physical and mental illness in adulthood. Encountering children where child abuse is suspected is a great stressor for nurses. Aim: To describe nurses’ experiences of encounters with children exposed to child abuse. Method: A literature review with qualitative design was conducted, including 10 articles in the result. Data were analysed using Friberg’s five-step analysis. Results: Experiences of encounters with children exposed to abuse aroused conflicting feelings within the nurse and the task was considered difficult because the nurse felt uncertain about how they would act in the individual case. The nurses’ experiences were that they provided support to children and parents through trusting relationships, but that they themselves were also in need of support and education. Conclusion: Caring for children suffering from child abuse leaves nurses in risk of their mental health. Collegiate support, supervision, debriefing and training may function as a counteract. These measures of support may increase the level of report to Social service concerning child abuse.

Child maltreatment is a public health problem directly linked to poor outcomes across the lifespan, including chronic health conditions and even death. The local population served by the agency in which the project took place experienced an increase in reports of child maltreatment. Agency leadership identified deficiencies in parental knowledge about positive parenting practices as a contributing factor to the problem. To address the problem, the agency implemented a quality improvement evidence-based home visiting pilot initiative. The evaluation of that initiative was the purpose of this project. Bandura's social cognitive learning theory provided the theoretical framework for the project, and the logic model was used to facilitate the practice change in the facility. Evaluation was based on data extracted from the Family Support Program Outcome Survey (FSPOS) tool completed by all 22 program participants. Comprising 7 questions, the FSPOS was a validated and reliable tool and was used to assess the increase in participants' parental knowledge related to positive parenting practices before and after participation in the home visiting program. Survey results revealed that participation in the initiative increased participant knowledge. Using a 7-point Likert scale in which higher scores indicated higher levels of positive parenting practices, participant scores increased from M = 4.71 before participation to M = 6.60 after enrollment. The results reinforce the significance of the nursing profession in health promotion and disease prevention in communities. Findings of this project have the potential to promote positive social change by decreasing child maltreatment, which may reduce cost of care and improve quality of life across the lifespan.

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Several theoretical risk models were proposed previously regarding the prediction of child maltreatment. Although child maltreatment was predicted individually in these models by such variables as parent temperament, emotional and behavioral regulation, stress, coping, and child temperament, these variables were not yet examined collectively. As such, a new transactional theory was proposed for the current study. As part of this study, a national community sample of 158 culturally diverse mothers of young children who were between the ages of 1½- to 5-years rated their own temperament, emotional and behavioral regulation abilities, parenting stress, daily hassles, and coping behaviors as well as their young children's temperament. Correlational analyses demonstrated many significant relationships among the variables of interest. In addition, hierarchical regression analyses suggested that several parent (i.e., mother mood quality, mother flexibility/rigidity, emotion dysregulation, parenting stress, cumulated severity of stress, and emotion-focused coping) and child characteristics (i.e., young child mood quality) added unique incremental variance to the prediction of child maltreatment potential. Finally, mediation analyses indicated that mothers' emotion dysregulation mediated the relationship between mothers' flexibility/rigidity and child maltreatment potential. Overall, this study contributed information regarding the importance of emotion dysregulation as a mechanism through which difficult mother temperament may be related to increased child maltreatment potential. Accordingly, these findings suggested that emotion regulation skills may serve as a potential point of intervention for mothers who are at increased risk for child maltreatment due to difficult temperament characteristics.

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