Child Maltreatment Fatalities in the United States (eBook)

Emily M. Douglas, Ph.D. is an associate professor of social work at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Her areas of expertise address child and family well-being, and programs and policies that promote positive outcomes. Specifically, her areas of expertise include fatal child maltreatment, medical neglect, corporal punishment, partner violence, divorced families, and the connection between research and public policy. Dr. Douglas and her colleague, Dr. Denise Hines (Clark University), have been among the first researchers to conduct NIH-supported, large-scale research projects on men who sustain partner violence and seek help, and the potential effects on their children. Dr. Douglas has an undergraduate degree in psychology and graduate degrees in public policy; she also completed an NIMH-supported post-doctoral research fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Murray Straus at the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire and has served on a legislative committee in Maine concerned with father involvement. Dr. Douglas is the founder and director of the National Research Conference on Child and Family Programs and Policy which is held annually at Bridgewater State University. Finally, Dr. Douglas is the author of two books on family policy and authored or co-authored 30 peer-reviewed publications, and has presented at numerous national and international conferences. She is the co-author (with Drs. Murray Straus and Rose Medeiros) of a forthcoming book on corporal punishment entitled, The Primordial Violence. During the 2010-2011 academic year, Dr. Douglas was named the Presidential Fellow at her institution, allowing her a full academic year to focus on her research on maltreatment fatalities and the child welfare system.

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This book focuses on the deaths of children in the U.S. due to maltreatment. In 2010 1,560 children died from maltreatment in the U.S. In spite of increased attention to child maltreatment fatalities (CMFs), through research, better identification, prevention efforts, and policy, the CMF rate continues to grow while other forms of maltreatment have declined or stayed steady. There are many unanswered questions about risk factors for CMFs and we know little about the effectiveness of our prevention efforts. This book defines CMFs and discusses the prevalence in the U.S. and other nations over the last 30 years. It addresses the known risk factors for victimization and perpetration: age, gender, race, parent-child relationship, parental mental health problems, and household composition. The book then focuses on the responses and interventions that have been put in place in order to prevent CMFs: the intersection of the child welfare profession and CMFs, child fatality review teams, safe haven laws, public education campaigns, criminal prosecution, and new, federal efforts in the U.S. to reduce CMFs in the U.S. It ends by making a series of recommendations for researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers.