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Essay Child Abuse in A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer

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In American society today we fail to address several issues that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, child abuse is one of the major issues that our country is plagued with, yet we neglect to bring this to the attention of the entire nation. It is often over looked because everyone has a different view of what exactly defines child abuse. The International Child Abuse Network (ICAN) uses four basis categories to docunment the child abuse cases. They are: emotional abuse, neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. I will be describing the first three.

Emotional Abuse, (also known as: Verbal abuse, mental abuse, and psychological cruelty) includes acts or the failures to act by parents or caretakers that have caused or could cause …show more content…

There were also 12 deaths that could not be classified. This is a grand total of 849 deaths caused by child abuse and neglect in 1998. The rate of child abuse and neglect fatalities reported by NCANDS has been rising over the last several years from 1.84 per 100,000 children in 2000 to 1.96 in 2001 and 1.98 in 2002. The 2001 report also showed that children ranging from age 0-1 year were accounted for 40.9 percent of all fatalities. 84.5 percent of maltreatment-related fatality cases were age six and under. 35.6 percent of child fatalities resulted from neglect alone, 26.3 percent from physical abuse alone, and 21.9 percent from both neglect and physical abuse. 82.8 percent of these child fatalities were the result of maltreatment by one or both parents. Mothers acting alone accounted 32.4 percent of child abuse and neglect related fatalities. The children ranging from zero to age three are the most frequent victims of child fatalities. Along with the 2001 NCANDS data, in 2002 children younger than 1 year accounted for 41 percent of fatalities, while children younger than 4 years accounted for 76 percent of fatalities. This population of children is the most vulnerable for many reasons, including their dependency, small size, and inability to

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