OBJECTIVE This study examined the effect of workers' attitudes toward corporal punishment on the workers' perception and reporting of child maltreatment. Three hundred twenty-five (325) potential entry level workers participated in this study. METHOD Responding to vignettes in multi-item scales, study participants 1) rated their approval of parental discipline involving corporal punishment; 2...

OBJECTIVE Child fatality review teams have emerged across the United States in the past decade to address the concern that systems of child protection, law enforcement, criminal justice, and medicine do not adequately assess the circumstances surrounding child fatality as a result of maltreatment. METHODS We compared data collected by a multidisciplinary child fatality review team with vital ...

Studies reporting a link between child maltreatment and addiction have typically focused on physical and sexual abuse. In contrast, emotional maltreatment has rarely been studied in substance-abusing samples although it is associated with a wide range of dysfunction. The current study aimed to determine the specific impact of different types of maltreatment and peer victimization on alcohol dep...

INTRODUCTION It is well established that childhood maltreatment has a detrimental impact on the brain, particularly the hippocampus. However, the hippocampus is a functionally and structurally heterogeneous region, and little is known about how maltreatment might affect hippocampal subregion development throughout important periods of plasticity. This study investigated whether childhood maltre...

This study examined cortisol reactivity to repeated psychosocial stressors in 35 adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 26 years. Participants were divided into three study groups: controls with no history of major depressive disorder (MDD) or childhood maltreatment (n = 18); a diagnosis of MDD at Time 1 but no history of maltreatment (MDD-only; n = 10); and both MDD and maltreatment (MDD+MALT...

Numerous studies indicate that child maltreatment increases the risk for the development of internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Great variations in outcome, however, have been noted among victims of maltreatment. From an ecological perspective, this review examines how the effects of maltreatment may be influenced by the contexts in which children develop, including their familie...

This article presents analyses of longitudinal data to explore whether low-income children who survived a first incident of reported maltreatment were at higher risk of later childhood death compared to a matched comparison group of low-income children without reports of maltreatment (n = 7,433). Compared to the comparison group, children in the maltreatment group had about twice the risk of de...

AIMS Childhood maltreatment and a family history of a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) are each associated with social-emotional dysfunction in childhood. Both are also strong risk factors for adult SSDs, and social-emotional dysfunction in childhood may be an antecedent of these disorders. We used data from a large Australian population cohort to determine the independent and moderating e...

Child maltreatment is a global public health problem of epidemic proportions [1]. Internationally, the prevalence is striking, with reports suggesting that 25%e50% of children report being physically abused [1]. The annual estimates of child maltreatment in the developed world are highest in the United States: 3.4 million referrals of child abuse involved 6.2 million children in 2011 [2]. It is...

The authors review recent trends within the family maltreatment research field toward a public health approach, discuss the rationale for community-level interventions for family maltreatment, and sketch the history and development of community-level prevention approaches. Next, to illustrate the both the logistic and the scientific challenges of such work, the authors discuss the development a...