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Issues - Child Abuse
Women are seen as better equipped than men to
care for young children, and that under their supervision
they will come to less harm. Men are seen as lacking the ability
to comprehend or adjust to children's needs and, almost biologically,
to lack the necessary patience, commitment and understanding.
Our unquestioning conviction pre-determines
much of what we do and how we decide matters. This singular
blind faith puts the custody of children in divorce permanently
out of reach of fathers. It immutably precludes fatherly involvement
in child development in the years following divorce.
But do the facts bear out our trust, or is it
all illusory? Are we prepared to face a prospect where cosy
reassuring myths explode into fictions?
The truth is: mothers kill more babies and young
children than fathers do, and women abuse more children than
men do.
In fact, the highest probability of being murdered
is not as an adolescent in a pub brawl or in your 20s being
mugged or attacked in your own home; it's in the first months
and years of life.
The likelihood of infant death is 27 per million
compared with the national average of 14 per million.
Closer examination of the facts reveals that
baby boys under 12 months old are more likely to be murdered
than girls: 55 and 42 per million respectively.
'In 1992 only 385 deaths of under one-year-olds
were reported as homicides' (Criminal Statistics England and
Wales 1996. Home Office.) This would seem to suggest that
further deaths were ascribed to other causes. It is interesting
to note that the indictments for infanticide (an exclusively
female defence for child murder: i.e. yet another attempt
to cover up violence by women) totalled no more than 4 in
that year. (Source as above.)
Figures for other years from the same source
show that in 1995 when there were 754 deaths in England and
Wales, initially recorded as homicides, show a clear 66:33
split between male and female victims and one is left to wonder
where the infant homicides have gone.
In October 1997 surveillance cameras in a baby
ward videod 34 women out of 39 attempting to smother or seriously
harm their babies. (BBC TV news. North Staffordshire Hospital.)
Approximately 60% of all women murderers premeditate their
act. (Justice Quarterly March 1988)
The figures for child abuse are similarly disturbing.
It is estimated that some 35,000 suffer abuse every year with
many thousands being taken into care every year.
Of the children on the NSPCC Protection Register,
60% lived either with their mother alone or with their mother
and her boyfriend, or father substitute.
Not only does 60% of abuse and neglect stem
from mothers but the figure seems almost the 'standard' in
many developed countries, e.g. UK, US, Canada and Australia.
At last, some of the few remaining taboos have
been broken; researchers are now asking about child sexual
abuse by women, now estimated at 35% or more of all reported
child sexual abuse. (BBC Panorama Child Sexual Abuse by Women.)
This compares with the more openly admitted and traditional
non-sexual abuse/neglect of children by women where the incidence
rate is about 60%.
A seminal British study, the Family Court Reporter
Survey 1982 - 88 for England and Wales, confirms that a child
is safest when his biological parents are married and least
safe when his mother is cohabiting with a man other than her
husband. The same report presents concrete evidence that children
are between 20 to 33 times safer living with their married,
biological parents than in any other family configuration.
The rate of abuse is 33 times higher if a child
is living with a mother who is cohabiting with another man.
Similar risks apply in cases of fatal child
abuse where the overwhelming number of child deaths occurred
in households in which the child's biological mother was cohabiting
with someone who was unrelated to the child. This clearly
demonstrates how dangerous divorce can be for children.
The above report deals only in well established
facts and clearly gives the lie to those supporters of lone
parenthood. When Claire Rayner and others say that 'To assume
that having two parents together is necessarily better is
one of the fantasies' they are clearly indulging in woolly
thinking which flies in the face of these facts.
It is this woolly thinking, and the reluctance
in the UK to face hard and unpleasant facts, which do not
fit society's preconceived ideas, that prevents research into
such subjects as female abuse of children, and, when such
research is undertaken, to prevent its publication.
However, for those readers who wish to check
out the facts for themselves I print below two lists of research
papers etc from Canada and the USA which have better track
records in such research. Given the fact that in all research
into family matters, the similarity in all Western countries
is amazingly close, I think we can ignore the fact that the
evidence is not UK based.
Child abusers are more likely to be women -
Richard Gelles 1979 quoted in the Health and Welfare Canada
Report 1989, Family Violence: a Review of Theoretical and
Clinical Literature.
Seven out of ten cases of examined women were
the abusers of children - Bonnie & Scalre 1969.
Mothers are perpetrators of abuse upon children
at least equally with fathers. - Senator Anne Cools (Canada)
1995.
In 1986 a child abuse morbidiity analysis of
100 children (covering the years 1973 - 1982) who suffered
abuse and/or neglect and who subsequently died, found that
mothers were the largest perpetrators. Mothers accounted for
38 deaths, fathers accounted for 12 and 13 were ascribed to
both parents. - Dr Cyril Greenland, University of Toronto.
Physical abuse of children is the only form
of family violence in which women are the perpetrators as
often as men - Brienes & Gordon, The Health and Welfare
Canada report 1989, Family Violence: a Review of Theoretical
and Clinical Literature.
In 50 out of 57 cases, women were found to be
the child abuser. -Steel & Pollock 1969.
Evidence was found that mothers are more likely
than fathers to be abusive. - Bell 1986
Mothers were identified in 38.7% of cases as
the abuser and fathers 18.4% rising to 31% where cohabitation
i.e. boyfriends or stepfathers were involved. - Benedict et
al 1985.
Mothers and mother substitutes are suspected
abusers in 44% of cases and fathers and father substitutes
in 46.5% of cases. -Creighton 1979.
In 1993 there were 46,683 child maltreatment
investigations undertaken by all 54 children's aid societies.
The study defined child maltreatment as any one of: physical
abuse, sexual abuse, neglect or emotional maltreatment. The
findings are as follows:
Total number of cases substantiated of child
maltreatment showed that mothers were responsible for 49%
of all cases and fathers 31% of all cases.
In the category of child neglect, mother perpetrated
85% of cases.
In the category of physical abuse mothers perpetrated
39% of cases and biological fathers 40%.
In the category of emotional maltreatment, mothers
were found responsible for 79% of all substantiated cases.
Mothers were also highlighted as being heavily
involved in physical abuse, especially in the newly born (zero
months) to the three-year-old category.
Significantly, 59% of all cases regarded abuse
to boy babies by their mothers. This bias continued through
into the age group 4 to 11 where recordings showed 55% of
cases involved boy children.
The largest single family group/style at 35%
was the single mother unit. - Dr Cyril Greenland. University
of Toronto.
USA: (Compiled 1996)
Over one third (36%) of children in America
today do not live with their biological father. US Marriage
/ 6.
Children from disrupted marriages were 70% more
likely than those living with both biological parents to have
been expelled or suspended. - Dawson.
Children of divorce are twice as likely as children
from intact families to drop out of school. - Zill 1993.
Of juveniles and young adults serving in long
term correctional facilities, 70% did not live with both parents
growing up. - US Marriage / 6 (Age of majority in USA is 21)
Appximately 60% of all murderesses premeditate
their murder. - Coramae Rochey Mann, Getting Even? Women Who
Kill in Domestic Encounters. Justice Quarterly. March
Reproduced
with kind permission from R J Whiston
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