Child abuse more likely during deployments

[CommunityEditor]

In Army enlisted families with at least one incident of child abuse, the children are far more likely to be abused during deployments, researchers have found.

And the type of abuse is likely to be child neglect at the hands of their mothers, according to a study to be published in the Aug. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by researchers at RTI International and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health.

The study looked at Army families with at least one substantiated report of child abuse and had at least one combat-related deployment during the 40-month period between September 2001 and December 2004. Within those families, the rate of child abuse during soldier deployments was 42 percent higher than when the soldier was not deployed.

Only enlisted families are represented in the study; the data included only 49 officer families, too small a sample to analyze, the researchers stated. For the same reasons, they excluded 156 families in which the soldier was not married to the civilian parent, and nine families in which both husband and wife were soldiers. Thus, out of 1,985 families who met the initial criteria, 1,771 families were included in the study.

“The greatest increase we see during deployments is the increase in child neglect,” which is a category of child abuse, said Deborah Gibbs, a senior health analyst at RTI and the study’s lead author. The study was funded by the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

The civilian mother committed child abuse during the time the soldier-husband was deployed at a rate three times greater than when he was not deployed. The rate of child neglect was four times greater. Rates of child abuse for male civilian parents were not greater, researchers noted, suggesting that the two groups may be different in terms of the stress they experience, or how they mobilize resources to help them during deployments.

There may be several reasons for the increase in child neglect among civilian mothers, Gibbs said. “Maybe male parents are more likely to commit child physical abuse. Or, one of the ways the civilian parent left at home responds is by getting overwhelmed with the situation, and may not be keeping up with the child’s needs or supervising the child.”

Nevertheless, researchers concluded, there is a need for still more support; at-risk parents need more services that they will be likely to seek out and accept.

Gibbs cautioned that this study does not prove that deployments cause child abuse, nor does anyone know this. “It’s important to recognize that the large majority of families who are deployed do not experience child abuse,” she said. “But in this relatively small group, the rates are much higher during deployment. Within every population there are those who are vulnerable, and this kind of added stress will hit them hard.”

This research does not compare the entire Army population of soldiers who have deployed to determine what percentage had child abuse in the family.

“Because researchers really limited their sample, they can’t draw a comparative analysis” about the effects of deployments, said Christine Hansen, director of the Miles Foundation, which provides advocacy and support services for victims of violence in the military community. “They can only make conclusions based on this sample.”

Gibbs said she would like to do a study on Marine Corps incidents of child abuse, as well as National Guard and Reserve families, which were not included in this research. It would be more challenging to get the data, she noted, “but on so many more levels there are more reasons to be concerned,” she said. “It’s entirely possible that Reserve and Guard families experience at least as much stress, without access to services that active-duty families have.”



Full article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...abuse_070731w/