F.A.C.T. Information: Child Abuse and Neglect
More great information is available through F.A.C.T. See our home page at www.fact.on.ca

Violence against children has been in recent years linked to violence against women. This link has come about solely as the result of posturing to gain political power and to attain funds for anti-family groups. Read the literature pumped out in vast quantities by the "violence panic" industry, an industry with includes now the Federal and Provincial Governments, the United Way and various other charitable organisations that have swallowed the hook. Children are removed like property and kept from fathers because "he just might some day be violent because men are violent."

In reality, violence against children is perpetrated by both men and women. Statistics in Canada have been suppressed the reality, but we can see from the US that the actual incidence of violence, with the exception of sexual abuse, is higher from women and mothers than from men and fathers. In addition, moderate or severe injury is more often the result of abuse from women than from men. The death of children from violence is largely a crime of women. Politically, it is expedient in both countries to ignore all but the most severe cases of abuse instigated by women, but to have mandatory charging of men. When women do kill children, it is often not something were charges are laid, or called "neglect" or "manslaughter", not murder. This shows up in the arrest statistics in both countries very strongly.

The issue should really not be which gender is the most violent toward children, but should be in protecting the children. Removal of a child from a parent is a form of emotional abuse that should not be tolerated as anything other than a method of the last resort. The brainwashing of Parental Alienation (see our separate section on this) is abuse that is widely practice. Incidents where both parents abuse or neglect children must also be considered - should society be moving towards wide spread seizure of children? Hedy Fry, Minister of State for the Status of Women, during her testimony before the Special Joint Committee on Custody and Access, stated that "we find that only one-third of parents in Canada give children the necessary environment for their well-being" - should 2/3 of Canadian children become wards of the State?

In PDF format, Explaining the Rise in Youth Suicide by David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Karen E. Norberg of Harvard Institute of Economic Research, Discussion Paper Number 1917 from March 2001. This article is an interesting study of youth suicide in the US. I would note that while it is incorrect in the decreasing suicide rates of adult males, it finds that "the rise in youth suicide over time, the most important explanatory variable is the increased share of youths living in homes with a divorced parent." Yes, once again it is clear that divorce is NOT in the best interests of the children. This paper are also available through http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=263440 or http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2000papers/2000list.html.

In PDF format, Homicides of Children and Youth by David Finkelhor and Richard Ormrod is a publication of U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by two world-respected researchers. The section on homicides of children mentions this fact, a fact hidden by the politics, including in Canada:

Homicides by Females

In general, women kill much less frequently than men. However, one-quarter of the victims in killings by women are juveniles. Women are responsible for 43 percent of the deaths of children under age 12 who are killed by identifiable persons, a percentage that has been relatively stable since the 1980s (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1997). Women overwhelmingly kill very young children (75 percent of their juvenile victims are under age 6) and members of their family (79 percent). Thus, women who kill are heavily concentrated in child maltreatment homicides and infanticides. Consistent with these types of crimes, women are more likely than men to use their hands and feet as weapons (54 percent versus 22 percent). Women are less likely than men to use a firearm to kill a child (17 percent versus 63 percent). Interestingly, 20 percent of the homicides of children committed by female offenders involve an additional offender, almost always a male accomplice (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1997). Women who kill children are more likely to be labeled mentally ill than men who kill children and are somewhat more likely to commit suicide (Silverman and Kennedy, 1988). Researchers also have highlighted differences between young, unmarried females who commit infanticide (often by suffocation or strangulation) and older, married females who beat children to death in child maltreatment homicides (Silverman and Kennedy, 1988).

Here are some of the statistics and reports on Child Abuse and Neglect.

FACT newsletter concerning a U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services Study indicating that women are the main perpetrators of abuse of children 77% of the time that the child protection agencies investigate.
The DHHS 2003 Child Maltreatment Study (also in PDF format).
The DHHS 2002 Child Maltreatment Study (also in PDF format).
The DHHS 2001 Child Maltreatment Study (also in PDF format).
The DHHS 2000 Child Maltreatment Study (also in PDF format).
The DHHS 1999 Child Maltreatment Study (also in PDF format for the first time).
The DHHS 1998 Child Maltreatment Study.
The DHHS 1997 Child Maltreatment Study.
The DHHS 1996 Child Maltreatment Study (the source of the above statistics).
The DHHS 1995 Child Maltreatment Study.
 
The US's NIS-3 study, expanded data sources to include untrained people (e.g. sheriff's offices), but still indicate the patterns of maltreatment for various types of parents. The report indicates that natural parents account for some 78% of child maltreatment and, of that 46% of the time the natural father was involved and 75% of the time the natural mother was involved (sometimes both were involved). It also notes that natural mothers tend to inflict more fatal (78% of the time, too low to measure for natural fathers), serious (81% vs. 43%) and moderate (72% vs 48%) abuse on the child than do natural fathers. You can see this from these NIS tables from Chapter 6 in PDF format. For those with the desire for more information we have the entire Chapter 6 in PDF format. We would recommend that you look at attaining the entire report from DHHS if this information is relevant to you.

The Canadian government, on the other hand, has as part of its on-going policy of reporting only gender-biased statistics at minimal cost restricts its studies. Victimisation studies cover only adults, not children. What statistics there are reflect only those where "police reports" are taken (i.e. cases where charges are laid), and this reflects the refusal to prosecture women abusers in Canada even when there is very strong and solid evidence of the abuse. This policy is generally put in place by ignorant judges who are not interested in the interests of the child, and Attorney-General offices that will not permit prosecutors to take cases to trial when they feel that thre is not a very, very high probability of conviction. It should be noted that such rules to not apply to men who may or may not have been present. This type of biased reporting can been seen in the Statistics Canada PDF publication Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile 1998, StatsCan publication 85-224-XIE. While much of this report is just a regurgitation of the highly 1993 report on spousal violence, the information on the children is apparently new.

While Statistics Canada does, albeit in more obscure publications, recognise the differences between Police-Reported and Victim-Reported crimes as being signficantly different -- especially as they put out scarey (and questionable) articles about levels of violence. Their discussion, which is not complete can be found in An Overview of the Differences between Police-Reported and Victim-Reported Crime, 1997, StatsCan publication 85-542-XIE.

Health Canada, in one of those fits of rationality before Alan Rock became the Minister, actually took a look at being male-inclusive in looking at the nature and impact of abuse and violence on boys. The end result was a revealing 1996 by Frederick Mathews, Ph.D., C. Psych. study entitled The Invisible Boy - Revisioning the Victimization of Male Children and Teens . This study, long hidden by Health Canada and available in paper form only to those who knew about it, is now available on the internet in HTML format at http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hppb/familyviolence/html/nfntsxinvisible_e.html, and in PDF format at http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hppb/familyviolence/pdfs/invisib.pdf.

Recently, however, the Canadian government, has taken to producing politically charged and not very well done reports based on limited data with lots of "politically correct" interpretations, and additional redefinitions of abuse in order to support the politics. These have the potential of turning into some better studies, as under the US reporting system for Child Protection Agencies, but to date are poor and reflect the politics and financial interests of the agencies and their workers. The studies are dangerous as a result, especially when people extract without reading and understanding the slanted stats and biases. On the other hand, slanted or not, they could not keep reality from leaking through in many places. You can find two reports at available through Health Canada:

This material comes out of the Bell Canada's Child Welfare Research Unit based at the University of Toronto which has a website at http://cwr.utoronto.ca/. Yet another monopoly, who you are forced to deal with, promoting bad politics.

Abuse can take a much more serious turn when the "memories of abuse" are inflicted on children by an incompetant or unscrupulous professional interviewer. This is easier said that what many of the practionners would like you to think. The American Coalition for Fathers and Children has an excellent web site with considerable information on it, that is referred to throughout this web site. In particular, this induced abuse is covered in an excellect article (in PDF format) that they have available by William Bennett, MD entitled Case Study: of Abuse Created in a Single Interview who discusses detailed memories being implanted after children are subjected to repetitive, suggestive, and leading questions during a single interview.

The ACFC site also contains two other excellent articles on false allegations of child abuse from Dr. Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield of the Institute for Psychological Therapies. Both articles are in PDF format. One article, entitled Techniques For Interviewing Children In Sexual Abuse Cases, deals with 319 cases of alleged child sexual abuse and the implantaton of memories by the techniques used by the multiple interviewers dealing with such children. The other article, Personality Characteristics of Falsely Accusing Parents In Custody Disputes, (presented at the Sixth Annual Symposium of Forensic Psychology in Las Vegas NV on March 13, 1990) indicates that 77% of the divorce-linked sex abuse cases coming to the Human Sexuality Program at the University of Minnesota turned out to be "hoax" cases.

The War Against Boys, October 24, 1996, Boston Globe newspaper

Abuse, Indeed! by Ron Montgomery, Balance Magazine, spring 1998 edition

(Victims of Domestic Violence Act) by Garth Wood, Associate Editor, Balance Magazine, December 29, 1996

The inter-generational transmission of violence by abusive wives to their children has been demonstrated by Walker (1984). In her study of over 400 battered wives, 29% of the wives and 35% of the battering husbands had witnessed their mother inflicting violence upon their father during childhood.

Certainly, we see time and time again that, the permanent removal of children from male parents for who it it even suggested could have been, or may be in the future, violent towards a spouse because a child may witness it. It does not work both ways. In particular, with there is proven extremely violent women who go so far as to actually kill their spouse, the woman is not jailed, and it is children are left with the woman. Is there a better way of teaching children that killing people really does not matter?

There are two sample Canadian cases of this are Lilian Getkate in Ottawa, and Deanna Emard in Vancouver. The stories, as told in the news papers follows:

  1. Lilian Getkate
     

     
  2. Deanna Emard
     

     

New Book
Tragic Tolerance .... of Domestic Violence
by Paul Szabo, Member of Parliament of Canada

This is a consolidation of surfing the net and doing a lot of research. He plageurizes from Christina Hoff Somers, Gelles, Straus, Children's Rights Council video tape on the Illinois Visitation Interference law, Richard Gardner, The Journal of the American Medical Association article "Battered Men" and just about everything you've read concerning domestic violence of men and children. It has stats on the fact that 25% of women going to battered women's shelters are not battered but are using them as a hostel and that the gender feminists want to build up the stats on abused women. It has some interesting testimony from the Special Joint Committee on Custody and Access. Paul Szabo was on the panel for some of the Toronto, Ontario hearings. It's great!!! We have the complete book on this website, click here. The book was paid for by the taxpayors of Canada and is free!!!!

Paul Szabo
Member of Parliament, Mississauga South
Room 175
Confederation Building
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0A6
(613) 992-4848 or fax: (613) 996-3267
In Canada, you can mail the above address without any postage
or
1684 Lakeshore Rd. W., Unit 20
Mississauga, Ontario L5J 1J5
(905) 822-2111 fax: (905) 822-2115


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