US Kids Suffer Alarmingly High Rates of Assault, Abuse, Study

A new study has revealed that more than one third of children in the US have been subjected to physical violence - mostly by their peers or siblings in the past year.

The researchers then go on to state that one in 20 children have been physically abused by a caregiver or parent during the same time period.

"Children are the most victimized segment of the population," said study author David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. "The full burden of this tends to be missed because many national crime indicators either do not include the experience of all children or don't look at the big picture and include all the kinds of violence to which children are exposed."

For the study, the researchers conducted telephone interviews of over 4000 children and teenagers. These children were aged between 10 to 17 and were asked questions on whether they were exposed to violence or other forms of physical abuse in the last year.

Caregivers answered questions during the study for children younger than 9 years.

From their findings, it was observed that over 37 percent of children and teenagers had been physically assaulted by either their peers or siblings while 9 percent of the participants ended up being injured from the assault.

Fifteen percent of the participants were found to have been mistreated by either the caregiver or the parent. Grounds for mistreatment include emotional and physical abuse and interfering with the child's custody arrangements like refusing to allow the kid to see another parent or talk to that person on the phone.

The researchers also found that 6 percent of the participants actually saw their parents physically assaulting each other.

  "Violence and abuse in childhood are big drivers behind many of our most serious health and social problems," Finkelhor said. "They are associated with later drug abuse, suicide, criminal behavior, mental illness and chronic diseases like diabetes."

"The dizzying array of statistics from this study are sobering and depressing to me as a parent and pediatrician, and they should be of great concern to public health experts and policy makers nationwide," said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York.

"These statistics should prompt public health experts and policy makers nationwide to commit greater resources to insure that, going forward, children and adolescents are neither exposed to -- nor the victim of -- so many different forms of violence," he said