Drug Abuse

Question by cutecandie: How many parents are unaware that they’re abusing their children?
I just need to know how many parents are unintentionally abusing their kids for this project I’m doing at school. I need an actual number or percent, statistic. Thanx!!!

Best answer:

Answer by RuthAnn
I don’t know if this will help or not, but I am betting that most parents who physically abuse their children are aware that what they are doing is not proper, while the parents who are emotionally abusing their kids are less aware of what they are doing. Probably very difficult to get statistics on mental abuse because those cases are under reported for sure.

Answer by Joe
I don’t think it’s possible to assign a number to this – at least not one that can be considered anything but a guess.

Numbers on child abuse are already unreliable because so much of it goes unreported. You’re asking here to divide that unreported value into people who know they’re abusing their kids, and those that don’t. You could probably assign a number to this, but I don’t think you could back it up with evidence.

All that being said, by far the most common form of abuse is neglect, and that is, in my opinion, perhaps the most likely case where a parent wouldn’t be aware that what they are doing would be considered abuse. If my assumption is valid, that would imply that parents being unaware that they are abusing their children is more common than people might guess. This idea is also supported by the fact that even experts on child welfare aren’t always in agreement about what constitutes neglect.

If you want to try to pin down some kind of a number, google “child abuse statistics.” You’ll get loads of results, a couple of which I’ve listed below. I’ve also linked an interesting article on neglect.