ample, Zellman (1990) conducted a national survey of legally mandated reporters of abuse (physicians, psychologists, and school staff) discovering that even under conditions where the reporting of abuse was required by law, a substantial number of survey respondents failed to report incidences of child abuse, usually due to lack of evidence or perceived problems with child protective agencies. Other reasons that abuse goes unreported include children failing to state what happened for reasons of fear or shame, and incidences where physical abuse is not sufficiently severe to require medical attention or hospitalization (Tomlinson-Keasey, 1985).
A discussion of why statistics on child abuse tend to under-estimate the situation has been presented by Hallett (1988) who notes that definitions of what causes child physical or sexual abuse vary tremendously from agency to agency and that this makes it extremely difficult to arrive at accurate estimates. Hallett feels that these diverse definitions are the result of the fact that despite numerous studies, there is a lack of understanding regarding how diverse contributors interact with one another and so produce abuse. The next section of this report presents a review of the literature on these contributors.
Factors That Place Children At Risk For Child Abuse
The effort to understand child abuse has led to hundreds of studies aimed at determining those conditions that place children at risk; a large subset of these studies have examined for traits, characteristics, attitudes and attributes that distinguish abusive parents or families from non-abusive parents or families. In this regard, Hickox and Furnell (1989) observed that abusive parents tend to have poorer coping skills, poorer interpersonal relationship skills, and poorer child management skills than non-abusive parents.
Also, Hickox and Furnell (1989) observed that abusive parents had higher levels of perceived stress, ...