Why is Chronic Maltreatment Pervasive Yet Rarely Addressed?

These blogs in Marie Cohen’s Child Welfare Monitor and Dee Wilson’s Sounding Board explore chronic maltreatment, which is a combination of long-term neglect, physical and/or sexual abuse and emotional neglect and abuse.  They cite studies claiming that these cases account for up to one-half of child welfare expenditures. The consequences for children are life – diminishing trauma and sometimes death.

Many cases in our upcoming study of child fatalities in Minnesota fit this pattern.  Here, child protection often responded to individual maltreatment reports in isolation, screening them out or offering limited services, while ignoring obvious long-term patterns. Services were frequently offered late in the game, after children had suffered irreversible damage.

The authors of these blogs suggest that the solution is early intervention by multi-disciplinary teams. That is a daunting challenge which would require enormous systemic change.