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Who Kills Children? Re-Examining the Evidence

Bibliographic Data

ID10894854
AuthorsC Pritchard (0000-0002-6837-2519, Institute of Social Work, corresponding author), Jonathan Davey (Institute of Social Work), Richard Williams (0000-0001-9974-8307, Institute of Social Work)
Year2013
Volume43
Issue7
Pages1403-1438
Publication date2013-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal of Social Work (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0045-3102 • E-ISSN: 1468-263X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/bjsw/bcs051
OpenAlexW2109356581
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited82

Violent children's deaths have become a surrogate indicator of effective child protection but can those who kill children be better identified? A decade-long study of child homicide assailants (population of 2.5 million) is re-examined in the context of nineteen Western nations' child mortality rates and child-abuse-related deaths, correlated with four international measures of relative poverty, focusing on income inequality. Child mortality rates of the nineteen countries were ranked and correlated with levels of poverty. Child mortality and poverty strongly correlated but, unexpectedly, child-abuse-related deaths did not. Child homicide assailants are extremely rare, but three distinct within-family assailant categories can be identified: mentally ill parents, mothers with a child on the Child Protection Register and men with previous convictions for violence. Mentally ill parents were the most frequent assailants, but violent men killed over five times the rate of mentally ill parents. The juxtaposed results indicate that the assailants' problems are essentially psycho-criminological, especially violence, rather than socio-economic, although poverty worsens most situations. Despite the dangers of ‘false positives’, children's services need to give greater weighting to the child protection–psychiatric–violence interface to assist front line staff in improving risk assessment and contribute to reducing the impact that parental mental illness can have on the child.

Child abuse · Child protection · Context (archaeology) · Environmental health · Geography · Homicide · Injury prevention · Mental health · Mental illness · Mentally ill · Poison control · Political science · Population · Poverty · Psychiatry · Sociology · Child Abuse and Trauma · Demography · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse · Intimate Partner and Family Violence · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology

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Unique citing works11
Citations per year0,92
Citation span2014 - 2023 (10)
Citation velocityhistorical
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 11
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