Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 37, Issue 10, October 2013, Pages 841-851
Child Abuse & Neglect

The prevalence of child maltreatment in the Netherlands across a 5-year period

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.07.004Get rights and content

Abstract

The prevalence of child maltreatment in the Netherlands was in 2005 first systematically examined in the Netherlands’ Prevalence study on Maltreatment of children and youth (NPM-2005), using sentinel reports and substantiated CPS cases, and in the Pupils on Abuse study (PoA-2005), using high school students’ self-report. In this second National Prevalence study on Maltreatment (NPM-2010), we used the same three methods to examine the prevalence of child maltreatment in 2010, enabling a cross-time comparison of the prevalence of child maltreatment in the Netherlands. First, 1,127 professionals from various occupational branches (sentinels) reported each child for whom they suspected child maltreatment during a period of three months. Second, we included 22,661 substantiated cases reported in 2010 to the Dutch Child Protective Services. Third, 1,920 high school students aged 12–17 years filled out a questionnaire on their experiences of maltreatment in 2010. The overall prevalence of child maltreatment in the Netherlands in 2010 was 33.8 per 1,000 children based on the combined sentinel and CPS reports and 99.4 per 1,000 adolescents based on self-report. Major risk factors for child maltreatment were parental low education, immigrant status, unemployment, and single parenthood. We found a large increase in CPS-reports, whereas prevalence rates based on sentinel and self-report did not change between 2005 and 2010. Based on these findings a likely conclusion is that the actual number of maltreated children has not increased from 2005 to 2010, but that professionals have become more aware of child maltreatment, and more likely to report cases to CPS.

Section snippets

Participants

Sentinels, i.e. professionals from organizations within several occupational branches (Table 1) were sampled by randomly selecting organizations and sentinels within these organizations. In order to obtain a geographically representative sample, the number of sentinels within each occupational group was equal across five zones, covering geographical areas in the Netherlands with approximately equal numbers of children. Whenever an organization or professional did not participate, a new

Prevalence estimates

96,175 children or 2.7% of all children were victim of child maltreatment in the Netherlands in 2010, based on sentinel reports (Table 2). Child sexual abuse was the least reported type of maltreatment by the sentinels: 3% of all victims experienced this type of abuse. Physical and emotional neglect were the most frequently reported types of maltreatment, with 37% and 72% of all victims, respectively (Table 2). Numbers of maltreated children per type of maltreatment do not match with the total

Discussion

The overall prevalence of child maltreatment in the Netherlands has remained relatively stable across a 5-year period. The second Netherlands’ Prevalence study of Maltreatment of children and youth shows a prevalence of 118,836 children or 33.8 per 1,000 children between 0 and 17 years of age in 2010, based on sentinel and CPS reports, with highest prevalence rates for physical and emotional neglect. This prevalence rate based on sentinel-reports did not differ significantly from the prevalence

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Renate Bahlman, Marleen de Borst, Marjanne van Esveld, Annette van Noort, Angela Scheepers, Anne-Fleur Vischer, Joke Larrewijn-Schillemans, Anita Pronk, Lieneke Jooren, Rosanne Schoorl, Sake Schoorl en Aram Limpens for their assistance during various phases of this project.

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    The study was supported by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, and by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (MJBK: VICI Grant no. 453-09-003; MHvIJ: NWO SPINOZA prize).

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