Child Physical Abuse Characteristics, Prevalence, Health and Risk‐taking

Sammanfattning: The home is supposed to provide support and safety for children but can also be the place where children suffer abuse and other adverse treatment by their parents. Violence against children in homes has been banned in Sweden for more than 30 years but it is still a considerable problem in the society and a threat to public health. The overall aim of this thesis was to create comprehensive knowledge of the phenomenon Child Physical Abuse (CPA) in Sweden after the ban on corporal punishment. The focus has been on examining the characteristics of cases reported to the police as well as self-reported CPA, prevalence of CPA and finally associations between CPA and health-problems/risk-taking behaviors among adolescents.Two samples are used in this thesis. The first comprises cases reported to the police during 11 years (n=142) in a Swedish police-district and the second is a population-based youth survey of the total number of pupils in three different school grades (13, 15 and 17 years old) in Södermanland County, Sweden.Cases of severe abuse constituted 14 % of the total number of cases reported to the police. The main difference between the group of severe cases and the remaining was the higher occurrence of convictions in court in the severe cases and the pattern of reporting to the police. The severe cases were reported by agencies to a greater degree than minor cases. Cases of severe abuse were characterized by an accumulation of risk factors in different areas as perpetrator factors, stress- and strain factors, factors of insufficient social network and finally child-related factors.In the cross-sectional study a prevalence of 15 % was found for self-reported CPA (n=8 494). There were associations between risk factors in different areas and abuse and there was a dos-response relationship between risks and reported abuse. It was shown that children who reported parental intimate-partner violence were at considerably higher risk for CPA than other children and that only 7 % of the children exposed to violence had disclosed this to authorities.The study of associations between health and risk-taking behaviors, were performed among the 15 and 17 years old pupils (n=5 933). Associations with health-problems and risk-taking behaviors were shown and the associations became stronger when the pupils reported repeated abuse. Finally there was a cumulative effect of multiple abuse in the form of being exposed to child physical abuse plus other types of abuse (parental intimate partner violence, bullying and being forced to engage in sexual acts) and the associations increased with the number of concurrent abuse.