The Effects of Child Abuse into Adulthood

Child abuse is complex in nature and generates many opinions (Miller-Perrin & Perrin, 2013). According to the world report on violence and health (2), child maltreatment refers to “all forms of physical and/or emotional or sexual abuse, deprivation and neglect of children, or commercial or other exploitation resulting in harm to the child’s health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power.” Normally known as child abuse, it occurs in all types of societies around the world. Several factors contribute to the existence of an environment that exposes a child to being maltreated by the parents or other adult caregivers. Parents who abuse alcohol and substances have been found to be the most likely offenders for child abuse. Poverty is also one among the major causes for this type of problem creating pressures on parents who find themselves abusive to their children. Dysfunctional homes, as well as life stresses, create a suitable environment within which child maltreatment can thrive. Child abuse has negative impacts later in life for the victim. This paper sets out to determine the causes of current societal problems including child abuse, youth delinquency, and gang membership. It also discusses the need for parental intervention programs and their effectiveness, evidence around program implementation, as well as the types of evaluations for program effectiveness.

Causes of Societal Problems at Hand

The societal problems at hand include undernourishment, neglected young girls and boys, child abuse, runaway boys and girls, school failure, and youth delinquency. Undernourishment is caused by lack of enough food to sustain the physiological functions of a child. This is largely caused by poverty, in that; there are inadequate resources to provide enough food. Child neglect involves the refusal or delay by a parent or guardian in providing the necessary health care, education and other basic things including food, clothing, shelter, love and attention, as well as the lack of supervision. Hardcastle & Sethi concur on the moral and legal obligation to the society to protect children, stating the role played by strong legislation and enforcements on child abuse as well as the implementation of evidence-based parental intervention programs, in protecting children from harm for their healthy development (2015).

Findings by the Child Welfare League of America concluded that children belonging to those parents who abuse drugs and alcohol are thrice as much exposed to abuse and four times susceptible to being neglected as compared to those children whose parents do not (Alister Lamont, 2009). The findings go further to ascertain that poverty and parental substance abuse account for eighty-five percent of reported cases of child abuse and neglect. In addition, those parents who abuse and neglect their children also have a history of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse and neglect as children. There are various reasons for school failure ranging from physical to emotional. Poverty is also one of the major reasons, and also peer pressure as well as the lack of parental support. The main cause for youth crime is attributed to the family. As the basic socialization agency, concepts about good and bad are primarily learned by children there. Being the building block of the society, societal values and norms are established in the family. As such, the family can support or destroy the personality of their children. Members of the family including parents as well as siblings play a major role in shaping one’s personality and behavior.

Certain theories have been put forward to explain the causes of delinquency. These theories include strain theories, control theories, and the theories of cultural deviance. Defiant adolescents demonstrating delinquent behavior most likely come from those families that do not offer the necessary support for their growth and development. Problems in the family go a long way in affecting children behavior. Divorced parents, separated families, single parent families, parent fights, the absence of trust and confidence between parents, parents with criminal records and parents with psychological problems may all contribute towards delinquent juveniles. It is the responsibility of both the siblings as well as the parents to shape the child’s personality and behavior. Children are bound to emulate the behaviors demonstrated by their parents and older siblings as their early role models because they are motivated to do so. There are also other problems in the family that can greatly contribute to a child engaging in criminal activities (Hirschi, 2002). 

According to the strain theories, man naturally desires to conform to societal norms and must be under great pressure to have the need for defiance. Economic problems in the family may exert pressure to the youth as they want to improve their status and thus engage in crime through negative ways. Teenagers from poor family backgrounds often do not get support from people and as a result, they opt for criminal activities. The existence of psychological problems in the family may also pose a risk factor for youth crime. When parents have mental illnesses or other related psychological problems such as aggression, depression, hyper behavior or frustration, the child will be negatively affected as he/she may feel inferior among friends and as a way out of this problem, the child may find solace in crime. Social problems also play a big role in youth involvement in the crime. These problems may include racial discrimination, age discrimination, gender discrimination and child labor among others (Hirshi, 2002). 

A child may develop stress as a result of being exposed to these problems and consequently get involved in violence. Moral problems in the family also pose a risk factor, morality being an important issue among teens in the contemporary society. It is important that the youth learn to respect people both in their family and those outside their families. When parents and older siblings do not show respect to their elders, the children will learn from them and demonstrate the same behavior towards other people. Control theorists explain the variation of the importance of morality to different people, with those who don’t value it becoming defiant (Hirschi, 2002). Parenting style also matters in determining the criminal behavior portrayed by a child. Harsh parents who often punish their children for trivial issues may harden them leading to disrespect as well as violence in these children. The other problem in the society is teen pregnancy. This problem may arise following peer pressure, drinking, rape, sexual abuse, ignorance; absent parents etc. Teenagers may not take precautions while engaging in sexual activity, as they do not believe that they can get pregnant.

Peer pressure leads to teenagers desiring to fit in with their friends and may even allow these friends to influence their decisions about engaging in sex. This situation is best explained by cultural defiance theories which see deviant behavior as conforming to a set of standards that are unacceptable by the larger society (Hirshi, 2002). They think that by doing this they’ll appear sophisticated, not knowing the adverse consequences of unwanted pregnancy. Some of them may not even want to engage in sex but because they are afraid of being ridiculed by their peer, they do it anyway. Parents provide guidance to their children and when they are absent; their children lack the necessary advice. Many parents find themselves with a busy schedule that does not allow them to have enough time with their children and cannot, therefore, offer the much-needed support and guidance to their teenage girls in making important decisions concerning sex. Langham agrees that teenage girls need someone to talk to about such issues, and when the parents are not around, she will talk to her friends who may misinform her, resulting in teen pregnancy (2015). 

The Need for Parenting Interventions

Parenting interventions refer to a structured set of activities given to primary caregivers with the objective of instilling positive parenting behaviors in order to achieve positive behavior in children (Alleyne & Joshua, 2015). Parenting interventions help parents or another primary caregiver to nurture, provide discipline, teach, monitor and manage the children in a way that is deemed effective in assisting the children to have positive growth and development. There is a dire need for parenting interventions in order to assist parents and other caregivers to bring up the children in a responsible manner. There has been an increase in the level of child maltreatment as well as poor parenting which results in high costs to the society as a whole. Due to maltreatment, children undergo many deleterious consequences such as stunted growth, physical injury, psychological problems, future deviant behaviors such as substance abuse and violence, and in extreme cases, children deaths (Kumpfer, 2012). This calls for the need to prevent child maltreatment through the dissemination of parenting programs. 

According to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN), poverty and parental substance abuse are the two top most culprits for child maltreatment, as they account for more than 80% of such cases as reported to child protective services in America (Holzer & Higgins, 2006). Raising a happy, healthy and productive child requires a supporting family, which also eliminates the risk of the child later developing adolescent problems. According to most developmental theories, the family plays a critical role in the child’s upbringing. The contemporary society is too busily engrossed in commercial activities to the extent that the importance of parents in the family as the core unit of the society seems to have been forgotten.

For the past two decades, peers have been known to have a great influence on the child’s behavior and parents have resigned to the notion that they do not matter anymore, thus leaving their children at the mercy of peer pressure. This line of thought may not be completely true though. Researchers have discovered that parents have a larger influence on their teens as opposed to previous thoughts. According to (Kemmet, 2013), parents may feel that they have been replaced by their children’s friends but research shows that this is not the case; peers have only become more important than they previously were, but parents remain a vital influence. As much as peer pressure is the main factor for adolescents engaging in negative behavior, proper parenting, which includes parental involvement, parental supervision and guidance, family bonding, imparting of positive family values and so on and so forth, provided continuously from early childhood, will go a long way in discouraging the youth from involving themselves in negative behaviors such as delinquency, sexual abuse, and substance abuse. Girls have been known to have a greater positive response to these protective measures ( Miller-Perrin & Perrin, 2013) . 

Family intervention programs are seen as a way to reduce the high level of negative behavior demonstrated in today’s youth, as a result of ineffective parenting. These programs have been developed by experts in family psychology through years of practice and research and are considered to be effective in providing families with stronger systems while reducing childhood as well as adolescent problems brought about by poor parenting. Four main approaches as co-authored by Dr. Jose Szapocznik have been found to be the most effective forms of parenting interventions. They include behavioral parenting training, family skills training, family therapy as well as in-home family support (Alleyne & Sparrow, 2015). 

Causes of Child Abuse

It is difficult to understand the reason why a person may want to hurt a child. It is the public perception that parents who abuse their children have mental disorders. However, more than 90% of the abusers do not suffer from any mental illnesses (Family Resource Center, 2017). Contrary to the assumption that these parents don’t love their children, they do love them but lack patience and also have immature personality relative to other parents. They cannot cope with their children’s demands and thus become more likely to subject their children to physical and emotional abuse. There is no single cause for child abuse, as it may result from a myriad of factors converging in a complex mix of social, personal and cultural elements. These elements can be classified into social stress, family structure, intergenerational transmission of violence and social isolation and low community involvement ( Miller-Perrin & Perrin, 2013).

Intergenerational transmission of violence occurs as a result of parents who had previously been abused as children developing the same kind of behavior towards their children. A child who grows in an abused family learns the violent behavior from their parents and when they grow up, they start abusing their own children. As a result, this abusive behavior goes through a vicious cycle in which it is transmitted from one generation to the next. According to various studies on family psychology, about 30% of abused children later become abusive parents while only 2-3 percent of all individuals become abusive parents. As this was the only kind of parenting that they were offered, abused children develop abusive behavior as a model of their own parenting practices. Abused children should be made to realize that their parents were wrong in abusing them in order not to develop the same kind of behavior, thinking that they deserved the maltreatment (Family Resource Center, 2017). 

Most children do not become abusive parents because they believe that their parents were not right in doing what they did, and thus condone the behavior as they become good parents. As such, those children who grow up thinking that their behavior was bad and therefore warranted the abuse subjected to them, are more likely to become abusive parents than those children who believed that their parents were wrong to abuse them (Family Resource Center, 2017).Social stress may emanate from a variety of negative conditions, and it presents a significant risk factor for child abuse. Some of these conditions may include but not limited to unemployment, poverty, illness, the death of a family member and a larger-than-average family size. Children from middle-class and wealthy families may also experience child abuse, though it is easier to learn of these maltreatments from poor families than in wealthy families. 

It is not easy to discover child abuse in wealthy families because they can successfully conceal this information since they have less contact with social agencies as compared to poor families. Social stress may also be intensified in parents who abuse alcohol and drugs, as well as children who have characteristics such as physical disabilities and mental retardation. Social isolation and low community involvement contribute a great deal to child abuse. Parents who are not involved in community organizations and have little contact with friends and other extended family members are more likely to practice child abuse. The absence of social involvement robes these abusive parents the chance to access a support system that will go a long way in alleviating their social stress (Family Resource Center, 2017).This is because they lack the necessary support system to help them cope with their stress and also, they are not going to change their abusive behavior since there is no community contact to compel them to conform to societal values and standards.

In communities that consider the task of bringing up a child as the responsibility of not only the parent but the whole community in terms of relatives, neighbors and friends, rates of child abuse are relatively low as compared to communities in which only parents are responsible for child care. This is because the community provides a support system for the parents thus reducing the amount of stress and by extension child abuse. In the United States, it is the sole responsibility of parents to shoulder child-care demands, which is more likely to lead to a higher risk of stress and thus child abuse (Family Resource Center, 2017). This is to say that cultural factors play a big role in eliminating or providing the risky environment for child abuse.

The type of family also contributes to the risk of child abuse and neglect, in terms of the structure. Some family structures have inherent characteristics which pose increased risk for child abuse. Single families are more vulnerable to child abuse as compared to families with both parents, as they usually earn lesser money, which may account for the increased risk (Family Resource Center, 2017). Also, families with persistent marital problems have greater probabilities of engaging in child abuse than those stable families with no such problems. Again, in families where there is a shared responsibility for important decisions by both parents, the rate of child abuse is low as compared to those families where one parent makes important decisions concerning the family such as how much money to spend, what to spend money on, when to have children, where to live and so on and so forth.

Causes of Gang Membership and Delinquency

Report by an advancement project considers six major factors to be responsible for gang membership and delinquency. These factors include unemployment for the youth, poverty as intensified by social isolation, domestic violence, peer pressure, lack of parental supervision, and early school failure. These risk factors predispose an adolescent to engage in gang membership though studies also find that children from stable families and rich neighborhoods also become members of various gangs. Other reasons may include the desire for a sense of “family”, the need for food and money, protection, peer pressure, family history or tradition, excitement, and the desire to appear cool. When young people do not get enough family support and attention, they may become depressed and try to escape problems from their home (Gang Alternatives Program, 2008). 

Gangs offer to provide unconditional support to their members and provide them with the sense of belonging. The youth may thus join such groups to have this fulfillment. Gangs engage in criminal activities such as robbery and drug trafficking for financial reasons and thus provide its members with money. Lack of money and other basic needs may lead the youth to join the gangs so that they can be able to provide for themselves using money offered through illegal activities by the gang. In neighborhoods where gang activities are prevalent, youth find it necessary to join gangs so that they can be protected because they feel more vulnerable if they don’t belong to a gang (Gang Alternatives Program, 2008). Peer pressure also lead the youth to want to fit in. Its negative influence is coupled in situations where a teenager does not have a strong family support to prevent him/her from joining the group. As a result of harassment, intimidation, friendly persuasion, a dare, or persistent begging, the teenager may be compelled to join the gang. 

Children who hail from families with a history of gang involvement will get used to this kind of lifestyle and will find it difficult to escape since it is part of their family values. Some youth may want to join a gang for the mere fact that they want to defy authority (Gang Alternatives Program, 2008). They thus get thrilled by the thought of belonging to a gang where they can engage in many illegal activities. It is thus this kind of negative excitement that will make them become members of a gang. Gangs engage in illicit activities which generate large sums of money. As such, they can afford to wear the latest fashions, throw big parties and drive cool cars. To an ignorant youth, this may seem the perfect lifestyle and will easily be attracted and recruited to join the gang ( Miller-Perrin & Perrin, 2013) . 

Core Causes of Urban Poverty

Eight hypotheses have been put forward to explain inner-city poverty in America. They include structural economic shifts, inadequate human capital, racial and gender discrimination, the complex interaction of culture and behavior, the mismatch between workers and jobs, migration, endogenous growth deficit as well as poor public policy. The main cause of poverty in America is attributed to the significant restructuring of the whole economy from a manufacture-driven one to a service-driven one. This transformation had adverse consequences especially to the urban under-class who experienced more joblessness. Some of these consequences include the loss of manufacturing jobs, greater internalization of the economy as well as transfer of jobs from cities to suburbs as well as overseas, facilitated through trade liberalization brought about by free trade agreements entered into in the 1990s. There has also been an expansion of low-wage jobs that lack fringe benefits, with an increased gap between high-wage earners and low-wage earners. These structural shifts in the economy have negatively influenced the competitive positions of the industrial sector in the cities, making them lack the ability to provide employment to the poor working class as they previously did. With the declining demand for their labor, they lacked employment and thus the increased level of concentrated poverty in the urban centers (Allen, 2014). 

The other reason attributed to urban poverty is the inadequate human capital of the labor force. Following the structural shift, the labor force has not been flexible enough in seizing the opportunity to take up better-paying jobs in emerging markets (Teitz, 1998).This has led to lower productivity and the inability to compete for the available jobs. Racial and gender discrimination in employment has also greatly contributed to urban poverty as it prevents full employment in the labor market. The complex interaction of culture and behavior is another reason for urban poverty. This is because; it has resulted in the creation of an isolated population that is self-referential and disconnected from the mainstream economy as well as the labor market. The long historical process that segregated the poor, as well as the minority populations in the United Sates, also seems to explain the concentrated poverty in the urban areas. This process led to a mismatch between the workers and the jobs when employment became decentralized after the economic transition (Teitz, 1998). 

Migration has also been a contributing factor in urban poverty through the removal of a successful middle-class population from the community who provided social capital, while replacing them with poorer populations from other regions who compete for the available employment opportunities, consequently reducing wages as well as employment for residence. According to Teitz, there is a regeneration process whereby the poor and ambitious people migrate to cities to seek for greener pasture while the middle-class residents move to the suburbs where the quality of life is much better. This process leads to the cities reconstituting themselves as economic niches and social structures left by higher class residents are filled by lower class residents. There is also a low level of entrepreneurship as well as access to capital by the minorities, which brings about growth deficit in the economy, leading to concentrated poverty in the urban areas. The other reason is the establishment of a poor public policy that was originally meant to solve social problems but instead caused these problems to become worse (1998).

Effectiveness of Child Abuse Programs and Interventions

Parental interventions are meant to prevent child abuse and neglect from occurring or reoccurring and/or stop their negative impacts on the child. These programs are normally sponsored by the government as well as the community welfare organizations. They are categorized into three main levels namely: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary interventions are general in nature and offered to everyone in the community by way of support and education to prevent problems from occurring, and are normally communicated through the general media awareness campaigns and school-based education programs. Secondary interventions are offered to families that are at high risk of child abuse. They provide extra support to mitigate existing problems and prevent them from occurring in future. They are done through parental education and home visiting programs. Tertiary parental intervention programs are provided to those families in which child abuse and/or neglect has already been experienced. Such programs may include clinical services like sexual abuse counseling and attachment therapy as well as statutory child protection services (Lamont, 2009).

The evaluation of child abuse programs and interventions is an integral part of child intervention programs in determining their effectiveness so as to facilitate the improvement of service delivery. Lamont propounds on the difficulty of measuring the effectiveness of parental intervention programs in the absence of evaluation. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the evaluation of child abuse and intervention programs. It is in the interest of funders and for other stakeholders to know how effective these programs are in achieving their objectives. Practitioners alike need to have this information in order to develop more effective programs (2009). 

Parental education programs are meant to teach parents on child development help them in developing parental skill while normalizing the challenges that characterize parenting. Research findings by the National Child Protection Clearing House’s Child Abuse Prevention carried out in 2006 on parental education program effectiveness, reported successful outcomes after participation in various programs. These results included fewer cases of child maltreatment, a decrease in the occurrence of negative parenting attributions, a greater capacity for parents in applying positive/productive disciplinary methods instead of punitive methods, an increase in competency and self-efficacy in parents, and an increase in parental awareness for child development, child maltreatment risk factors, and the negative consequences that child abuse and neglect have on the child ( Kemmet, 2013 ). 

Home visiting is another major form of parental intervention. It is designed to deliver various intervention initiatives with the objective of achieving different outcomes. This form of intervention can be provided to mothers and their newborn infants, parents, and children who have specific problems, disadvantaged families or those families which are at a high risk of child abuse. Home visiting programs are carried out internationally and are designed to enhance family functioning as well as mitigate the risk of child maltreatment. Holzer & Higgins (2006) explain that most home visiting programs are early interventions to support prenatal mothers in taking care of their children during the first years of child development. In comparison to other intervention programs, home visiting has an upper hand in bringing services closer to families. They also give the visitors the opportunity to have first-hand information on the environment in which families live, by observing. This enables them to develop tailored services that are suitable for individual families and build relationships more effectively. Another research carried out by the same organization on home visiting programs found out that these programs are effective and resulted in fewer incidents of child maltreatment, increased parental knowledge as well as skills, improved child cognitive and social development and an increase in the association of parents to health care and other services (Higgins & Higgins, 2006).

Evidence Around Program Implementation and Effectiveness

Intervention programs are carried out to facilitate the establishment of a safe and supportive environment for children by enabling parents to practice a caring, consistent as well as positive parenting (Hardcastle & Sethi, 2015). This quest is in line with research documentation that the risk of child abuse is increased when parents do not possess the necessary skills to bring up their children, and also lack social support and knowledge on child development.

Child maltreatment is a problem that occurs in every society around the world. Consequences of these maltreatments include physical injuries, poor mental health, feelings of abandonment, depression, fear, self-harm, anxiety and even suicide. At the international level, different groups, as well as individuals, have successfully started and implemented programs with the objective of preventing child maltreatment and others have been instrumental in changing the existing policies and strategies to improve the protection of children rights. The successes of these programs are documented in various academic papers. In the United States, there are different programs offered by different organizations and includes: The Nurturing Program, which is offered by SAFEchild, the Parent Education Program, which targets teen mothers, the Multilevel Selected Prevention Program, the Child-Parent Enrichment Project, Project 12 Ways, and many others. In Canada, there is the ESPACE program, the Systematic Training for Effective Parenting Program etc. In Australia, there is the Triple-P Positive Parenting Program, the Signposts for Building Better Behavior Program, Parent Effectiveness Training Program and so on and so forth (Holzer & Higgins, 2006). 

A report issued by the National Research Council (NRC) in 1993 indicated that there have been many milestones in the development as well as dissemination of programs meant to tackle child abuse and neglect. In all communities, there are existing child protection and child welfare systems, as well as various treatment programs for victims and offenders of child abuse and neglect. The treatment programs are offered through mental health and social service agencies. Primary and secondary prevention services are also increasingly available for communities, which help vulnerable families in reducing the risk of child abuse and neglect. The number of service options has significantly increased on a global level. A significant number of interventions indicate a strong evidence of efficacy on their target populations (Petersen, Joseph & Feit, 2014). Many of these programs are aware of the need for evaluative data needed to determine their effectiveness and are thus aggressively building their evidence base.

Examining the performance/effectiveness of child abuse programs

Determining the effectiveness of child abuse programs is paramount for quality assurance. Through evaluation, researchers are able to measure their effectiveness in attaining their objectives. Evaluations answer the question as to whether or not the intervention programs are beneficial to the participants. Evaluations may be undertaken to analyze how the services are used, classify service users, aid in improving and refining the program content and also provide a cost-benefit analysis. Findings from the evaluation process are useful in planning for new services by those who are of interest. This includes the practitioners as the service providers and also the policy makers who need this information before making decisions on the public policy and program funding (Lamont, 2009). 

There are three main types of evaluations employed by researchers to determine program effectiveness. They include process, impact, as well as outcome evaluations (Lamont, 2009). These three evaluations may be applied together or done independently depending on the objectives of the evaluation. Process evaluation seeks to analyze how the service is delivered by looking at different parameters. These parameters may include the timing of an intervention, the place where the intervention is taking place, the service delivery costs, the type of service offered, the participants in the intervention program and the facilitators of the program. This type of evaluation intends to identify those areas that are working and those areas that need to be altered for improvements, to facilitate effective service delivery. The evaluation helps in determining issues such as the demographic and clinical features of clients, whether all service providers are uniformly administering the program if the program has been implemented according to the plans, whether the intended population has been successfully served, and if collaborative links have been established. However, process evaluation cannot determine the impact the intervention has had on the participants ( Petersen, Joseph & Feit, 2014).

Impact evaluations present the most popular type of evaluations. They measure the impact of the intervention on the participant based on the set objectives (Lamont, 2009). For example, an impact evaluation on home visits program may want to assess whether the parents under participation have developed better parenting skills such as an increased awareness of child development process, risks posed by child maltreatment, as well as the future impacts of child abuse on the child. All changes that a participant shows are assumed to come from the program participation ( Petersen, Joseph & Feit, 2014).

Outcome evaluation is strategic in nature as it measures the effectiveness of an intervention program in the long-run. The difference between impact evaluation and outcome evaluation is the time element. While impact evaluation looks at the short-term direct results, outcome evaluation considers long-term underlying results. In this case, impact evaluation may analyze whether participating parents have improved on their parental skills while outcome evaluation looks at the underlying goals such as the prevention of child maltreatment. While the direct goals of an intervention may be achieved, the underlying goals may fail to be achieved (Lamont, 2009). This is where the outcome evaluation comes in. It seeks to assess the accuracy of the direct goals in determining whether they translate to the underlying goals. For instance, it may aim to evaluate whether improvement in parental skills through parental education program leads to the reduction of child abuse cases.

The society is faced with many problems and child abuse presents one of the serious issues which needs to be dealt with as research shows that such cases are on the rise. In response to this problem, governments, as well as non-governmental agencies, are increasingly developing programs in form of parental intervention to help curb down cases of child abuse. Poor parenting has been seen as the main cause of child abuse, later leading to a dysfunctional society due to delinquency. Providing parents with the necessary knowledge and skills will go a long way in ensuring that there is a positive parent-child relationship through positive parenting, which will effectively tackle the problem of child abuse. These programs need to be evidence-based in ensuring that they solve the problems that they are meant to. As such, process evaluations, impact evaluation, as well as outcome evaluation, are carried out to determine program effectiveness. 

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