Since 1972, Prevent Child Abuse America has led the way in building awareness, providing education and inspiring hope to everyone involved in the effort to prevent the abuse and neglect of our nations children.
Working with chapters in 39 states and the District of Columbia, we provide leadership to promote and implement prevention efforts at both the national and local levels. With the help of our state chapters and concerned individuals like you were strengthening families and engaging communities nationwide.
Our many local programs, prevention initiatives and events help spread the word in your community, creating awareness that prevention is possible. We are a family of friends, professionals, volunteers, donors and parents who are preventing child abuse and neglect before it ever starts.
Together, we can make a difference. Remember, a child is helpless you are not.
There are four forms of child maltreatment: emotional abuse, neglect, physical abuse andual abuse.
Emotional Abuse: (also known as: verbal abuse, mental abuse, and psychological maltreatment) Includes acts or the failures to act by parents or caretakers that have caused or could cause, serious behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorders. This can include parents/caretakers using extreme and/or bizarre forms of punishment, such as confinement in a closet or dark room or being tied to a chair for long periods of time or threatening or izing a child.
Less severe acts, but no less damaging are belittling or rejecting treatment, using derogatory terms to describe the child, habitual scapegoating or blaming.
Neglect: The failure to provide for the childs basic needs. Neglect can be physical, educational, or emotional. Physical neglect can include not providing adequate food or clothing, appropriate medical care, supervision, or proper weather protection (heat or coats).
It may include abandonment. Educational neglect includes failure to provide appropriate schooling or special educational needs, allowing excessive truancies. Psychological neglect includes the lack of any emotional support and love, never attending to the child, spousal abuse,and alcohol abuse including allowing the child to participate inand alcohol use.
Physical Abuse: The inflicting of physical injury upon a child. This may include, burning, hitting, punching, shaking, kicking, beating, or otherwise harming a child.
The parent or caretaker may not have intended to hurt the child, the injury is not an. It may, however, been the result of over-discipline or physical punishment that is inappropriate to the childs age.
Abuse: The inappropriateual behavior with a child. It includes fondling a childs genitals, making the child fondle thes genitals,, incest,, , exhibitionism andual exploitation. To be considered child abuse these acts have to be committed by a person responsible for the care of a child (for example a baby-sitter, a parent, or a daycare provider) or related to the child.
If a stranger commits these acts, it would be consideredual assault and handled solely be the police and criminal courts.
