Insights in Public Health: It Takes a Hui to Raise a Child: A Case for Peer-to-Peer Support for Child Abuse Prevention

摘要

In the United States, child abuse has been called a national public health epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 The Child Welfare League, 2 and Michael Petit, a leading researcher and advocate for child welfare from Every Child Matters, 3 among others. A recent BBC documentary investigated why the United States, one of the most prosperous nations on earth, has the worst child abuse record in the industrialized world. “America's child maltreatment death rate is triple Canada's and 11 times that of Italy. Over the past decade, more than 20,000 American children have been killed by their own family members — that is nearly four times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.”4