Citation

Bhopal S, Buckland A, McCrone R, Villis AI, Owens S. Arch. Dis. Child. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, BMJ Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1136/archdischild-2020-319783

PMID

32554510

Abstract

Infection with SARS-CoV-2 does not, thankfully, appear to be harming children in great numbers at this point of the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Concerns have however been raised that necessary social distancing and particularly ‘lockdown’ measures are having negative, often unintended, consequences for the health and well-being of babies, children and young people. These consequences have been termed ‘collateral damage’,2 and it has been argued that measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to cause a ‘secondary pandemic’ of child neglect and abuse.3 The Children’s Commissioner for England has raised concerns within government that children are at increased risk of abuse and neglect during the pandemic, while household stress is high, families are confined to the home and usual societal safety nets including social services, schools and other statutory and voluntary agencies are less able to be in regular contact with those children who are known to them.

We are paediatricians serving Newcastle upon Tyne, Sunderland, North Tyneside and Northumberland local authority areas across the North East of England (population 1.1 million), with some of the highest levels of deprivation in the UK4 and great need for child safeguarding services. We anticipated that need for these services would have increased during the pandemic but noted a decrease in inward referrals to our services, particularly following the most drastic ‘stay at home’ messaging announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on 23 March 2020. We therefore examined monthly referral data for children and young people (0–16 years) attending for child protection medical examination as part of a child safeguarding assessment from January to April 2020 in comparison with the same months in the last 2 years.

Our analysis showed that the 28 assessments done in March 2020 was lower than in 2018 (36 assessments) or 2019 (43 assessments). This was drastically lower in April 2020 after institution of ‘lockdown’ when there were only 13 assessments compared with 50 in April 2018 and 30 in April 2019. The total number of assessments from January to April was 152 in 2018, 156 in 2019 and 99 in 2020, a reduction of approximately one-third (table 1). Reported vast increases calls to domestic abuse and child support telephone lines, and feedback from local authorities mean that we think this number of ‘missed’ children is likely to be a worrying underestimate ...

Language: en

Keywords

child abuse; data collection; epidemiology; health services research