Citation

Janson S. Br. J. Soc. Work 2005; 35(8): 1411-1415.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/bjsw/bch369

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In an earlier issue of this Journal, Chris Beckett discusses the Corporal Punishment Ban in Sweden and child death statistics (Beckett, 2005). If I have understood it correctly, Beckett's main objective is to prove that there is no close connection between legal banning of child abuse and a decreasing frequency of child homicides. I will try to elaborate on this problem, but first I would like to comment on the title of Beckett's paper ('The Swedish myth:. . .'), which is misleading. This is unfortunate, as Beckett actually is writing that the 'myth' is produced by people outside Sweden.In Sweden, we are aware that child homicide figures are low compared to many other countries and we are happy about that, although we are not completely satisfied because children are still murdered, although for different reasons--as Beckett correctly states. When evaluating international figures on child deaths due to maltreatment (UNICEF, 2003), figures that are less than one in 100,000; it is, however, very difficult to reach any plausible conclusions. The figures from UNICEF (Table 1 in Beckett's paper) are from one single year (2003) and just a few more deaths in small countries like the Scandinavian countries could alter the figures quite substantially. I was quite astonished when I first saw the UNICEF figures, as the lowest figures were reported from countries where awareness and debate concerning child maltreatment have come into focus late, particularly in comparison with the UK and the Scandinavian countries. Studies on the prevalence of severe violence towards children from Spain, Greece, Italy and Ireland published in English are sparse. The few good quality investigations are quite critical of the official under-reporting of severe child abuse, particularly against younger children (Bardi and Borgogni-Tarli, 2001; Trogan et al., 2001).