Children and adolescents experience more violence, abuse, and criminal victimisation than do other segments of the population. Proper public health attention to this vulnerability is hampered by many things, but one of the most remediable is the fragmentation of the response system. Separate institutions, researchers, and advocacy groups lobby and often compete on behalf of victims of child molestation, rape, exposure to domestic violence, corporal punishment, physical abuse, and bullying. Attention is also hampered by the description of abusive behaviours such as peer violence (including that among siblings) as being part of a 'normal childhood' and by viewing efforts to address such abuse as a sign of overwrought protectionism.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 2215-0374 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00173-X ID - ref1 ER -