Child protection is used to describe a set of usually government-run services designed to protect children and young people who are underage and to encourage family stability. These typically include foster care, adoption services, services aimed at supporting at-risk families so they can remain intact, and investigation of alleged child abuse.
Most children who come to the attention of the child welfare system do so because of any of the following situations, which are often collectively termed child abuse:
- Child sexual abuse
- Neglect including the failure to take adequate measures to safeguard a child from harm and/or gross negligence in providing for a child's basic needs:
- Physical abuse
- Psychological abuse
The United States government's Administration for Children and Families reported that in 2004 approximately 3.5 million children were involved in investigations of alleged abuse or neglect in the US, while an estimated 872,000 children were determined to have been abused or neglected, and an estimated 1,490 children died that year because of abuse or neglect. In 2007, 1,760 children died as the result of child abuse and neglect. Child abuse impacts the most vulnerable populations, with children under age five years accounting for 76% of fatalities. In 2008, 8.3 children per 1000 were victims of child abuse and neglect and 10.2 children per 1000 were in out of home placement.
Read more about Child Protection: History, U.S. History, Effects of Early Maltreatment On Children in Child Welfare, Ideology of Child Protection, Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words child and/or protection:
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Take away from the courts, if it could be taken away, the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, and it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needful remedy available to all men for the protection of their business interests against unlawful invasion.... The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)