Child abuse tied to housing crisis? New study finds links
Here鈥檚 another reason for policy makers grappling with the country鈥檚聽economic woes to keep a focus on kids:
As the US housing crisis worsened during the 2000s, severe child abuse increased, according to this week in the journal Pediatrics.
The study, whose lead author was Dr. Joanne N. Wood of the Children鈥檚 Hospital of Philadelphia, found that for every percentage increase in a metropolitan area鈥檚 foreclosure rate, the rate of hospital admissions for children who had been beaten increased by 6.5 percent.聽 And for every 1 percent increase in the 90-day mortgage delinquency rate, child abuse admissions increased 3 percent.
The numbers run counter to other past studies that show an overall decline in child abuse rates 鈥� studies that have primarily taken their data from child protective services rather than hospitals.
鈥淭his suggests that maybe the problem is not getting better,鈥� .
Although researchers acknowledge that they can鈥檛 know for sure whether or how the two statistics are linked (social scientists, by the way, tend to look critically at these sort of Freakonomics-style correlations), they say that the findings make sense 鈥� both the stress and disruption of home foreclosures may well lead to more abuse.
While researchers found that unemployment rates did not have a similar correlation with abuse admissions, it鈥檚 possible, they theorized, that foreclosure and mortgage delinquency rates were more representative of a family鈥檚 breaking point.聽
Researchers studied the numbers of children admitted to 38 hospitals in the Pediatric Hospital Information System database. They found that between 2000 and 2009, there were approximately 11,800 admissions for physical abuse in children younger than 6 years old 鈥� about a quarter of a percentage of the nearly 4.2 million admissions overall.
The worst year was in 2008 鈥� the height of the housing crisis.
