Are Rates of Child Abuse Much Higher In the UK than the Rest of The World?

[Highlander]

'Cos we do seem to go a bit mental in efforts to 'protect' children.

Things I was told to do in Canada by my HV just about made my UK community midwife pass out. She told me 'never ever tall a health professional anything unless absolutely necessary'. Cripes

Interesting question.

I don't know anything much about this, except that:

1. in Sweden the anti-smacking laws have led to cases where parents (usually immigrants) go to prison and have their children taken away just for smacking them
2. quite a few of the comments on the web re Fran Lyon have been from Americans saying things like 'I thought it was just in America that social workers behaved like that', so things may be similar over there.

Nope, they're even higher in NZ if you believe the stats. It's one of the most dangerous places to be a child.

Recorded rates of child abuse are going to depend on there being a disconnection, perhaps caused by different cultures co-existing, between what the law says it is acceptable to do to a child and what the inhabitants of that country believe is ok, aren't they?
ie in some places everyone thinks it's ok to hit a child so that doesn't get recorded as child abuse. OTOH if the law said it was not ok but a lot of the population thought it was, rates would be high. Just wondering if that could account for NZ - is there a difference between Maori and Pakeha rates?
(Obviously social deprivation will also be a factor.)

save the children

i have read they determine maori rates to be higher

Ah that link is talking about deaths - that's a rather more objective measure and hence undermines my theory.

There is a big cover-up and denial factor with child abuse, especially sexual abuse - often children report it but aren't believed, or are blamed, or they know they won't be believed so don't report it. This could happen more in some societies than others (eg where family honour is more important, you might expect it to be harder to get it out in the open and harder for children to report it) and/or there could be countless ither cultural factors affecting reporting and recording rates. So I think it would be very hard to know, just from recorded levels, what the truth really is - and I'd guess it's actually fairly common everywhere

rather a lot of abuse ends in death, unless you're referring specifically to sexual abuse

confirmed that 10,687 children were neglected or abused in the past year and that there were also 53,097 notifications of suspected child abuse -- all in a nation of 4.1 million people