I just read this:
“Are female child abuse and domestic violence rare? Unfortunately not. According to the US Department of Justice, 70% of confirmed cases of child abuse and 65% of parental murders of children are committed by mothers”
from here:
http://www.glennsacks.com/california_mothers_murders.htm
can anyone verify this statement? provide a source; e.g., where on DOJ website this info is contained?
thanks.
Usually the Bureau of Justice Statistics page.
Going by Figure 4 on this page (Child Abuse Reported to the Police, from May 2001), that doesn’t seem to be true. I don’t think murder is accounted for in these statistics, but simple and aggravated assault, sexual assault, and kidnapping are, and men seem to commit 75% of those, with the (non-step) father accounting for just over 40% (versus a little over 20% for the (non-step) mother).
Is child abuse a separate offense in those figures?
Regards,
Shodan
My understanding of the report is that it concentrates solely on child/juvenile abuse that was reported to the police. This was split in figures 2 and 5 into simple assault, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and kidnapping.
I should point out that the only gender breakdown I saw was in family/caretaker child abuse; figures 1 and 2 show the percentages of offenses against children by caretakers, non-caretaker acquaintances, non-caretaker family, and strangers, but aren’t separated by gender. (It’s worth noting that the non-caretaker acquaintances committed 63% of the offenses against children, with only 10% done by strangers.)
So we don’t know what the percentage of non-caretaker violence is - this would count strangers, non-caretaker family, and non-caretaker acquaintances. However, it does provide some evidence against the assertion from the quote in the OP that the majority of child abuse is done by the mother.
Thanks for your response. I was wondering if the offenses you mentioned were cases that might otherwise have been charged as child abuse, but the circumstances warranted a more serious charge, like assault or sexual assault. I also could not tell if there were cases of child abuse that were reported to CPS that were not included in the figures.
Maybe I’ll do some Googling.
ETA: It seems that a lot of the statistics are that the majority of child abuse and neglect is committed by women, but that is rather different from the OP.
Regards,
Shodan
I think it’s extremely important to account for the existence of one-parent households when interpreting these statistics. I would guess that many more one-parent households are headed by mothers than by fathers. And I also suspect that even in two-parent households, mothers are more likely to be taking care of the children. So if fathers have a smaller tendency to abuse their own children, it may be only because they’re absent.
If failure to pay child support was counted as “child abuse,” the figures might be considerably different.
I am the last one to want to defend physically abusive mothers though.
This looks like a good place to get up on my soapbox about violence against men committed by women - women are just as likely to be physically abusive to a man as the other way around, as well as being physically abusive to children. Is domestic abuse of women a bad thing? Of course, but so is abuse of men, and we have this idea that it doesn’t exist when it’s quite common. It’s time we got realistic about what women are capable of and actually doing, and started having that reflected in education and law-enforcement.
I’m not trying to be overly dubious here, but do you have a cite for that? I’d always suspected that abuse of men by women was under-reported, but I would not have thought that the incidence was equal. I also kind of had the idea in the back of my head that men tend to inflict more severe injuries when they abuse women than do women when they abuse men. I have no idea if that is the case, though. Do you have any information that addresses that?
We did a thread on this awhile back (actually, I think I did a thread on this a while back) if you wanted to search. I have some tv watching to do (I might search tomorrow). 
The sources I found at the time had women abusing men as often as men abusing women, if I recall correctly, and you’re right about the damage levels - men do tend to do more damage simply because of their size. As for psychological damage, well, that’s hard to measure.
From that same website’s source page:
Spoilsport. Zoe’s doing her best to play the “Women aren’t bad, men are bad!” card, and you go dragging in inconvenient facts.
For all that, I guess the bulk of child-support non-payment can be laid at the door of men. There’s probably some correlation between that and not getting awarded custody in the first place.