Leading Health Indicator 2 Child Abuse and Violence Florida 2010 Goal for Children and Youth Reduce morbidity and mortality in children, youth and pregnant women from child abuse, homicide and domestic violence Related HP 2010 Leading Indicator Injury and Violence

Nationally — “more than 1 million children are victims of child abuse and neglect each year. ... Many victims don't receive help because they are not reported to the system.”⁽¹⁾   While victims span all ages, races, religions and socio-economic backgrounds, children under age 5, as a proportion of their population,

Figure 21: Florida Reports of Verified and Indicated Abuse, 1990-1999 Source: National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) Note: http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cb/publications

are at highest risk of abuse and death from abuse. In 1999, 77 percent of perpetrators of child abuse or neglect in Florida were parents, and 13 percent were other relatives.^{(2, p. 36)}   Recurrence occurred in 6.2 percent of cases. There is no more difficult and important task given to government than the protection and welfare of vulnerable abused children, when families cannot protect their own children. Each year at least one child victim is brought to the attention of the public. Poorly paid workers often take the blame for this societal problem and new attempts are made to solve this difficult problem. Florida's Governor, Jeb Bush, appointed a Blue Ribbon Panel in 2002 to develop recommendations on how to improve the state's care of children and how to lessen the occurrence of child abuse. Among its recommendations are the funding of the (a) Guardian-ad-Litem program to give each child an advocate, (b) community primary prevention and early intervention programs to support families in stressful situations (e.g., Florida healthy families, healthy start, child care, and preschool), and (c) greater funds for the Department of Children and Families for salaries and upgrading the professionalism of child abuse workers. (See http://www5.myflorida.com/cf_web/myflorida2/healthhuman/
childabuse/about.html) One difficulty in measuring the increase or decrease of abuse is the inability to adequately ascertain the actual incidence of child abuse in Florida. The only data available comes from vital statistics mortality for child homicides and child abuse reports. Child maltreatment mortality is thought to be significantly under-reported with some maltreatment coded as an unintentional injury on the death certificate. Child abuse reports measure how many reports were made to the hotline not actual incidence. But each of these is a window that allows some ability to describe the problem. This is also the case with other morbidity data sets such as hospital discharge data that is dependent of medical billing codes to estimate illness prevalence.