lure to provide needed, age-appropriate care. Medical neglect is the failure to provide needed medical attention to a child when financially able to do so, or offered other means by which you can obtain the needed care. Emotional abuse is commonly defined as a pattern of behavior that can seriously interfere with a child's positive emotional development (American Humane Association, 1999).These definitions for the most part are meant to be guidelines not absolute definitions. A mother, who playfully threatens her child that she will be angry if she doesn't get a kiss on the cheek, will not be charged with sexual abuse even though it fits the legal definition. As social workers we must be prepared to allow for cultural differences in child rearing practices and not be quick to judge. What may seem like child abuse to one culture may not be considered abuse by another. "The vast majority of cases fall in a grey area between the extremes. Within this grey area, the decision to report an incident is a function of societal standards of acceptable childrearing practices, legal definitions of abuse and neglect, and an individual's own value system" (Rubin, 1992). It is also this lack of a clear, exact, and widely accepted definition of child abuse that hampers us in our fight to end it. According to NCANDS in 1996, an estimated 3,000,000 children were reported for abuse and/or neglect to some form of a social services agency, such as, child protective services. An estimated 1 child out of every 25 children in the U.S. had reports filed on behalf of them. After the investigations, over 1,000,000 children were found to be victims of abuse, an 18% increase since 1990. Based on the 1,000,000 confirmed cases of abuse; 52% involved neglect, 24% involved physical abuse, 12% involved sexual abuse, 6% involved emotional abuse, 3% involved medical neglect, and 14% involved other types of abuse, such as, abandonment. The victim's age distri...
