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Litteraturgenomgång Av Nationell Och Internationell Kunskap Maltreatment and neglect in societal care of children and young people - an overview of research data Carl Göran Svedin, Professor Documentation for the Swedish Government Official Report SOU 2011:9: Inquiry on Redress for Past Abuse, February 2011 Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 3 1.1 Commission .................................................................................................................................. 3 1.2 Approach ...................................................................................................................................... 3 2. The vulnerability of children in general - in Sweden and internationally .......................................... 4 2.1 Sweden ......................................................................................................................................... 4 2.2 Norway ......................................................................................................................................... 5 2.3 Iceland .......................................................................................................................................... 5 2.4 Denmark ....................................................................................................................................... 5 2.5 Ireland ........................................................................................................................................... 6 2.6 Wales ............................................................................................................................................ 6 2.7 Australia ........................................................................................................................................ 7 2.8 Canada .......................................................................................................................................... 7 2.9 Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 7 3. Presence of neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse before placement ......................................... 8 4. Symptoms and behavioural problems of children and young people in social care .......................... 9 5. Neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse of children and young people in social care .................. 14 5.1 Occurrence ................................................................................................................................. 14 5.2 Events ......................................................................................................................................... 18 5.3 Perpetrators ................................................................................................................................ 19 5.4 Victims ........................................................................................................................................ 20 5.5 Risk factors for maltreatment in social care ............................................................................... 21 5.6 Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 21 6. Survivors - retrospective victim surveys ........................................................................................... 22 7. Program for avoiding harmful treatment in social care ................................................................... 26 8. Children's own accounts ................................................................................................................... 31 9. Summary and conclusions ................................................................................................................ 32 10. Viewpoints and proposals .............................................................................................................. 34 References ............................................................................................................................................ 37 1. Introduction 1.1 Commission The commission was to collect as much knowledge as possible from literature searches regarding children and young people who have been victims of maltreatment or negligence when placed in a foster home or institution for children and young people, nationally and internationally. The commission is structured in the framework of the committee directive "Redress procedure for individuals who have been victims of maltreatment and neglect in the social services' children and youth care" (dir. 2010:15). This commission has its origins in the previous investigation "Neglect in social services' childcare in the twentieth century" (SOU 2009:99). 1.2 Approach Literature searches Data searches were carried out by a systematic review of the Scopus databases, which contain publications in the areas of research, technology and medicine and include around 18,000 journals from 5,000 publishers (www.info.sciverse.com/scopus/about/); PubMed, containing bibliographical references to approximately 19 million journal articles in medicine, nursing, odontology, veterinary medicine, health care and pre-clinical subject areas since 1948 (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ); Web of Science, published by the major American company ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) mediated by Thomson Reuters, which indexes more than 10,000 peer-reviewed journals in natural science, the humanities and social sciences, (http://apps.isiknowledge.com.lt.ltag.bibl.liu/ ); CSA Social Services Abstracts, which is a database mainly in social work and sociology since 1979, www.csa.com and ERIC Education Resources Information Center, which covers large parts of educational research since 1966 and currently has approximately 1.3 million articles, www.eric.ed.gov. The search words in the databases were limited to Swedish, English, Danish and Norwegian. The search words for care were: Institutional care, orphanage/s, children’s home/s, foster home/s, foster care, institutionalized child/children, residential care, young offender institution/s, youth detention center, juvenile detention center, juvenile hall, youth custody, youth center. Concerning vulnerability: Child abuse/s, abuse of child, child neglect, child molestation, child harassment, child maltreatment, sex offences, physical abuse, sexual abuse As regards persons: Child/children, adolescent/s, teenager/s, young people, adult survivors of child abuse The years searched were 1990-1999 and 2000-10. In Scopus: 940 hits. In PubMed: 714 hits. In PsychINFO: 720 hits In Web of Science: 316 hits In SCA: 1,433 hits In ERIC: 576 hits In total there were 4,699 hits using the above search words. In addition to this, a manual search was made after reference to the references in the databases searched. A large part of the literature was found in several of the databases. 3 There were nearly 40 articles that directly concerned poor conditions during a placement in a foster home or in an institution, and this compilation discusses these articles in sections 5 and 6. On top of these there are about 50 articles that indirectly affect children placed in homes, mainly in sections 5 and 7. These articles concern principles, discussions, prevention and policies regarding the abuse of children in foster homes or institutions. The delimitations are not as clear here, since discussion articles about different countries' earlier government Inquiries, for example, have been left out of the compilation. In addition to these, certain articles, usually overview articles, have been used to describe areas such as the occurrence of maltreatment and neglect in society and its effects on health, the background and health of children placed in homes, and risk factors involved in taking children into care and placing them in out-of-home care, in sections 2, 3, 4 and 8. Many of the publications searched through describe different aspects of children placed in institutions or foster homes, but there are few that discuss their situation and experience during the placement. The majority of the publications are from English-speaking countries, with only a few from Sweden or the Nordic countries. Studies and reports that are listed and described in the government study on "Neglect in social child welfare in the 1990s" (SOU 2009:99) are not described, since this has already been done. For reasons of space, we have not included purely theoretical articles with more political or administrative descriptions of quality, or rather lack of, in the care of children and young people outside the home. The review focuses on what we know about the children in research and reports. Percentages in the referenced materials have been rounded to the nearest whole number. Definitions The term children refers to everyone from 0 - 18 years old unless otherwise stated. The concept of child abuse includes neglect, physical maltreatment and sexual abuse, unless otherwise stated. In Anglo-Saxon literature, child maltreatment is often used as a collective term, which in the Swedish original text became roughly malicious treatment of children or child abuse. When only physical child abuse is involved, this is stated specifically as physical child abuse. 2. The vulnerability of children in general - in Sweden and internationally 2.1 Sweden From a number of Swedish
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