What is physical abuse?

Physical abuse is the infliction of physical injury as a result of punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning, shaking, or otherwise harming a child. The parent or caretaker may not have intended to hurt the child, rather the injury may have resulted from over-discipline or physical punishment.

What is child neglect?

Child neglect is characterized by failure to provide for the child's basic needs. Neglect can be physical, educational, or emotional. Physical neglect includes refusal of or delay in seeking health care, abandonment, expulsions from the home or refusal to allow a runaway to return home, and inadequate supervision. Educational neglect includes the allowance of chronic truancy, failure to enroll a child of mandatory school age in school, and failure to attend to a special educational need. Emotional neglect includes such actions as marked inattention to the child?s need for affection, refusal of or failure to provide needed psychological care, spouse abuse in the child's presence, and permission for drug or alcohol use by the child. (The assessment of child neglect requires consideration of cultural values and standards of care as well as recognition that the failure to provide the necessities of life may be related to poverty.)

What is the withholding of medically indicated treatment?

Withholding of medically indicated treatment is: The failure to respond to the infant?s life threatening conditions by providing treatment (including appropriate nutrition, hydration, and medication) that in the treating physician's or physicians' reasonable medical judgment, will be most likely to be effective in ameliorating or correcting all such conditions. But, the term does not include the failure to provide treatment (other than appropriate nutrition, hydration, and medication) to an infant when, in the treating physician's or physicians' reasonable medical judgment: The infant is chronically and irreversibly comatose The provision of such treatment would - Merely prolong dying - Not be effective in ameliorating or correcting all of the infant's life-threatening conditions - Otherwise be futile in terms of the survival of the infant The provision of such treatment would be virtually futile in terms of the survival of the infant and the treatment itself under such circumstances would be inhumane.

What is sexual abuse?

Sexual abuse includes fondling a child's genitals, intercourse, incest, rape, sodomy, exhibitionism, and commercial exploitation through prostitution or the production of pornographic materials. Many experts believe that sexual abuse is the most under-reported form of child maltreatment because of the secrecy of "conspiracy of silence" that so often characterizes these cases.