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Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention Program |
Child Abuse In IowaEach state separately defines by law what constitutes child abuse; there is no federal law or standard that applies throughout the country. In Iowa, the Legislature has defined as "child abuse" several types of harm suffered as the result of the acts or omissions of someone who is responsible for the care of a child. This harm includes:
In Iowa the Department of Human Services ("DHS") is responsible for responding to reports of possible abuse. Iowa DHS offices accepted 22,991 reports of suspected child abuse in 2007 and found that there was child abuse in 8,484 (36.9 percent) of the reports. All told, the number of children that DHS determined suffered abuse was 13,529. This means that 19.51 Iowa children per 1,000 were found to have been abused.
The number of children abused in 2007 was approximately 500 fewer than in 2006 and 1,500 less than in 2005 – a decline of 10 percent. Below is a chart showing the trend in child abused over the last decade:
Please note that PCA Iowa uses the “duplicate” abused children numbers from the Iowa DHS. These numbers count each time a particular child is abused. DHS also releases figures for “unique” abused children. These numbers count a child only once as abused, even if the child suffers abuse on multiple occasions. In 2007, there were 12,237 “unique” abused children.
The table below lists the different types of child abuse that DHS confirmed in 2007:
For more data on child abuse, visit this site’s Child Abuse Data page.
If you suspect child abuse, please call 1-800-362-2178. If you would like more information on reporting abuse, click here. |
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For general comments and questions, please contact: Prevent Child Abuse Iowa
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