Children of deployed soldiers may be at a higher risk for emotional, physical, and sexual abuse than children of soldiers who aren’t deployed, a study suggests.
The report, published in the May 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, found that the rate of child abuse in military families doubled after October 2002, when many U.S. soldiers were deployed overseas. Both departures to and returns from deployment were associated with with a rise in child-abuse rates, according to the study. Information was analyzed from a Texas database of verified child-abuse cases from 2000 to 2003.
Read an abstract of “Effect of Deployment on the Occurrence of Child Maltreatment in Military and Nonmilitary Families” from the American Journal of Epidemiology.
