ISPCAN child abuse screening across cultures

Child maltreatment is a problem that has longer recognition in the northern hemisphere and in high-income countries. Recent work has highlighted the nearly universal nature of the problem in other countries but demonstrated the lack of comparability of studies because of the variations in definitions and measures used. The International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect became involved in developing instrumentation that can be used by investigators seeking to measure child abuse in ways that permitted cross-cultural and cross-national benchmarking by local investigators. Design and Sampling: Convenience samples of approximately 120 parents with children under the age of 18 in each country (698 total) were administered the instrument. Results: This report presents an instrument which measures parental behaviors directed at children which has been piloted in 7 countries and 7 languages. Patterns of response revealed few missing values and distributions of responses that were similar in the seven countries. Results varied by child age and gender in expected directions. Conclusion: Early data suggest that the instrument is well tolerated and captures variations in child discipline by parental self-report.