Читать книгу Pediatric Epidemiology - Группа авторов - Страница 26

Police reports on child maltreatment are highly dependent on national laws and the existing thresholds as to how serious cases must be in order to be reported. When using such data one has to be aware of these facts and how well the report system is handled by the police. In the Nordic countries, all professionals working with children have been mandated to report not only obvious maltreatment cases but also suspected cases of child abuse and neglect to the social services since the 1980s. The social services then report severe cases to the police department when there is reason to believe that a crime has been committed. If all countries had mandatory reporting and handled these reports in the same way, international comparisons would be possible. However, great variation exists even between the European countries. In Sweden, police reports for child maltreatment have steadily increased and now also include many cases of neglect, probably due to direct reports from professionals outside the social services. An international public would therefore assume that child maltreatment is more common in Sweden than in other countries, while the opposite has actually been shown through self-report surveys among children, and severe cases of abuse are very few.