Tuesday, April 30, 2019 | 2 a.m.
Resist the temptation to think of all child abusers as monsters set out to inflict harm on their child, say medical professionals at University Medical Center Children’s Hospital. Oftentimes, those who abuse children are overstressed, overworked parents lacking community and social support.
That’s why raising awareness of child abuse — which UMC doctors say is on the rise in Southern Nevada — is crucial when it comes to preventing serious injury and death of young children at the hands of parents or caretakers.
Medical professionals from UMC and hospital partners addressed the rise in child abuse fatalities in the region at a news conference Monday. They also outlined some of the preventive measures the hospital is taking to address the problem, and ways that members of the community can prevent and address abuse of children.
In 2018, UMC reported nine deaths as a result of child abuse and neglect and treated 31 cases overall, with the victims’ ages ranging from 18 months to 4 years old. In 2017, the hospital reported seven deaths related to child abuse and neglect, while only three were reported in 2016.
The increase has alarmed medical staff at UMC, including Mason VanHouweling, the hospital's CEO.
“As a hospital administrator, a member of this community and a father of two daughters, I continue to be shocked at the amount of cases we continue to see in our community,” VanHouweling said. “We all must work together to protect this vulnerable population.”
In Nevada and nationwide, children under 5 are now more likely to die of inflicted abuse than of a car crash or cancer, said Jay Fisher, medical director at UMC Children’s. Fisher added that when child abuse occurs, it is often on more than one occasion and as a result of “an accumulation of stresses” in a household.
To combat the rise of child abuse and neglect, UMC has created a free child abuse prevention handbook for parents, which helps them identify signs of stress that may lead to abuse of children. In addition, the hospital now requires all families with children under 3 years old to watch an informational video about shaken baby syndrome, one of the most common types of child abuse in which a caregiver shakes a baby, usually out of frustration, causing brain damage, physical complications or death.
To prevent such a tragedy, parents and caregivers should recognize that they can take a step away from a crying or distressed baby in order to calm down, and that doing so can sometimes save the child’s life, said Amanda Haboush-Deloye, associate director of the Nevada Institute for Children’s Research and Policy at UNLV. Parents should also be careful about with whom they leave their child.
“When you are leaving your kid with other people, make sure they know how to take care of an infant,” Haboush-Deloye said.
The causes of child abuse and the uptick reported at UMC are multifaceted, Fisher said, and the phenomenon seems to cross socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds. But he added that the stresses associated with being a working parent — and lack of access to resources and support — seem to be contributing to the problem.
“A lot of these families are having to work two or three jobs, and they’ve got three or four kids,” Fisher said. “No family is more than a couple tragedies away from a very dire situation.”
Fischer and Haboush-Deloye therefore emphasized that everyone in the community — parents, teachers, neighbors and more — should check in with those around them, offer support to families in distress and look for and report signs of abuse.
“This is a health care problem, not just a social problem or an individual problem,” Fisher said. “It’s a family problem. It’s a community problem that we all have to focus on.”
