Reuters – Kathryn Doyle
“Phone-based surveys show that nearly four of every 10 kids and teens in the U.S. were exposed to violence or abuse over the previous year, researchers have found. “Children are the most victimized segment of the population,” said study leader David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “The full burden of this tends to be missed because many national crime indicators either do not include the experience of all children or don’t look at the big picture and include all the kinds of violence to which children are exposed,” Finkelhor told Reuters Health by email. Compared to 2011, the violence rates appear to be stable, and certain kinds of violence exposure may be decreasing, he said. While the rates are not going up, “the problem is that there is still way too much,” he said. The National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence includes phone interviews with contacts at a representative sample of U.S. numbers in 2013 and 2014. Overall, researchers collected information on 4,000 kids age 17 and younger.”(more)