Hospital Opens Center Targeting Child Abuse

Physicians and child-abuse counselors at the Children’s Hospital and Health Center have their work cut out for them.

In response to a dramatic increase in reported child-abuse cases, the hospital is opening the Center for Child Protection today with the goal, its director says, of eliminating child abuse “within the next 100 years.”

Why so long?

Because, the center’s director Dr. David L. Chadwick said, the syndrome of abuse is often passed on quietly between generations, making it extremely difficult to detect and bring under control.

“People who have abused children tend to have histories of child abuse themselves,” said Chadwick.

Said Vince Bond, another hospital spokesman: “Face it. We’re not going to see the eradication of child abuse in our lifetime.”

In addition to offering counseling and educational services, the center plans to compete for state, federal and private child-abuse research grants. The Kempe Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse in Denver, Colo., is the only other child-abuse clinic in the country to combine counseling and research as a tool for controlling child abuse.

Chadwick hopes the Children’s Hospital center, the first of its kind on the West Coast, will catapult San Diego to national attention as a model city in the prevention and reduction of child abuse.

“What we did in the past was to react . . . we now want to be pro-active,” Chadwick said.

The center plans to conduct a series of small-scale research projects in San Diego that can later be applied on a national level. Topics of research include child abuse among in-laws, among other members of the extended family and in families with children with special medical problems.

“There’s enough here to keep me busy for a lifetime, and maybe then some,” Chadwick said, referring to the large volume of child-abuse cases the hospital deals with each year.

Before the center’s opening, a hospital child protection team provided counseling and clinical care for parents and children involved in child-abuse cases. In recent years, the number of reported child-abuse cases has skyrocketed, leaving the 23-member team understaffed and overworked, Bond said.

In 1984, the hospital handled 1,337 sexual and physical abuse cases--up from 673 cases just two years earlier. Hospital officials say greater public awareness and population growth are factors that influenced the increase in reported cases.

“Clearly a solution is long overdue; the problem is actually worse than it seems,” Bond said. “Most experts feel the majority of child-abuse cases go unreported,” he said.

With today’s opening of the Center for Child Protection, the hospital will be able to expand existing programs including the STOP! program, in which counselors advise San Diego schoolchildren on how to avoid, report or escape threatening situations.

Counselors have met with approximately 100 children throughout San Diego county since the program began in 1984. This year the center plans to make at least 60 school presentations and see between 30,000 and 50,000 children.

The STOP! child-abuse sessions are expected to be one of the center’s most successful programs, since past meetings have helped hospital officials detect, prevent and study child-abuse cases.

“With the exception of the child’s home, the school provides the most consistent setting where the child’s behavior and emotional development can be observed,” Bond said.