COMMENTARY ON ABUSE : For a Child, Home May Be More Dangerous Than the Streets : Nearly half of all victims of child abuse, a study indicates, are between the ages of 12 and 18. Teen-age suicide is believed to be an end result.

A recent front page Times article disclosed that a million high school children attempt suicide annually. Add to that the 1 million children who run away from (or are kicked out of) their homes each year, and it’s obvious that there are a tremendous number of unhappy youngsters in this country.

We know that about one half of those runaway children are running from abuse in their homes. But there are no statistics cited about the possibility that some of those children may have felt driven to suicide in their desire to escape abuse by other family members.

Instead, experts suggested problems such as substance abuse, depression, and stress. It’s not surprising that there was no mention of the possibility that some of those suicidal teen-agers are victims of violence by parents and/or siblings in their homes.

When the topic of child abuse is raised, almost everyone thinks only of small, helpless babies and toddlers, yet nearly half of all victims of child abuse are between the ages of 12 and 18.

Older children don’t appear as helpless or innocent as younger children, thus parental abuse is often blamed on the victims by the notion that they “got what they deserve.” Abuse by siblings, even when noticed, is mostly ignored by everyone. People dismiss it as “kids will be kids.”

Physical abuse of adolescents must cause serious and visible damage before most people realize that a child is being hurt. Parents usually try to hide or rationalize their own abuse, and if the injuries are inflicted by siblings, parents often cover up for their violent child. Sometimes one child is the family scapegoat, targeted by both parents and violent siblings.

Not only are adolescents more likely to be abused than younger children, they suffer more severe violence. One punch to a small child’s head can be fatal, but there may have to be many punches to an older child’s head before unconsciousness or death occurs. Consider these statistics: the proportion of persons 15 to 17 years old is only 19% of the child population, but 27% of the serious injuries--and 23% of the fatalities--occur in that age range. Abuse increases with the age of the child.

A teen-ager in an American family is in a very dangerous position. More than 1,000 college students participated in my survey of adolescent abuse. Those students revealed that when they were 12 years old or older, there was physical violence in 88% of their homes: sometimes the violence was between their parents, between them and their parents, or between them and their siblings. Seven percent reported multiple types of abuse in their homes. Almost half these students reported that they were victims of physical violence by their parents, and some complained that the questionnaire didn’t ask about psychological abuse, which they felt was even more hurtful. One wrote: “You can get over the bruises, but when they play with your head, that’s hard to get over.”

My study confirmed other research findings that there is more sibling violence than any other type of intrafamily violence. More than three out of four of these students were either victims of sibling abuse or aggressors, and some were both, in their homes of orientation.

A high proportion of them also suffered sexual abuse from family members. One female told about being forced to watch while her father raped a sister and then it was her turn. Another told about frequently being raped by her older brother until one day he brought his friends and held her down while his “buddies” engaged in gang rape. Some males told about extreme violence, including death threats, from brothers. When he was a child, one student asked for his parents’ protection from a bullying older brother, but he was told that he had to “act like a man” and “don’t come running to us.”

Americans tend to worry about crime in the streets and, undeniably, our streets are getting more dangerous with each passing year. However, researchers find that the home is more dangerous than the streets: More assaults and batteries, rapes and homicides occur in the home than on the streets.

Research reveals millions of victims of violence in the home: wives beaten by their husbands, little children beaten and neglected by their parents, both wives and children sexually abused in the home, and elderly folks abused and neglected by their caretakers. Research on sibling violence is almost nonexistent.

Like most people, researchers have ignored that segment of the population best known for its loud music, slavish devotion to faddish clothes and activities, and behavior adopted to shock the older generations: children from 12 to 18. Abused adolescents are not the ones who complain loudly to anyone and everyone.

We must begin to realize that beneath all the noise and commotion exists a segment of the population that seldom calls out for help because of family loyalty and knowledge that they won’t be believed anyhow.

Abused young people are the silent ones, who often minimize or excuse the aggression of other family members when an outsider suspects abuse. There are millions of young people living lives of quiet desperation: old enough to know that what happens to them is wrong but too young to escape.

For these young people, suicide may seem like an attractive alternative.