Theoretical and empirical studies on "unidentified child abuse victims" : prevalence and psychological influences

本课题在三年的时间里进行了以下研究：1.调查了大学生中“身份不明的儿童虐待受害者”的患病率，并考察了儿童虐待对大学生心理适应（分离、抑郁、自尊）的影响。通过本研究，我们编制了《多形式虐待儿童量表》（MCAI）。“2.通过将MCAI应用于家庭中的受虐待儿童来检验其临床效度，并通过将其应用于大学生来检验其收敛效度。3.编制了适用于1-3岁和4-5奥尔兹的《儿童虐待症状量表》。然后，我们进行了一项大规模的研究，通过要求教师在F县的3个城市的日托中心为他们的孩子填写清单，以调查身份不明的虐待儿童的患病率。根据研究结果，我们估计约有1.5%的儿童在中心可以被确定为“身份不明的受虐待儿童”，他们没有被报告给PC办公室。通过定性分析他们对开放式虐待的反应。5.我们研究了日托所虐待行为的普遍性-中心教师要求大学生回顾性报告他们小时候在中心的经历。6.我们检查了大型中心门诊中身份不明的虐待儿童受害者的普遍性7.探讨普通人在报告受虐待儿童时可能遇到的困难的可能原因，本研究以儿童虐待为研究对象，探讨了专业人员与非专业人员（包括大学生和管家在内的14种职业）在儿童虐待专业知识方面的差异，方法是让他们评估MCAI中虐待行为的严重程度。我们发现，专业人士认为虐待行为比非专业人士少虐待。

In this project, we conducted the following studies during the period of 3 years :1.We investigated the prevalence of "unidentified child abuse (CA) victims' in college students and examined influences of CA on their psychological adjustment (dissociation, depression, self-esteem). Through this study, we developed "Multi-form Child Abuse Inventory (MCAI)."2.We tested clinical validity of MCAI by applying it to abused children in home and convergent validities with college students. It was shown to have good validities.3.We developed "Child Abuse Symptom Inventories" for 1-3 and 4-5 year olds. Then, we conducted a large-scale study, by asking teachers to file out the inventories for their children in daycare centers in 3 cities of Prefecture F, in order to investigate the prevalence of unidentified abused children. Based on our findings, we estimated about 1.5% of children in centers that can be identified as "unidentified abused children" who have not been reported to PC Agencies.4.We exploratorily investigated reasons of daycare-center teachers having difficulties of reporting abused children whom they found in their centers, by qualitatively analyzing their responses to open-ended questionnaire.5.We examined the prevalence of abusive acts committed by daycare-center teachers by asking college students to retrospectively report their experiences while in centers as a child.6.We examined the prevalence of unidentified child abuse victims in outpatients of a large-scale psychiatric hospital.7.To explore possible causes of the difficulties that regular people might experience for reporting abused children, we examined differences among professionals vs. non-professionals (14 occupations, including college students and housekeepers) in terms of expertise of child abuse, by asking them to evaluate the degree of severity of abusive acts in MCAI. We found that professionals perceive abusive acts as less abusive than non-professional people.