Child Abuse in Stepfamilies

This month I am looking at the issue of CHILD ABUSE IN STEPFAMILIES. It is certainly not a pleasant subject but one that has come about due to a running battle I have with an organisation who states in their newsletters the abusive nature of stepfamilies. It is not that abuse does not occur within this family structure, but unfortunately their reporting of the incidence is questionable, due to the classification of what constitutes a stepfamily. I have raised the matter with the Festival of Light concerning their first article and I intend to reply to their second. The reason being is that stepfamilies have enough problems to cope with, without organisation such as the Festival of Light labelling them as an abusive environment.

John Faulkner

In their first article they state:

Mathematicians can get out their calculators and use the number supplied on pages 21 and 22 to work it all out. Traditional families (married couple living with their biological children) make up 81% of families and are responsible for 30% of child abuse. Blended stepparent families make up on 4% of families but are responsible for 21% of child abuse.

This means that blended families are responsible for 14 times...more abuse than the traditional families. In the case of sex abuse in particular, blended (step-parent) families are associated with 17 time more abuse than traditional families.

These figures do not mean that every step-parent family, or every sole parent family, is abusive - nor that every traditional family is perfect. But they do show there is a much greater risk in step-parent and sole-parent situations.

It continues with statements such as,

ð They did not get on with their mother's new boyfriend.

ð "Street kids yearn to see mum and dad get back together.

ð "Almost all the street kids we work with in Care and Communication Concern in Melbourne come from single parent or blended step-families. And let me tell you, blended families are the worst - when mum or dad's new sex partner has no interest or the wrong interest in the kids."

ð They are inviting sole parents and step-parent families to foster children, even though these families are more likely to be abusive.

Governments can help - but not by throwing more money at social workers. Before anything else we need a change in law to allow marriage to be valued, in the words of the Lyons Forum, as "the environment in which nurturing of children can best be undertaken."

The article was stating that stepfamilies and single parent families should not be allowed to foster children due to the relative risk of abuse in these family structures. The first thing that came to my mind was, 'how many of these families would contemplate fostering other children considering the difficulties already faced in these families?'

The problem I have with the article is with regard to the terminology of a Stepfamily. Statements such as, 'mother's new boyfriend', and 'when mum or dad's new sex partner' are not really clear. They do not even suggest that it is a defacto relationship. But Festival of Light in an attempt to sensationalise statistics have grouped these relationship under the heading of Stepfamilies.

In the second article by the Festival of Light

Australian statistics indicate that the relative risk of child sex abuse in a family where only one of the parent figures is a natural parent, is much higher than in a single-parent family and enormously higher - around 17 times - than in a two natural parent family. In a stepfamily, the abuse may be an older stepsibling - not necessarily the stepparent. Former Australian Human Rights Commissioner Brian Burdekin reported that sexual abuse of girls is very much higher in families where the adult male is not the natural father. In 1994 Daly & Wilson reported that US children from birth to two years are 70 to 100 times more likely to die at hands of a stepfather than a biological parent.

US researcher Leslie Margolin wrote an article in 1992 entitled, "Child abuse by mothers' boyfriends: why the over-representation?" A former assistant in the Victorian State Coroner's Office recently commented that almost every case of young child murder he had investigated involved a non-traditional family: the recent case in Moe is a further example. He then added: "But we're not really supposed to say that!"

I have not presented all of the second article due to its size, but it came under the heading of, 'Strategies for Reducing the Incidence of Child Abuse and Neglect in Australia.' The thrust of the article was the upholding of the two natural parent family, it was placed on a pedestal as the ideal, and in some ways portraying other family types as inferior. In this article I question once again the terminology and their statistical findings. They presented a graph showing three categories, Two natural parents, Single Parents and Stepfamily. It would appear that defacto relationships and new relationships have been placed under the one category. The graph shows that the relative risk of abuse is extremely high for both stepfamilies and single parent families, compared with the two natural parent family.

My findings are completely different to FOL.

The majority of children were maltreated by birth parents (78%). Fewer children were maltreated by non-birth parents or parent-substitutes, such as step-parent, foster parent, adoptive parent, separated or divorced spouse of an in-home parent, or parent's boyfriend or girlfriend (14%) or by others (9%).

ð The safest environment for a child--that is, the family environment with the lowest risk ratio for physical abuse--is one in which the biological parents are married and the family has always been intact.

ð The rate of abuse is six times higher in the second-safest environment: the blended family in which the divorce mother has remarried.

ð The rate of abuse is 14 times higher if the child is living with a biological mother who lives alone.

ð The rate of abuse is 20 times higher if the child is living with a biological father who lives alone.

ð The rate of abuse is 20 times higher if the child is living with biological parents who are not married but are cohabiting.

ð The rate of abuse is 33 times higher if the child is living with a mother who is cohabiting with another man.

The most interesting finding was from Dr Mary Hood in her unpublished paper, 'Not Just neglect! The interplay Between Poverty, Unemployment, Family Disruption and all Child Abuse,' which she presented at the recent child abuse and neglect conference held in Adelaide. Dr Hood is with the Social Policy Research Centre with the University of South Australia, and works with the Child Protection Unit at the Womens and Childrens Hospital. Her paper involved case studies of 500 child abuse victims in the hospital. Based on her findings it can be deduced that the mother only family is the most abusive in the areas of sexual, physical, neglect and emotional. Dr Hood study separated parent and stepparent and parent and defacto parent. When doing so the study reveals that out of the two family units the defacto parent family is more abusive the stepparent family. It could almost be stated from her study that the relative risk of abuse is no different between the parent and stepparent family and the two parent family. In fact as other studies have shown the two natural parent family is more abusive in the areas of neglect and emotional abuse than the stepparent family.

Therefore contrary to what the FOL is trying to tell its readers stepfamily are not more abusive. Abuse still occurs within this family unit, but in fact is comparable to the two natural parent family.