Measuring and monitoring national prevalence of child maltreatment: A practical handbook
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Abstract
This handbook has been developed to support the creation of a surveillance system to measure and monitor child maltreatment prevalence across European countries. Implementation of a surveillance system will be an essential factor in realizing Investing in children, the European child maltreatment prevention action plan 2015–2020. It describes the processes involved in setting up child maltreatment surveillance systems and presents recommendations on issues such as selection of data collection method, sampling of respondents, choice of instrument to measure abuse and ethical considerations. The handbook suggests community-based surveys on prevalence as the most appropriate method in setting up a child maltreatment surveillance system and proposes the use of one of three established child maltreatment questionnaires, based on the results of a rapid systematic review of child abuse measures. The Short Child Maltreatment Questionnaire is introduced for countries needing a brief measure. Ideally, community-based surveys should be conducted with nationally representative samples of approximately 1500 students in each age group and administered via schools. The use of self-report methods – paper-based or tablet/mobile-phone self-administered questionnaires – is advised. Questions should capture previous-year and lifetime prevalence of child maltreatment. Monitoring prevalence rates over time requires surveys to be conducted at repeated time points. It is proposed that surveys be administered every four to seven years. Methods of data collection that do not involve children are presented for countries unable to conduct surveys with children. Finally, ethical considerations in conducting surveys on child maltreatment are discussed.