Child abuse rises in S.C.

Some measures of child abuse rose in the past year as the state continued to struggle with an economic downturn hitting some of its most vulnerable residents the hardest.

Even as unemployment and child abuse rose, nonprofit and government agencies tasked with trying to help faced funding cuts that limited their reach.

New research presented to the American Academy of Pediatrics has directly linked unemployment increases to child maltreatment a year later. State unemployment in the wake of the most recent recession peaked in January at 12.5 percent.

Experts said the stresses of poverty cause some parents to snap with long-term consequences, including more students dropping out of school and more inmates crammed into an already overburdened prison system.

"We have to stop thinking about child abuse as 'those people's problem and to say this is a community problem," said Sue Williams, chief executive officer of the Children's Trust of South Carolina, an agency that focuses on prevention.

Children who are alleged to have been abused or neglected in South Carolina are referred to the state Department of Social Services for an investigation into whether they should receive protective services.

DSS investigated more than 18,800 cases in fiscal year 2009-10, an increase of almost 6.7 percent. The number of cases in which allegations proved founded rose 2.7 percent to nearly 7,000.

The previous year's statistics had shown signs of hope. Investigations and founded reports had both dropped more than 5 percent.

Robert Sege, a pediatrics professor at Boston University School of Medicine, said he and some colleagues decided to study the link between abuse and unemployment after noticing a dramatic increase in the number of maltreated children seen at Boston Medical Center in 2009.

They looked at 18 years of nationwide data as recent as 2008. Researchers found that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment, maltreatment reports one year later increased by at least .5 per 1,000 children.

"When unemployment goes up, it has drastic effects for children," Sege said.

South Carolina's unemployment rate shot up from 5.5 percent in February 2008 to 12.5 percent in January. The rate has bounced up and down this year and stood at 10.7 percent in October.

The Greenville Rape Crisis and Child Abuse Center served 625 children last year and 450 in the first 10 months of this year. A higher percentage of the abuse is sexual, and the children are younger, executive director Shauna Galloway-Williams said.

The cases of physical abuse have been more severe, she said.

At the same time, the agency has been unable to add staff, she said.

"Our resources have been diminished, but our numbers have increased," Galloway-Williams said. "It's certainly been a challenge for us to meet the needs of the community."

At least one measure of Upstate child abuse and neglect has fallen. Greenville County sheriff's deputies received 136 reports of abuse and neglect through September, a decrease of more than 13 percent.

Experts said that further decreases can be achieved through education, better funding for state services and peer support for parents.