clocarlin@... asked this question on 4/26/2000:

Am looking for stats on children killed in domestic violence situations across U.S. and in New York. Where can I find the info for a grad school paper?

cpiblues gave this response on 4/26/2000:

Your most likely sources of information for this topic will be "across the U.S." stats. Although New York certainly has stats on this issue - it may not be indicative of the U.S. as a whole - further - they may document abuse/neglect/domestic violence different than another state. At this time most states at least are similar in their definitions but in general all states define their statutes differently. Domestic violence has only recently really been acknowledged as a serious problem and thus only the most current statistics will be reliable insofar as the amount of domestic violence occurring and what constitutes domestic violence. If you recognize that each state qualifies each item differently somewhat then you realize that you must take all of these statistics with a "grain of salt". Sadly, some cases do not separate basic "abuse" from a domestic violence situation and thus your numbers will appear skewed when in fact it is the method of reporting. Some good sites for information are: www.calib.com/nccanch/pubs/index.htm www.famvi.com/ www.famvi.com/links.htm http://www.nncc.org/abuse/abuse.page.html Journals such as Child Maltreatment, Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Family violence, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice are good resources for statistics. The U.S. Dept. of Justice stats will be the most accurate because they list all of the states and usually also define for you how that state accumulated their data. Thus beware of doubling figures or separating out figures depending on what "family violence is". In Florida we recognize "Family Violence Threatens Harm". If domestic violence occurs and a child and parent are injured - juvenile delinquency may become involved: depending on the police that respond: they may say it was the juvenile's fault and send them to detention or they might arrest the parents - very subjective responses because of "discretion" and that also skews the data. You might want to compare how the states differ in their coding of these key terms that cause persons to use faulty reasoning when attempting to combine these stats. Just as an example: Suppose a baby died that happened to be in between two adults fighting but was not necessarily directed at the child: how would you code it: child death due to abuse, family violence threatened harm, etc.? This would depend on the investigator who is certainly not thinking about how someone is going to be coding their results for statistic generation. Thus even then there will be variation.