Facts About Abuse
Reported child abuse quadrupled in Texas in recent years. Parenting is a complicated, demanding job. Very few parents have had any training in how to do it. But abuse will continue to increase as long as unrelieved stresses affect families.
Studies show that 98 percent of today's convicted felons were abused as children. A large percent of chemically-dependent children and teens have suffered abuse or neglect. Victims of sexual abuse find it difficult to establish loving, trusting relationships as adults. All abuse victims whose families do not receive help are at high risk for repeating the cycle in their own families.
Child Abuse includes the following acts or omissions:
Physical Abuse
- Physical injury that results in substantial harm or genuine threat of harm from physical injury to the child. This includes an injury that is at variance with the history or explanation given, excluding an accident or reasonable discipline by a parent, guardian, or managing or possessory conservatory.
- Failure to make a reasonable effort to prevent an action by another that results in substantial harm to a child.
Emotional Abuse
- Mental or emotional injury to a child that results in an observable and material impairment in the child's growth, development, or psychological functioning.
- Causing or permitting the child to be in a situation in which the child sustains a mental or emotional injury that results in observable and material impairment in the child's growth, development, or psychological functioning.
Sexual Abuse
- Sexual conduct harmful to a child's mental, emotional, or physical welfare;
- Failure to make reasonable effort to prevent sexual conduct harmful to child;
- Compelling or encouraging the child in sexual conduct
- Causing, permitting, encouraging, engaging in, or allowing the photographing, filming, or depicting of the child of the person knew or should have known that the resulting photograph, film, or depiction of the child is obscene.
Child Neglect includes:
Neglectful Supervision
Placing a child in or failing to remove the child from a situation that a reasonable person would realize requires judgment or actions beyond the child's level of maturity, physical condition, or mental abilities and that results in bodily injury or substantial risk of immediate harm to the child.
Medical Neglect
Failure to seek, obtain, or follow through with medical care for the child, with the failure resulting in or presenting substantial risk of death, disfigurement, or bodily injury or with the failure resulting in an observable and material impairment to the growth, development, or functioning of the child.
Physical Neglect
Failure to provide food, clothing, or shelter necessary to sustain life or health of the child, excluding the failure caused primarily by financial inability unless relief services had been offered and refused.
Refusal to Accept Parental Responsibility
Failure by the person responsible for a child's care, custody or welfare to permit the child to return to the child's home without arranging for the necessary care for the child after the child has been absent from the home for any reason, including have been in residential care or having run away.
Abandonment
Leaving a child in a situation where the child would be exposed to substantial risk of harm, without arranging for necessary care for the child, and a demonstration of intent not to return by a parent, guardian, or managing or possessory conservator for a child.
