Officially, child abuse didn't exist under the Communist concept of a perfect society,” said Dr Owen Lewis, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at New York City's Columbia Medical School and cofounder of the Children's Mental Health Alliance. “Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, it became very evident that child abuse was quite common in these countries.”
In 1995, the Alliance and the Open Society Institute (a philanthropic body set up by financier George Soros) organised the eastern European child abuse and child mental health project. This now involves non-governmental organisations in 11 Baltic, Balkan, central European, and Asian countries, dedicated to identifying and preventing child and adolescent abuse and providing treatment systems. “To date, approximately 18000 children have had face-to-face clinical contact with non-governmental organisation team members,” Dr Lewis said.
The organisations' goals include increasing public awareness, promoting the training of professionals who can effectively deal with child maltreatment in their respective countries, and facilitating social and legal reform. Members of those organisations—paediatricians, psychologists, and other professionals—met in Budapest to discuss how far the project has come.
“We've experienced varying degrees of success, often reflecting the diversity of the political and economic situations in the various countries,” said Dr Lewis. “An obvious complicating factor has been political and religious unrest, including a decade of war in the former Yugoslavia.”
Other hurdles are more subtle. “We have a child protection law which makes it mandatory to report abuse cases, but it's not working very well,” reported Dr Ruth Soonets, a paediatrician and head of the Tartu Child Support Centre at Tartu University Children's Hospital in Estonia.
“In a survey a few years ago of 292 15 year olds, 65% of the children said they were abused emotionally, 20% of the boys and 11% of the girls said they were physically abused, and 35% reported sexual abuse,” she said. She complained that one of the problems was money. “We have more people writing grant applications than working with children. Our government hasn't put a high priority on child abuse.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122705/Education was a key factor in combating child abuse, Dr Soonets said. “We published the first Estonian language book on the mistreatment of children in 1997 and distributed 1000 copies to doctors, social workers, teachers, the police, judges, and prosecutors. Because of recognition, we're seeing an increase in child abuse because more cases are being reported.”
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