Monday 27th December, 07:38 AM JST
TOKYO —
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has developed a database intended to distinguish child injuries caused by accidents from those inflicted through domestic violence with a view to preventing repetition of child abuse.
Given that parents who have abused their children often attribute the injuries to accidents, the database will seek to verify their statements by figuring out the likelihood of a given child’s injury having been caused by an accident, the government lab, known as AIST, said.
The database performs the task by comparing a patient’s injury with some 10,000 cases of children who were hurt due to accidents and were treated by the National Center for Child Health and Development.
The data are classified by injured children’s gender, age and stage of physical development, and give the details about the nature of their injuries.
The institute used the database to examine 24 cases of child injuries that were considered to have been caused by abuse and in 22 cases, the chances of the injuries being caused by an accident ranged from several to about 20%. Still, such percentages sometimes went as high as nearly 50% so the lab says it is still working to improve the database’s precision.
Doctors who suspect patients might have been abused by their parents are required to report to local counseling offices for children but often refrain from doing so because they are not completely sure whether they are right.
The lack of scientific standards about what kind of injuries can be considered to have been caused by domestic violence is one reason that is making difficult for doctors and nurses to report possible child abuse cases, said Koji Kitamura, an AIST researcher who is working on the new database.
AIST says it hopes to figure out the threshold percentage to determine whether a given injury has been caused by child abuse.
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