Glimpsing the Iceberg: Corporal Punishment and Physical Abuse

To truly address child physical abuse, we have to understand the scope of the problem and how the use of corporal punishment can escalate to the point in which children are harmed. What Dr. Amy Slep and her team did was to set up their research in such a way that it was truly anonymous, and parents could feel very safe to be completely honest about their use of corporal punishment and even their own self-identified physical abuse of their own children. As you will hear, parents admit—and to a shocking degree—physically disciplining infants, an unsafe practice that warrants help and support immediately. They admit a range of behaviors far beyond the spanking with an open hand that some of us might remember from childhood. And a heartbreaking number admit to physically disciplining—to the point of physical abuse—their own children, whether because of corporal punishment taken too far or out of frustration or anger. 

Topics in this episode:

• Origin story (02:49)
• What are corporal punishment and physical abuse? (05:31)
• How the study encouraged honesty (11:28)
• Studying military families (15:51)
• Family size and physical abuse (21:39)
• Physically disciplining infants (24:18)
• Public policy implications (31:57)
• What’s next in research? (35:34)
• For more information (39:53)

 Links:

Amy M. Smith Slep, Ph.D., professor, Family Translational Research Group, New York University

DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

ICD – International Classification of Diseases

“Glimpsing the Iceberg: Parent-Child Physical Aggression and Abuse,” Amy M. Smith Slep, Kimberly A. Rhoades, Michael F. Lorber, Richard E. Heyman (2022). Child Maltreatment, 0(0). DOI: 10.1177/10775595221112921

Child Maltreatment report series from the Administration for Children and Families has the most recent official statistics

National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire

Family Advocacy Program

“Know the Signs: Physical Abuse,” Alaska Department of Family and Community Services, Office of Children’s Services

For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at NationalChildrensAlliance.org. Or visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast.

Transcript

Season 5, Episode 18

“Glimpsing the Iceberg: Corporal Punishment and Physical Abuse,” with Amy. M. Smith Slep, Ph.D.

[Intro music begins]

[Intro]

[00:09] Teresa Huizar:
Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, “Glimpsing the Iceberg: Corporal Punishment and Physical Abuse,” I speak with Dr. Amy Slep, professor at NYU and co-director of the Family Translational Research Group. 

Exploring the relationship between corporal punishment and physical abuse is always fraught. Discussions can quickly devolve into hearsay, anecdotes, and flared tempers. But how often do we look at the actual research on either? The 10 to 15% of all child abuse cases in which what may have started out as discipline, or with the intention of teaching a child, crosses the legal line into child physical abuse.

Now, I’m going to put all my cards on the table. I was spanked as a child. I was never physically abused, and I have no traumatic memories of any of it. Yet, I personally do not believe in the use of corporal punishment. Firstly, because of the research on better alternatives that are more effective. But perhaps more importantly, because I have seen those cases across the past 26 years of my career that did cross that line into abuse—the injuries and the terror. So I’m always grateful when a researcher decides to delve into this area of research.

What Dr. Slep and her team did—which was ingenious—was to set up the research in such a way that it was truly anonymous, and parents could feel very safe to be completely honest about their use of corporal punishment and even their own self-identified physical abuse of their own children. As you will hear, parents admit—and to a shocking degree—physically disciplining infants, an unsafe practice that warrants help and support immediately. They admit a range of behaviors far beyond the spanking with an open hand that some of us might remember from childhood. And a heartbreaking number admit to physically disciplining—to the point of physical abuse—their own children, whether because of corporal punishment taken too far or out of frustration or anger. 

To truly address physical abuse, we have to understand the scope of the problem and how the use of corporal punishment can escalate to the point in which children are harmed. I know you’ll be as interested in this thought-provoking conversation as I was. Please take a listen.

[02:45] Teresa Huizar:
Hi, Amy. Welcome to One in Ten. 

Amy Slep: 
It’s great to be here. Thank you.

[02:49] Teresa Huizar: 
So I’m wondering, how did you come to this work, looking at the relationship between corporal punishment and child physical abuse?

Amy Slep: 
I have always, since before graduate school, been interested in trying to think about and do research on trying to understand the mechanisms about families that can either support or hinder kids’ positive development. And thinking about phenomena like corporal punishment and child abuse as a long continuum and trying to understand if we can isolate where we should be putting the most of our attention.

Obviously, no one thinks hitting kids is a good thing. But where should we emphasize our  programs and policies? 

[03:38] Teresa Huizar: 
I’d like to do a little level-setting so that all of our listeners are kind of coming from a base of knowledge. So I’m wondering if you can just talk a little bit—let’s start with child physical abuse. How big is this problem? How common is it? Sort of, what’s the scope of child physical abuse? 

Amy Slep: 
Mmm. So that’s a great question, and one that I think we don’t have a perfect answer for. 

The official reports of child physical abuse put it at around—I think last time I looked, around 70,000 to 100,000 cases a year in the U.S. Those are, of course, official reports. So that requires someone noticing a child and calling child protective services, and child protective services doing an investigation and then substantiating that maltreatment occurred. So everyone widely recognizes that that’s going to be an underestimate of the amount of child abuse that’s there.

If you then zoom out and try to say, “Well, how big is that iceberg?” that’s when things get really confusing. So there are national surveys that have attempted to ask parents about the nature of their corporal punishment and then more severe aggressive acts are. And those suggest rates that are somewhat higher, and then there are additional—but then everybody says, “Well, but we don’t know how severe the actual actions of those parents self-reporting are.”

It’s really pretty complicated. Some of the work we’ve done has suggested that it may be as high as, as 5 to 7% of kids experience what we would consider to be child physical abuse.

[05:31] Teresa Huizar: 
And we’re going to dig into your study in more depth in a moment. But can you just also talk a little bit about what is the relationship—because they’re not identical. So, what is the relationship between physical discipline or corporal punishment and child physical abuse? 

Amy Slep: 
Sure. “Corporal punishment” is a phrase that typically is used to refer to a parent using some type of physical force against the child in response to the child’s misbehavior, and is used as a form of socialization—so to try to help a child learn what the parents’ limits are in terms of whatever, you know: staying out too late or using that language or hitting or whatever it is that they’re doing. 

Physical abuse is defined in different ways. Each of the states has its own unique laws saying what child physical abuse is in a statutory sense. In our work with the military, that has been influenced. DSM and the I.C.D. suggests that if there’s non-accidental use of physical force on the part of a caregiver that results in any injury to a child under 2, an injury to the face or head or any sort of more significant injury elsewhere in the body, or a trauma response on the part of the kids, which could mean that this act of physical aggression perhaps wasn’t physically injurious but maybe is part of a bigger pattern for that child. So this calls up trauma symptoms or that maybe the child was lucky this time, but what the parent did was, in fact, very dangerous—a parent, you know, throwing a knife at a child or something like that.

So with those thresholds, we don’t consider the intent of the parent when we’re thinking about child physical abuse. So it might be that a parent was doing something physical to discipline a child and teach them about behavior norms. But if that ends up leading to one of these notable outcomes in terms of injury or trauma or putting the child in significant danger, then we would count it as child abuse regardless. 

And of course, child physical abuse doesn’t include only corporal punishment. So, if a parent is using physical force against their child, and it’s not because they’re trying to discipline the child, it’s just that they’ve had a really bad day or have gotten triggered in some way by something or, you know, they have impulse control issues or engaged in substance misuse or whatever—that all counts. And typically that kind of thing isn’t covered by corporal punishment. 

[08:26] Teresa Huizar: 
I appreciate you making some of these distinctions and also demonstrating the complexity of what we’re here to talk about today.

We know that the use of corporal punishment, physical discipline, is much more common than the sort of rates we’re talking about for physical abuse. So can you talk about how common the use of physical discipline is in the U.S.? 

Amy Slep: 
It used to be nearly ubiquitous. It used to be that almost all parents used physical discipline with kids. Those rates have been coming down. I know when I first started this work that the rates were well over 90%. And at this point, I think—and you may know more up-to-date things than me—that that is closer to 70% now. So corporal punishment is not as common as it used to be, but it’s still widely used.

[09:17] Teresa Huizar: 
At least we’re seeing some numbers start to go in the right direction, which is— 

Amy Slep: 
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
—you know, a gift. So let’s kind of pivot from this sort of making sure that everyone has a general sense of the topic to more specifically about the research study that we contacted you about. I’m always delighted when there is a study on physical abuse and also one on corporal punishment. And I also just found your approach in the study very interesting. So, you’re not the only researcher, obviously, who’s looking at these types of topics. What research gap were you specifically trying to address? 

Amy Slep: 
And so the gap we were trying to fill is exactly the one you alluded to at the beginning of our conversation. That we I think sometimes are comforting ourselves thinking that, although official reports are an underestimate that the underestimate may not be quite as notable as this paper and other papers that really dig in like this find. 

I know when we first began the pilot work for this study—which was long ago, and there were very notable researchers who are part of the advisory committee—we did similar work around child abuse and around intimate partner violence, and no one was incredibly shocked at the prevalence rates we were finding for intimate partner violence. But everyone, including the child abuse researchers, were thinking that the magnitude of difference that we were finding between official reports and what our sample was telling us what’s going on was much more than they—they expressed shock and surprise, and a little bit of incredulity.

And so with this, we just wanted to really dig in and try to understand, if you use methods that help you isolate impactful parent-child aggression, not just corporal punishment, how much of that crosses those lines that I was talking about before in terms of danger, injury, and trauma symptoms?

[11:28] Teresa Huizar: 
One of the things I found really—well, there were several things I found interesting about the article—but one of the things that I found interesting was some of the work that you did to try to—I mean, one of the issues with any behavior for which people might be embarrassed or ashamed, you have to worry about how honest they are in their reporting— 

Amy Slep: 
Yes.

Teresa Huizar: 
—of their own behavior. And you guys went to some lengths to try to provide an opportunity that would increase the likelihood of honesty. Can you talk a little bit about the way the study was structured to try to sort of lower the barrier to people being truthful?

Amy Slep: 
Sure, yeah. We were fortunate that we were able to do a good amount of foundational work before we had to actually field the study. So we were able to sit with a lot of parents and talk to them about under what conditions they would feel comfortable—or they thought other people would feel comfortable—being truthful. 

So, we did many things in this study to try to help with that. One is we asked very few demographic questions so that people did not feel like they could be exposed. We didn’t track their names. We weren’t able to ever connect anything back to specific individuals. 

And we asked about behaviors, which is standard for these kinds of things. If you ask about specific behaviors instead of saying, “How often have you abused your child?” you get more useful information. So, if you ask about slapping separate from kicking, separate from punching, people are able to tell you more, and they’re a little more forthcoming.

What we found was that, although we could do some level of screening, if people had not engaged in any even minor—like a slap or a pinch or a push—they weren’t bothered by and they weren’t kind of led into anything by asking about more severe behaviors. But people who had engaged in some potentially more severe, physically aggressive behaviors, having even more severe behaviors be on the list made it more palatable to tell you about the more moderate things. So, we had some behaviors on the list like intentionally burning, and things like that. 

We also had parents, instead of telling us how often they engaged in a particular behavior, we asked them why they engaged in that behavior. So they were able to check off a box saying, “It was to teach.” “It was because I lost my cool.” “It was for discipline,” or some other reason. When we tested things with our families who were working with us before we started the study formally, that seemed really important. That if parents felt like you could, they could explain to you why they were in this position of reporting this act, that they felt more comfortable with it.

[0014:32] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, there’s just so much to say about that.

[Laughter]

Teresa Huizar: 
I mean, my goodness. I just—I did think, I have to say, that I found it enormously clever. Because I completely agree that people are much more likely to be honest— 

[Laughter]

Teresa Huizar: 
—if they can give you their reason for why they did something, right? So I thought it was so smart to include— 

Amy Slep: 
Thank you. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—in your study design, the ability to do that.

And I’m really curious about what were the most frequent reasons, although those weren’t published in this particular study.

Amy Slep: 
Yes.

Teresa Huizar: 
But I just am very curious. I think that would be a whole other area of exploration for what the most likely reasons are.

Amy Slep: 
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
Even by type of physical abuse.

But I also thought it was interesting that by including these sort of more horrific forms of physical abuse, that people sort of minimize their own behavior and were willing to tell you about sort of quote, unquote, “minor” forms of physical abuse, because they’re like, “Well, at least I didn’t burn my child with a cigarette.” 

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
Or, you know, something else, which says nothing good about human psychology, I just want to say it right now.

[Laughter]

Teresa Huizar: 
Oh, dear. However, as far as a study design—

Amy Slep: 
  [Laughter] Sorry.

Teresa Huizar: 
—it was, it was brilliance, pure brilliance.

Amy Slep: 
Oh, thank you.

[15:51] Teresa Huizar: 
But I’m curious about why you decided to go with an Air Force population. So tell me a little bit about that. Why not just a general U.S. sampling of parents? 

Amy Slep: 
Well, that was an opportunity. So it has been my impression that trying to get new and different data on the prevalence of child physical abuse is not a super high priority for any of the—the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control or Administration for Children and Families. That there are studies there. The National Victimization Survey happens every so often and includes child physical abuse, and the National Incident Survey, which is more related to—not exactly the same as reported cases, but is that plus some extra stuff—goes on from time to time. And I think the federal government in general thinks that that information is good enough.

And we were in a position because we were going to do prevention work with the Air Force Family Advocacy Program, and they were interested in trying to understand. Family Advocacy was created by the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, just like all of the state child welfare systems. But the mission is a little bit different.

Our child welfare systems are supposed to identify and track and intervene in maltreatment. But Family Advocacy is supposed to do that for both child maltreatment and intimate partner violence. And they’re charged—the same entity, the Family Advocacy Program is charged with doing prevention, outreach and treatment in addition to, you know, substantiating incidents of maltreatment.

The Air Force partnered with us a long time ago and was particularly interested in trying to understand their prevention efforts at a population level and whether those efforts were making a difference. And anybody who does a lot of prevention work in this or related areas knows that the challenge is that if your prevention efforts are trying to raise awareness, in addition to other things, then you could be doing very effective prevention and your reported cases might be going up because you’re reducing barriers. And that’s a good outcome, not a bad outcome. But you need to have population-level data to help you understand if your cases that are walking in the door are becoming a bigger portion of your iceberg, or if they are in fact, suggesting that the iceberg is growing, which is what many people think if the rates that are walking in the door go up.

So the Air Force was interested in trying to understand—across installations and settings—what the population level of maltreatment was. And they wanted to know that with respect to the definitions of maltreatment that they use in their formal systems. And so because of that there was the opportunity to do this study, and that’s why we picked the Air Force. 

[19:08] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, and how great is it that they wanted to know the full scope of a problem—

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—you know, while tackling it? I mean, I can think of lots of other areas I’d love to see that in too, and not just in the Air Force, right?

Amy Slep: 
[Laughter] Exactly. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah. 

Amy Slep: 
Exactly. Yeah. We felt like it was a very forward-looking approach. 

[19:27] Teresa Huizar: 
Oh, for sure. And I also appreciated, though, the efforts that you all made to make sure that even though there are some things that are unique to an Air Force population, you know: At least one parent’s gain fully employed. 

Amy Slep: 
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
You know, there are other protective factors—

Amy Slep: 
Absolutely. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—in there too. But to make it as close to sort of the general population as you could. 

Amy Slep: 
Yes.

Teresa Huizar: 
Do I have that right? Yeah.

Amy Slep: 
The sample was large enough, and we were able to do the kind of weighting, statistical weighting. It’s all statistical procedures to try to make the prevalences be as accurate for thinking about the U.S. population generally as we could. Knowing that there’s nothing we can do to make up for that somebody has a job, everybody in the sample is an adult, that kind of thing. 

This study involved reports from civilian spouses and from the Air Force active-duty people. It’s not just people who are in the military. But of course, you know, you can think about all sorts of folks who struggle with maltreatment in their families where no one is gainfully employed. And there are lots of other issues—health or mental health issues or substance issues—that would make you not be able to sustain a career in the military. So those folks are not here. 

[20:48] Teresa Huizar: 
Which points out that even the somewhat surprising higher level numbers that you found in your own study, it just points that in the general population, the numbers would likely be even higher. 

Amy Slep: 
Yes.

Teresa Huizar: 
Because you would have some who there’s no one in the family employed or have conditions that would have prevented them from having a military career. And they would have been screened out for that. 

Amy Slep: 
Yeah. It’s also unlikely that, as much as we, we did a bunch of things to try to make—and I appreciate you thinking they were clever—but we did a bunch of things to try to make it more likely that people would report honestly. It still seems like, if someone were going to over report or under report, they would under report.

Teresa Huizar: 
Oh, I’m … yes.

[Laughter]

Teresa Huizar: 
I’m certain of that. And I would bet that’s even more the case, the more severe abuse—

Amy Slep: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
—that they’re reporting. 

[21:39]
 One of the things that I thought was interesting in the study as well is, you looked at the size of families and to see what impact that might have on physical abuse. And probably better for you to talk about your own study than me to talk about it. 

[Laughter]

Teresa Huizar: 
So I’m just, you know, can you just share what you found about how family size interacted with, you know, the incidence rate of child physical abuse?

Amy Slep: 
Sure. Corporal punishment was more likely in families with more kids rather than just having one child. And the rate of physical abuse was also higher if families had more than one child versus one child. And I am unaware of any other studies that asks parents to report on their behavior about more than one child. The most typical approach is to isolate a target child to have parents report on, and we asked about all the kids. So this may be not a surprising finding, just not previously investigated. 

[22:45] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, I think that the paper also pointed out that one myth that has sometimes floated around is that in a family that might have multiple children, one child might be much sort of more likely—

Amy Slep: 
Of course.

Teresa Huizar:
—and potentially be the only victim of physical abuse.

Amy Slep: 
Yes. Yep.

Teresa Huizar: 
And it seems that your findings point to the contrary—

Amy Slep: 
Yeah. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—that children in a family across the board in larger families were likely to experience— 

Amy Slep: 
Of an elevated—

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah.

Amy Slep: 
—risk. Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
—of physical abuse. Yeah.

Amy Slep: 
Yep. 

[23:16] Teresa Huizar: 
And what do you make of that? When you look at this finding that, you know, for one thing that larger families have some increased vulnerability for physical abuse. And then you look at the fact that this isn’t clustered around one child. It tends to be all the children in the family. To what do you attribute that—family stressors or other kinds of things? 

Amy Slep: 
I would say, yes. We know that financial stress, stress in general, parenting strain, all of those things,  are risk factors for child abuse. If you think about, you know, if you’re a family, a young family with four kids, you probably are stretched more tightly in terms of time and stress and the money and all of those things. And so it makes sense. I don’t think the number of kids is a causal factor. I think it’s a marker for life just being more demanding.

[24:14] Teresa Huizar: 
And potentially an amplifier of stress that you already have. 

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah. 

Amy Slep: 
Yep. 

[24:18] Teresa Huizar: 
So I have to say that, overall, when I was reading your results, I can’t say that in large measure I was shocked. I mean, it’s always good to have new information and build the evidence base, but I just, it wasn’t. I didn’t go “Wow!”

Except—

Amy Slep:
[Laughter] Except, okay. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—there was one exception, and I want to tell you what it is. I mean, in cases that I’ve experienced, certainly some of them involved infants. But the level, not only of corporal punishment but also a physical—well, both are equally shocking. I mean, frankly, that someone would think it is okay to physically discipline a child under 6 months of age was shocking. And just the levels of it.

It’s not as though these were rare instances that hardly ever happened. It was. It’s really surprisingly common that parents were reporting that they were physically disciplining a tiny little infant and even reporting physical abuse— 

Amy Slep:
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
—of a child under 6 months of age. And we know, I mean, we know from experience and literature that these kids are the most vulnerable.

But I’m just wondering just what your takeaway is in terms of what we need to be doing prevention-wise? 

Amy Slep:
Mmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
Because it’s just, these are the most vulnerable kids and—

Amy Slep:
Yes.

Teresa Huizar: 
—you know, clearly whatever reasons they were checking in the box for why they were doing it, no one really thinks you’re teaching a 6-month-old anything—

Amy Slep:
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—or a 4-month-old or a 3-month-old. 

Amy Slep:
Yep.

Teresa Huizar: 
So what’s driving that?

Amy Slep: 
Yeah. I guess I think this is one of the places—and so this is now not empirically based. This is just me thinking. I think this is one of the places where our cultural norms are a challenge for us, and we need to work on those. I think in the U.S., you know, very clearly. corporal punishment is legal. That isn’t true everywhere. And rates of corporal punishment are going down. However, they’re still highest with young kids. And our findings, as you’re pointing out, are suggesting that corporal punishment isn’t very rare, even with little babies. 

So, little babies through, you know, early school-age kids, are at high risk for corporal punishment, and I think even if we want to have corporal punishment remain legal in the United States, uand there is some data to suggest that in some circumstances, corporal punishment isn’t linked with terrible outcomes for kids and stuff. So, you know, I’m not trying to say that. But we need to do more to help folks realize that, if you want to include that in your parenting toolbox, it’s not appropriate when kids are too little to be able to kind of think about what it’s a consequence for. You know, the studies on spanking as a backup strategy for time-out and things like that, those are all with 5- and 6-year-olds. Those aren’t with babies. We need to make it clear that it’s not okay to hit babies. 

[27:27] Teresa Huizar: 
I just wonder, you know, kind of what’s missing in all of our sort of parenting education and prenatal education, etc. 

Amy Slep:
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
Because I have to tell you, I can’t even imagine a single adult parent admitting they struck an infant under 6 months of age. I think if you just ask them point blank, and you didn’t have it anonymous and all the things you did, I think, nary a person would say they did that. Because I don’t think that people actually think it’s okay for someone that age. But something seems to me to be horribly missing if it’s such a common thing that when people are promised anonymity and can come up with their own justifications, they’re willing to say they do it. 

Amy Slep:
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
It just—for me, there are, for all of the listeners who are child abuse professionals who interact with families every day, there are a lot of implications. And I think one of them is, we shouldn’t just assume—

Amy Slep:
Yes!

Teresa Huizar: 
—that parents somehow know this is wrong or out of bounds— 

Amy Slep:
Yep.

Teresa Huizar: 
—or likely to cause serious injury. And—

Amy Slep:
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—maybe we need to say the obvious, like, “You can’t physically discipline an infant,” right?

Amy Slep:
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
You know?

Amy Slep: 
We have a lot of education, right?, around shaken baby, which is very important and we absolutely need to. But maybe we can expand that to be: You can’t shake infants and you can’t do other things too.

[28:51] Teresa Huizar: 
Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that so much of this has to be rooted in frustration and sleepless nights. 

Amy Slep:
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
But helping people understand the significant potential for fatal harm of doing that—

Amy Slep:
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—I think is really important. 

Amy Slep: 
Yep. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah.

 Amy Slep: 
Yeah. Anecdotally from some of our other work that we’ve done with young families, like you said, the frustration and sleepless nights. And when you have a 5- or 6-month-old who is starting to try to explore, they pull your hair, they bite, they don’t listen because they don’t. [Laughter]

Teresa Huizar: 
Right.

Amy Slep: 
It’s not their job.

And so I think that there are people who, if, like the baby pulls their hair, they hit the baby. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Right.

Amy Slep: 
They’re not thinking about it from a, you know, stepped-back teaching perspective.

Teresa Huizar: 
Right.

Amy Slep: 
Like, “Well, you just hurt me. I’m going to hurt you.”

Teresa Huizar: 
Or they think that somehow it’s teaching them if they do it back— 

Amy Slep: 
Or something.

Teresa Huizar: 
Or something.

Amy Slep: 
Something.

Teresa Huizar: 
It’s like, no. All of that, just no.

Amy Slep: 
But, yeah, I think there’s a lot of those that we have—there’s room there for us to try to improve our norms around—because I—

[Cross-talk]

[29:56] Teresa Huizar: 
The understatement of the century—

Amy Slep: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
—when it comes to this, I mean, it’s just, 

Amy Slep: 
Yep.

Teresa Huizar: 
—yes, there’s definitely room for us to improve our norms about how we’re handling kids. 

Amy Slep: 
Yeah.

[30:07] Teresa Huizar: 
But, you know, to your point, to your bigger point about where this behavior peaks, you know, I was really interested that for corporal punishment, it peaked at age 3—

Amy Slep: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
—and for physical abuse at age 6. So both of those still very young. I mean—

Amy Slep: 
Yep.

Teresa Huizar: 
—with, you know, corporal punishment peaking during toddlerhood and probably about the time kids are really saying “no” a lot and having tantrums. 

Amy Slep: 
Mm-hmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
And then just as kids are going to school, that’s where physical abuse is peaking. It feels like that—well, it doesn’t “feel like.” We don’t have enough supports for young families— 

Amy Slep: 
We don’t.

Teresa Huizar: 
—and families of young kids when you’re seeing numbers like that. Yeah.

Amy Slep: 
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And physical abuse isn’t the only thing that’s going on, right? 

Teresa Huizar: 
Oh.

Amy Slep: 
That’s what we have data on here. But we know that it’s not operating in isolation and that everything else is fantastic. 

[31:03] Teresa Huizar: 
Sure. Of course. One of the things that I’m wondering about, you know, kind of back to the justifications given. Do you guys plan to publish a paper that that looks at that at all? 

Amy Slep: 
Well, it wasn’t high on the list before, but it wouldn’t be hard for us to do. So—

Teresa Huizar: 
Oh, I hope you will.

Amy Slep: 
—and you’re not the only person who’s asked. So I think we will.

[31:22] Teresa Huizar:
Come right on back if you do, and we’ll talk again.

Amy Slep: 
Alright!

Teresa Huizar:
Because I am— 

Amy Slep: 
Okay. You’ve got it.

Teresa Huizar:
Well, I think it gives us some direction for prevention strategies and communication, you know?

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar:
What I worry about with some prevention efforts is that we may be misdirecting our energy to places where, if that’s not what parents say the cause of it is, then why are we focused on this area over here that’s not what parents themselves are saying— 

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar:
—is the reason that they’re doing something? So I think it just has some good public health implications if we can understand more about their reasoning. 

[31:57]
 When you think, you know, sort of beyond child abuse professionals and researchers to policymakers, what do you see as the policy implications of your paper?

Amy Slep: 
I think there are a few. The rates of corporal punishment with young kids are still a huge concern and need to be more formally built into our maternal early childhood education efforts. And like you said, improving supports, which a lot of things have been moving in the direction of trying to achieve that, but there’s definitely still room for improvement.

On the physical abuse front, one of the other things that came out of this line of research that we did with the Air Force is that these definitions of maltreatment that we used for this measure—so, physical: a parent’s use of physical force that results in injury, significant potential for injury, so danger or trauma symptoms—those became the criteria that were used for the formal system as well. And they were very explicitly laid out in a way that we were then able to measure. And having very concrete criteria helped reduce bias and increase the consistency of decision making regardless of who walked in the room and who was friends with who and all of that kind of stuff.

The state of Alaska has adopted the system. They feel like it allows them to make their decisions more consistently and with less bias. And the side effects that happened in the military when they adopted this system is that it reduced recidivism. By half.

Teresa Huizar:
Wow. 

Amy Slep: 
We don’t know for sure because we didn’t, like, dig in to see what the mechanism was, but we think a piece of that is that having “the line” like be as clear as it became, meant that at least for some families, if they knew that this is the line not to cross, they could stay on the right side of that line.

Teresa Huizar:
That’s interesting. 

Amy Slep: 
Yeah. And obviously not for everybody. And obviously there’s more to it than that, because it could also be that the community was better able to rally around and support these families once everybody had a stronger sense of what the line was. But instead of it feeling like: “Those social workers, they just are all up and in my business,” and instead it was, “This is a system that we perceive to be fair,” and everyone thinks that it is fair because it’s consistent and reproducible. It seemed to change behavior in families. 

[Cross-talk]

Teresa Huizar: 
Well that’s really interesting.

Amy Slep: 
And that, that I think has huge policy implications. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes, indeed. Yeah, that’s, that is really interesting. Well, and it also speaks to not just the fairness—the perceived fairness of whatever the system’s being used to intervene—

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
—being important, but also that lack of clarity about where the line is also contributes to that.

Amy Slep: 
Yes. Absolutely.

Teresa Huizar: 
Because if people feel that that line is fuzzy or they don’t quite understand, you can see how someone could wind up on the wrong side of that line. 

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
And just by knowing that they can go, “Okay, I’m not going to go any further. You know, this is really it.” 

Amy Slep: 
Right.

Teresa Huizar: 
That’s interesting. 

Amy Slep: 
Yeah. And like I said, I’m sure not all families can do that, but some families can. And isn’t it nice to help those families? 

Teresa Huizar: 
Exactly, to have some gain in this.

[35:34] 
 The listeners here are primarily child abuse professionals, so people who work with families every day, either on prevention intervention or both. What do you see in your own findings from this study as sort of actionable steps that we should take? That you say, you know, in the, in the best possible scenario, “Folks, you know, take these findings to heart.” 

Amy Slep: 
Mmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
  “What I would love to see is next.” What would that be? 

Amy Slep: 
At the level of policy, I think it would be to take on, like, really take on the idea tha—because I feel like many states have decided, because of the inherent bias in child maltreatment decisions, that they’re just going to kind of back off those decisions and not track families differently. I think it sends a different message to the family if you’re saying, “This was over the line,” I don’t think we should shy away from that. 

Now, how you track the family and whether you’re only engaging in preventative services or that, that’s great. I’m not trying to interfere with that. But I think there’s a lot to be gained by taking a system like the military is using, like the state of Alaska is using, that’s informed by some of our work and that is related to the findings here, and tackling, making decisions in systems in a way that is without bias and criterion-based and potentially important in terms of prevention. So that’s one thing. If you’re in a system that isn’t doing that, nudge somebody that there’s a better way.

And then the other thing would be around educating parents. One of the things that these findings can do is to help you join with parents about the fact that this isn’t a one in a million phenomena. They’re not the one parent who, you know, left welts all over their kid’s back. There are a lot of parents struggling with the same thing and who maybe don’t have alternative ways of managing. And that’s okay, that’s what you’re there for. But I think the prevalence rates can help normalize this—not in the sense of making it be okay, but just in the sense that they’re not alone in struggling with parenting.

[37:56] Teresa Huizar: 
And can seek help, right? 

Amy Slep: 
Yep.

Teresa Huizar: 
Yeah. So this, this study that we’ve been talking about was published in 2022, which is like donkey’s years in the research world because I know you’ve been doing plenty of other work since. So tell me what’s, what’s next on your research agenda? What’s exciting you these days?

Amy Slep: 
Well, prevention work. So we continue to be interested in how these things all fit together. So how you can try to build sort of light-touch supports for people and families that simultaneously help reduce their risk of lots of different things, including child maltreatment. Wo we’re interested in that and doing some work there.

We’ve also been working on trying to optimize how to train and scaffold the development of case workers and doing assessments around maltreatment to try to help them as efficiently as they can come up with what they need to be able to know what’s going on in the family and what the risk and safety plan needs are and what the optimal treatment plan would be.

And so that is sometimes challenging and sometimes fun. [Laughter] Because of course, it’s a group of people who walk in the door with very different experiences from each other. So trying to figure out structured training protocols that meet everyone where they’re at and still bring them all to the right places has been a challenge and has been fun. 

[39:27] Teresa Huizar: 
I’m sure. So is there anything else I should have asked you or anything else that you wanted to make sure that we talked about today? 

Amy Slep: 
Hmm. Nothing occurs to me. 

[Outro music begins]

Teresa Huizar:
Well, thank you so much for coming on One in Ten. I look forward to seeing that research publication—

[Cross-talk] [Laughter] 

Amy Slep: 
Alright! 

Teresa Huizar: 
—that we discussed.

Amy Slep: 
I’ll put it on the list. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Awesome.

Amy Slep: 
You got it.

Teresa Huizar: 
Well, thank you so much. We appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

Amy Slep: 
It was great. Thank you for having me.

[Outro]

[39:53] Teresa Huizar:
Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And subscribe to get great conversations like this about every two weeks. We’ll see you back here soon.

[Outro music fades out]