"The rate of child maltreatment doubled among Texas military families in the nine months after October 2002, when Congress gave President George Bush the go-ahead to send troops to Iraq, the researchers found. "

""Both departures to and returns from operational deployment impose stresses on military families and likely increase the rate of child maltreatment," Dr. E. Danielle Rentz of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and her colleagues write in the American Journal of Epidemiology. "Such increases in child maltreatment may also extend to families at risk of being deployed.""

"While deployment has been tied to increases in divorce rates and domestic violence, no studies have looked at how it affects the risk that neglect and physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children will occur, Rentz and her team note."

"To investigate, she and her colleagues compared data on substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect from 2000 to 2003 for military and non-military families in Texas, as well as statistics on active duty deployment for military personnel in the state."

"Rates of child maltreatment were actually significantly lower among military families than among non-military families before deployment began, the researchers found. But while these rates remained roughly the same for non-military families, they began to climb for military families in the second half of 2002, with a particularly steep jump in January 2003, when the number of local soldiers deployed to the Middle East also rose sharply."

"The researchers then compared data before and after October 2002, and found the rate of child maltreatment among military families doubled after that date, but remained the same for non-military families."

"For
... read the whole article