Children must be encouraged to report incidents immediately. Authorized and trained professionals must deal with the reporting to allow swift corrective action while protecting the innocent, both the suspected abuser and the child. The process must start by defining child abuse and neglect. The definition of child abuse is any non-accidental injury of a child that impairs physical or mental health immediately or over period of time. Neglect deals with the omission of reasonable care of the child, such as failure to provide adequate supervision, food, clothing, or shelter.
Child abuse has a high frequency involving the child with some authority source person.
This could be an older relative, youth worker, teacher, etc. Children can be drawn into the abuse by the need for self esteem, loneliness, physical disabilities, self identification or love. The abuse tends to occur in isolated environments with the abuser. The symptoms of child abuse can involve chronic behavior changes, increasing periods of anger, loss of control, social relationship changes, loner patterns, and abnormal patterns of behavior. Physical abuse is sometimes discovered by identifying bruises on non-bony areas of the child's body followed by illogical explanation of why the bruises occurred.