Attempts to conceal child's injuries or vagueness about how injuries occurred. Child who always shows up at your house at meal time and asks for food or seems badly nourished. Unsupervised child out on the street at inappropriate times. Some children suffered more than one type of abuse.
Child maltreatment occurs more frequently among socially isolated families.
Very few studies have compared biological parent vs. stepparent child abuse. One 1989 study compared families in which a daughter had been sexually abused by a biological father or stepfather. Another study by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University analyzed murder records from the U.S. and Canada and determined that children under two years were at least 60 times more likely to be killed by a stepparent than by a biological parent. They emphasize that no one should infer from their results that stepparents are fated to abuse their children. In fact, most stepparents treat their children benignly, they state.