For this assignment, you will draft a formal, academic essay in MLA format that details an argument about your selected topic. You will use the outline from the previous assignment as a guide, but you

TO: Ms. Stephanie High

FROM: Sonja McDonald

DATE: 07 July 2019

RE: Child Abuse

Works cited

Jud, A., Fegert, J. M., & Finkelhor, D. (2016). On the incidence and prevalence of child maltreatment: a research agenda. Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health, 10(1), 17.

Mendelson, T., & Letourneau, E. J. (2015). Parent-focused prevention of child sexual abuse. Prevention Science, 16(6), 844-852.

Tiyyagura, G., Gawel, M., Koziel, J. R., Asnes, A., & Bechtel, K. (2015). Barriers and facilitators to detecting child abuse and neglect in general emergency departments. Annals of emergency medicine, 66(5), 447-454.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2017). This issue: child abuse & victimization. Psychiatric Annals, 35(5), 374-378.

The research process was a success. First, I was looking for recent books and journals that have information relating to child abuse. The sources I was looking for were those published from 2015 to date. For the four sources, I wanted each of them to cover different aspects regarding child abuse. First, I researched for a source that shows statistics on the prevalence and incidence of child abuse. The other source was to describe what child abuse is as I have realized that people are not sure what child abuse is and what it is not. Another aspect I wanted to research on is how people can detect child abuse and what barriers hinder its detection. Thirdly, I researched for a source that could give insights into how child abuse can be prevented by the primary caregivers who are the parents.

During this research, I learnt that a researcher needs to be objective in what they want to find out and go ahead to formulate their objectives. For example, on the issue of child abuse a researcher need to know its prevalence, have a detailed definition of what child abuse is, how it can be detected and lastly how it can be prevented. This formulation made it easy for me to get sources as already knew what information I needed.

From my research, I found out that child abuse is so prevalent and something serious need to be done about it. There are so many children who are abused, but they are silent about it. This places the burden on the whole society as children must be made aware that no one should abuse them. I will use these sources to find more about the whole issue and then build a list of recommendations on the prevention and management of child abuse cases.