| Child abuse and neglect have only recently been identified publicly as significant social issues in Israel. Two major voluntary organizations, ELI and the National Council for the Child, helped to raise public awareness of these problems. Public interest and policy-makers' awareness of these problems were stimulated by extensive exposure of several severe cases of abuse and neglect. The publicity reached its peak in 1989. At that time Moran, a three year old from Tiberias, died due to brutal abuse by her uncle. This tragedy led to the passage of the Law for the Protection of the Helpless (Amendment 26 to the Penal Code) in November of that year. This legislation, which is essentially a mandated reporting statute similar to those in the U.S., recognized child maltreatment as a separate criminal offense for the first time. Following the new legislation and extensive publicity about it, the numbers of children reported to the child protection system (see chapter on welfare services) increased dramatically, resulting in increases in the identified number of children subjected to abuse and neglect who require social service intervention. In some local authorities the number of reports was claimed to have tripled between 1990 and 1992. According to estimates provided by the head of the child protection services in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, approximately 14,000 children were in the care of child protection officers in 1994 compared with 4,000 in 1989. (Wiesel, 1990). Due to the lack of systematic data, our understanding of trends in this area is limited. This highlights the need for improved data collection and management information systems dealing with child protection. To deal with this need, efforts are currently underway to introduce a new information system for child protection officers.
Recent research concerning children in care of the child protective services in four of Israel's larger cities (Dolev and Rivkin, forthcoming) indicates that the majority of the children known to these services are victims of neglect (in approximately 60% of the cases, severe physical neglect) rather than physical or sexual abuse (approximately 20% of the children). However, the data indicate that these children and their families most often suffer from other extreme forms of disadvantage and social malfunctioning and are not receiving services sufficient to meet their needs. Single-parent families (approximately 30%), families in which the head of the household is unemployed (approximately 25%), and families with four children or more are highly over-represented within the child protective caseload. More than half of the children known to these services live in households in which at least one of the parents has serious problems with social functioning (substance abuse, mental illness or retardation, or criminal activities). As for the children themselves, a large proportion are underachievers, lag two or more years behind their age level in Hebrew and math, and also suffer social and emotional adjustment problems.
Children in the care of the child protection system are believed to represent only a small proportion of the children subjected to or at risk of neglect or abuse. Only very limited information is available to indicate the prevalence of this phenomenon. More than 40,000 children receive services from the Service for Children and Youth of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs for problems associated with child neglect, child abuse or inadequate parental care. Many more children live in families that are in the care of local welfare offices, and are living in conditions that may put them at risk of abuse and neglect. The number of children and families living in poverty indicate another group at potential risk of abuse and neglect. (Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, 1993). Research efforts currently underway at the JDC-Brookdale Institute in two local authorities aim at providing a valid estimate of the size of this at-risk population (Ben-Rabi, Yoel and Dolev, 1996).
A preliminary study concerning children aged 0-3 in Haifa provides some evidence that some forms of inadequate child care, particularly neglect, are more common among the Arab population. The study indicated that while the proportion of children detected by nurses at Family Health Centers as being "at risk" or subjected to parental maltreatment was approximately 3% in the general population, it reached 7% among the city's Arab children in these age groups. The same study did not indicate over-representation of children at risk among new immigrants (Ben-Rabi, Yoel and Dolev, 1996).
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