The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) is a federal law that supports individual state programs across the U.S. that focus on prevention and indentification of child abuse through preventative and public awareness programs that are community based. The goal of this federal law is to help provide comprehensive care to the actual victims, or potential victims, of child abuse. It helps to integrate the services provided by a wide-variety of agencies; including educational, legal, mental health, and social service organizations.
It is also good to be especially mindful of children with disabilities as they are more than twice as likely to be victims of child mistreatment, or abuse, than children with no disabilities. Bone injuries tend to be one way hospitals and health care providers are watchful of suspected child abuse since health experts have reported that more than 1/3 of all abused children will suffer some type of bone fracture. If a child, for example, has multiple fractures involving different bone groups, or multiple fractures in different stages of healing, then child abuse should be strongly suspected in the absence of some type of specific disease of the bones.
