Study: Child abuse rate twice as high in Israel than in U.S.

For every 1,000 children, 18 in Israel had said that they had been abused - some 45,600 children in real terms.

More than 45, 000 children in Israel have been the victims of abuse over the past 12 months, the head of the Israel National Council for the Child, Dr. Yitzhak Kadmon, said Monday.

Speaking a conference tackling the issue of infanticide, held at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Kadmon said that initial studies showed the rate of children suffering abuse over the past 12 months was twice as high in Israel than in the United States. For every 1,000 children, 18 in Israel had said that they had been abused (45,600 children in real terms), as opposed to 10.1 children per thousand in the U.S.

In the last eight years, 42 children in Israel have been murdered by a family member, the majority at the hands of a parent. Of that number, 75% of the victims were under the age of 4 years, and most of them were boys. The data also showed that 19 of the 42 murders had been carried out by the child’s father, 12 by the mother and six by both parents together.

One of the most shocking cases of child murder in Israel occured in July, when Itai Ben Dror of Netanya admitted to killing his three young children, in order "to give them peace and quiet from their mother."