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Introduction: Child abuse is a serious health problem with compelling evidence that the phenomenon is common throughout the world. The Center "SOS enfants ULB" is a specialized team, established in a pediatric ward, which had mission to prevent and to treat the situations of children victims of physical, sexual, psychological abuse or of neglect. Our objectives were to describe the characteristics of 439 children hospitalized for (suspicion of) maltreatment and to investigate different factors potentially associated with the children at risk of neglect or maltreatment, the children victims of neglect and the physically maltreated children. Methods: Chi square test and multinomial logistic regression models with clustered robust standard error were applied to assess the relationship between the three types of mistreatment and the potential associated factors. Results: Maltreatment was observed for almost one in two children (48.7%) and approximately four on ten (41.5%) were considered at risk. Physical abuse was the most prevalent (57.9%) among the maltreated children and neglect was the second most prevalent (37.4%) form of maltreatment. Regarding the criteria leading to hospitalisation, at least one protective criterion was observed for a little more than eight children on ten. The parental criteria have shown that social problems and conjugal conflicts were the most prevalent for this category of hospitalisation criteria. Conclusion: These data, concerning the hospitalized children for which there is (suspicion of) mistreatment, collected by this team make important contribution to describing child maltreatment and its associated factors. Despite the fact that these hospitalized cases may be probably more serious than those who were not reported, every event, however small it may be, should be known for better organizing each level of prevention.

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BackgroundOver time, the circumstances encountered in case of child mistreatment, can be quite complex and then, can lead to methodological questions for the analysis of the data. Based on data coming from 395 children hospitalized, alone (66.1 %) or in siblings (33.9 %), in a pediatric ward between 2007 and 2012 for mistreatment or because of a severe risk of mistreatment, the aims of this paper were to quantify the degree of similarity between sibling members, to study the differences between children hospitalized alone or with siblings and to compare four statistical methods (logistic regression and GEE, both without and with robust standard error) for the analyses of the associated factors of mistreatment.ResultsAlmost all intracluster correlation coefficients were large, meaning that the sibling’s members have a higher degree of similarity between them. The odds ratios were not exactly the same between the two models and the robust standard errors where almost always higher than the model-based standard errors in both logistic and GEE models leading to wider confidence intervals.ConclusionBecause many of the intra-siblings correlations observed were relatively strong, the failure to take this cluster dependency into account had a substantial effect on the statistical analyses. Methods taking into account the cluster dependency are widely available in statistical software and strongly recommended.