“For children, the collateral damage of the COVID-19 pandemic response has been considerable: ‘nearly insurmountable’ educational losses, deteriorating mental health, low routine childhood vaccination rates, 39 billion missed school meals by January 2021 and millions of estimated life-years lost among students in the USA alone. It is difficult to deny the harmful impact of lockdowns on children, who are society’s most vulnerable members. In this paper, we use the framework of evidence-based medicine to argue that child abuse is another negative side effect of COVID-19 lockdowns…
There is emerging evidence that lockdowns significantly worsened child abuse on a global scale. Low-income and middle-income countries are particularly vulnerable to increases in child abuse. In Uganda, for example, there was a 1565% increase in the average number of calls per day to the Uganda Child Helpline in the first month of lockdown. Yet, even wealthy nations in the West did not escape unscathed. In the UK, there was a 1493% increase in cases of abusive head trauma at Great Ormond Street Hospital. In France, there was an 89% increase in national child abuse helpline calls, a 48% increase in home visits by law enforcement officers and a 50% increase in the relative frequency of child abuse hospitalisations. Furthermore, there appears to have been insidious changes with potentially long-term effects which are more difficult to measure. In the Netherlands, for example, there was a 32% increase in previously rare harsh parenting behaviours, including shaking and name calling…
We conclude that lockdowns have an unacceptably high risk of negative side effects for children, as evidenced by child abuse, the true extent of which appears to be masked by lockdown-related disruptions to schools and other surveillance systems. Rather than a ‘missing epidemic’, perhaps a more appropriate name for lockdown-related child abuse is an unseen pandemic—hidden in plain sight.”