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THE BIAS OF MEASUREMENT /

The limit

The ten were only ever designed to measure what happens inside a house. A child is not wounded only under their own roof.

THE BASELINE

The ten, as written in 1995

  • 1Physical abuse
  • 2Emotional abuse
  • 3Sexual abuse
  • 4Physical neglect
  • 5Emotional neglect
  • 6A household member with mental illness
  • 7A mother treated violently
  • 8Divorce or parental separation
  • 9Substance misuse in the household
  • 10An incarcerated household member

Ten. Closed. All of them inside the home.

THE EXCLUSIONS

Real, and never counted

  • Bullying, in person and online
  • Community and street violence
  • Gun violence and school shootings
  • The sudden death of someone they love
  • Serious accident, injury, or illness
  • Medical trauma
  • War, displacement, and migration
  • Racism and prejudice
  • Poverty, hunger, and housing loss
  • Natural disaster
  • Foster placement and family separation

And more. The list has never been closed.

We have thirty years of data on ten of them, and no comparable dataset for the rest — not because they do not wound children, but because nobody built the study.

So every figure on this site undercounts. If what happened to you is on the right-hand list, you were never excluded. You were only uncounted.

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