Another set of casualties

Oh, this truly breaks my heart. I want to call your attention to a Time Magazine article entitled "Fallout From the War at Home". Here's what is happening:

Rates of neglect and abuse of the children of servicemen and women rose 42% within the family when the enlisted parent was deployed on a combat mission, according to a new study led by senior health analyst Deborah Gibbs of RTI International, a research institute in North Carolina. Previous studies have shown an association between combat-related deployments and higher levels of stress in the family, and it is this stress that is thought to play a major role in the maltreatment of children by the parent who stays home.

The current study is the first to take a comprehensive look at how deployment affects child neglect and emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Backed by funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, the researchers harvested data from the U.S. Army Central Registry of 1,771 families worldwide with at least one instance of child neglect or abuse between Sept. 2001 and Dec. 2004, a period during which many soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The results show that a staggering 1,858 parents had maltreated their children during that period — boys and girls in equal numbers, with an average age of 6. Nearly 10% of those parents neglected or abused their children on more than one day.
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Government statistics note that in 2004, 1.1 million children (under the age of 18) were maltreated in enlisted soldiers' families. Gibbs and colleagues cite another soon-to-be-published study that found "the rates of neglect in U.S. Army families increased sharply between 2001 and 2004, reversing a decade-long downward trend."

Oh, this horrible, horrible war.