Recognizing the co-occurrence of domestic and child abuse: a comparison of community- and hospital-based midwives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to compare and contrast how midwives working in either hospital or community settings are currently responding to the co-occurrence of domestic and child abuse (CA), their perceived role and willingness to identify abuse, record keeping, reporting of suspected or definite cases of CA and training received. A survey questionnaire was sent to 861 hospital and community midwives throughout Northern Ireland which resulted in 488 midwives completing the questionnaire, leading to a 57% response rate. Comparisons were made using descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation, and the questionnaire was validated using exploratory factor analysis. Community midwives reported receiving more training on domestic and CA. Although a high percent of both hospital and community midwives acknowledged a link between domestic violence (DV) and CA, it was the community midwives who encountered more suspected and definite (P < 0.001) cases of CA. More community midwives reported to be aware of the mechanisms for reporting CA. However, an important finding is that although 12% of community midwives encountered a definite case of CA, only 2% reported the abuse, leaving a 10% gap between reporting and identifying definite cases of CA. Findings suggest that lack of education and training was a problem as only a quarter of hospital-based midwives reported to have received training on DV and 40% on CA. This was significantly less than that received by community midwives, as 57% received training on DV, and 62% on CA. The study suggests that midwives need training on how to interact with abused mothers using non-coercive, supportive and empowering mechanisms. Many women may not spontaneously disclose the issues of child or domestic abuse in their lives, but often respond honestly to a sensitively asked question. This issue is important as only 13% of the sample actually asked a woman a direct question about DV.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".