Reporting abuse and neglect of children with disabilities: Early childhoodservice providers' views

The abuse and neglect of young children with disabilities pose a great prob lem to early intervention professionals and family members. This qualitativ e study used stakeholder focus groups (eg, administrators, service provider s, researchers) to investigate participant. perspectives on reporting abuse and neglect of children with disabilities. Transcript-based data were anal yzed for stakeholder perspectives regarding the current reporting system's strengths and challenges. Participants described relatively few strengths w ithin current reporting systems and several challenges affecting decisions of whether or not to report suspected cases of abuse or neglect or both of children with disabilities. Participants recommended how to reduce these ch allenges.