AMA Journal of Ethics^®

Following evidence-based approaches to evaluating and reporting suspicion of child maltreatment can help minimize bias and promote equity.

Pediatricians have been forced to navigate diagnostic uncertainty, hospital closures, limited staffing, and new infection control guidelines.

How society and medicine discussed and responded to child abuse changed dramatically in 1962. Since that time, the problem’s fuller scope has been revealed.

One Supreme Court decision has historic significance for child abuse pediatricians working with multidisciplinary care and legal teams.

This article considers 3 works by artists who were directly or indirectly affected by this type of childhood abuse.

Separation of children from their parents is one possible traumatizing consequence of a mandated report, which is not to be taken lightly.

If it is ethically justifiable for clinicians to err by overreporting suspected abuse and neglect, we must fairly distribute benefits and harms among all children and families.

Ethical questions about child abuse and neglect are rife with ambiguity and uncertainty.

Adverse childhood experiences and trauma influence health in ways that now garner more attention across the life-spectrum.

This narrative illuminates need for students and clinicians to be well prepared to face ethically and structurally complex realities of identifying and responding to children.