Write a 400 word response with one reference/intext citation that is an open source
Due 1/24/2026
Jewel
Child Maltreatment and COVID-19: COVID-19 Problems in Detection and Assessment.
The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented problems in identifying and measuring the problem of child maltreatment, which has essentially thrown a spanner in the gears of surveillance mechanisms that would identify vulnerable children. Studies find that although most expected the number of reports of child abuse to go up during the lockdowns as a result of economic pressure, isolation, and more time together in a small area, the reported instances of maltreatment, in fact, dropped significantly during the first few months of the pandemic (Marmor et al., 2021). This paradox, which was frequently labeled as the silent epidemic, happened not due to the decrease in abuse, but because children became unseen by those reporters who are required to report on the issue.
Schools present the most typical approach to identify cases of child maltreatment and approximately 20 percent of all cases of child protection services are referred by teachers, counselors, and administrators. This important surveillance infrastructure broke down when schools went remote. Those children who may have reported to school with apparent injuries, who may have shown some behavioral changes, or who may have revealed their abuse to trusted adults were now trapped in homes with their abusers and only seen through the occasional video screens with close staging, able to hide disturbing home conditions.
The shift to virtual learning fundamentally transformed the nature of assessment. Social workers who visited the homes by video were greatly restricted in seeing the conditions of the home, evaluating the parent-child communication, and establishing rapport with the child to be able to reveal the abuse. Studies have shown that professionals had complications in determining safety when they only viewed well-monitored backgrounds during video calls, could not see all the aspects of the home setting, and were not able to talk privately with children in the presence of potentially abusive parental figures (Daphna Gross-Manos et al., 2024). Also, the number of high-risk families without internet access was high, making them virtually invisible to oversight systems. The digital divide implied that the poorest, those most unstable in their homes, and those in the most turbulent environments with children were the ones who became the most hidden.
Studies on the long-term consequences of the pandemic on child maltreatment detection explain that when institutions are not involved, surveillance mechanisms need to be more powerful and multifaceted. According to Daphna Gross-Manos et al. (2024), one should create technological solutions to ensure that children can report about themselves safely and confidentially, and more people should be trained to become informal monitors, and then, create systems that are fast-adapting to quickly changing crises that interrupt regular protection infrastructure. The pandemic showed the dangerous flaws in the practices related to vulnerable children identification and protection, and demanded the development of new assessment instruments that can be used in various conditions and at the same time focus on the safety of children. With schools being reopened to face-to-face education, there has actually been an influx of maltreatment cases in many areas, indicating that the abuse within lockdowns has only been uncovered recently, with some even discovering it too late to stop the maltreatment spiral out of control.
Scientific Methods and Pseudoscience in Psychology
The use of pseudoscience in the education of psychology students is the argument Dr. Lilienfeld discussed, which is directly connected to Chapter 2, which is dedicated to the strict scientific approach to human interaction. In spite of the fact that this recommendation might sound counterintuitive initially, the exposure of the students to the arguments of pseudoscientific claims carries crucial pedagogical advantages that would strengthen their knowledge of a proper scientific approach.
Chapter 2 identifies the pillars of scientific inquiry in psychology: systematic observation, operational definitions, hypothesis testing, replication, and peer review. According to Lilienfeld, pseudoscience presents ideal opposites to help students learn why these scientific protections are important. Keeping students analyzing statements as astrology, facilitated communication, or subliminal self-help tapes and the scientific research demonstrating their disproveration, they learn to think critically, an ability that cannot be developed solely by exposure to valid research.
Juxtaposition can be notably proper, as pseudoscientific assertions can be persuasive – they make sense to our instincts, offer straightforward explanations of complicated phenomena, and provide comforting certainty. Students can understand the difference between subjective and empirical validity by discussing why such statements remain scientifically invalid. They find that false claims can be false due to anecdotal evidence, confirmation bias, and confusion of correlation and causation, and so the systematic approaches of Chapter 2, controlled experimentation, random assignment, and operational definitions, are needed but not procedural.
Another point Lilienfeld makes is that a study in pseudoscience is also a lesson in intellectual humility and the tentative nature of knowledge in the sciences. Learners come to understand that science advances through doubt and refutation rather than through blind faith in authority. This relates to Chapter 2, which discusses how scientific knowledge develops through imitation, objection, and the fine-tuning of theories based on cumulative data. Understanding the appeal of pseudoscience is beneficial, as it helps students recognize their vulnerability to specific ways of thinking and why science must be approached with methodological rigor, which makes it incompatible with our habitual ways of thinking.
