I'd like to post this question to any of you who are academicians, familiar
with the bf lit.  I was approached by a pediatric nurse practitioner whose
specialty is abuse cases.  Having been in the field for decades now, she
said she realized that she has noticed that there are fewer  cases of abuse
among families who have breastfed their babies.  She approached me to help
design a study to look at pediatric records (which she has access to) and
cross reference them with records from CPS in order to prove or disprove the
correlation.  We partnered with several other people and my job was to begin
the literature search.  The search turned up only a handful of studies with
the keywords "abuse" "neglect" and "breastfeeding" and they were entirely
discussions of women who THEMSELVES had been abused (and their response to
later breastfeeding their own babies).

My question is--do any of you out there know of any studies which have
looked at this before?  Do you have any suggestions for the study or for the
literature search which might be helpful to us?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or references;
libby Berkeley, IBCLC, in El Paso (staring at Mexico as we speak)

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