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Abstract
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Fatal child assault, the deaths of children caused by the violent actions of another person, is the subject of this article. It is argued that the definition of the problem, its size and scope, is dependent on administrative social and legal categories. These phenomena encompass a range of situations. Although a child dies from violence in each incident, the social context within which these incidents occur is diverse. A typology of child fatal assaults is developed based on the research literature. Diverse explanatory theories have been offered to account for the problem of fatal assault of children. These paradigms concentrate on different aspects of the problem including the perpetrator (and their mental state or gender), the incident itself, and the social context of the incident (familial or not). It is argued that conceptualisation of the problem and the assumptions in the accompanying paradigm must be made explicit before discussion of this social problem can begin.
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