Assessment of pain and suffering in child abuse and homicide victims: Suggestions for social work practice

Child abuse and homicide are on the increase worldwide. Often the burden falls upon social workers to argue the case of victims without being able to quantify the pain the children have suffered A case study approach was used in which a High Court case was utilised as base to describe the proposed methodology to assess the level of pain, post-mortem, a victim could have gone through. The application was a four-step methodology constructed by using paediatric pain assessment. This study found that there is a need for the development of post-mortem pain scales to aid social workers.