[Epidemiological research on violence against children: Ethical issues]

This article reports on a seminar held among a group of researchers, practitioners, lawyers, service managers, and members of an ethics committee. This seminar examined various important ethical questions raised by an epidemiological (population) research project. The project's objective was to establish the incidence of violence against children in the province of Quebec. The ethics committee of the organization responsible for health and well-being surveys in Quebec (Santé-Québec) had rejected the project on the grounds that several ethical constraints jeopardized the methodological requirements of the survey. The main issues discussed by the members of the seminar concerned: (a) balancing individual and collective rights, (b) identifying the status and the role of the researchers, (c) gauging the protection of individual children against the protection of research participants, (d) identifying the risks for children who could be linked to systematic reports of child maltreatment-like situations, and (e) dealing with the ambiguous notion of "reasonable doubt" as it presents itself in a survey context. Participants identified various paths for possible solutions to the problems which tackled legal, methodological, and pedagogical areas.