NCJ Number
216114
Journal
Child Maltreatment Volume: 11 Issue: 3 Dated: August 2006 Pages: 263-280
Date Published
August 2006
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article reviews the current state of knowledge of ecological studies of child maltreatment.
Abstract
This review documented a stable ecological relationship between rates of child maltreatment and neighborhood poverty, housing stress, and drug and alcohol availability, Areas with increased levels of poverty, housing stress, and drug and alcohol availability have higher rates of child maltreatment, and these relationships appear to be maintained across various ways of measuring maltreatment and defining neighborhoods. However, gaps in the research support the necessity of developing a more thorough understanding of how neighborhood characteristics exert their influence on varying types of child maltreatment. An important limitation of all the studies included in this review was their cross-sectional nature that only allowed for discussion of correlational associations between maltreatment and neighborhood features. There is a need for a better understanding of how neighborhood characteristics interact with each other and the social processes and mechanisms involved in the maltreatment of children. In the past 25 years, studies examining neighborhood characteristics in relation to social problems, including child maltreatment have multiplied. This article represents an effort to synthesize the findings of ecological studies of child maltreatment in which the primary unit of analysis is an area unit intended to roughly approximate the space of a neighborhood. Tables, notes, and references