Child Maltreatment and Poverty: Causes and Effects Maltreating children may set them up for poverty in adulthood.
There's been a good deal of discussion lately of the impact of socioeconomic status on children's development-- especially on the role that maltreatment of children plays in determining outcomes like physical and mental health and employment in adulthood. This is an interesting direction for things to go after many decades in which it was repeated that child maltreatment was found in all classes and income groups, and there was a tendency to discourage discussion of how poverty might impact child abuse and neglect.
Of course, it is very true that child maltreatment is found at all levels of society, and that affluence does not guarantee a safe home for children; in fact, affluence may simply make it less likely that abuse or neglect will be reported to authorities. But these facts do not mean that there is no connection between poverty and family discussion, and they certainly don't mean that there is no connection between a child's experiences of maltreatment and his or her later life, including employment and personal income.
On March 26, the Quality Improvement Center on Early Childhood Learning Network sponsored a webinar presentation by David Zielinski, author of a relevant paper published in Child Abuse & Neglect in 2009. In this post, I'm going to summarize some of Dr. Zielinski's comments, and will follow this by discussion of some issues that come up as we struggle to understand the connections between children's maltreatment experiences and their achievements in later life. For anyone who would like to see more details than I can give here, you should be able to find the slides used in Dr. Zielinski's presentation at www.qic.ec.org at some future time (they don't seem to be posted there as of today, March 27, 2010).
To establish the importance of this topic, Dr. Zielinski noted that in 2007 there were 3.2 million referrals and reports of maltreatment in the U.S., involving 5.8 million children. Of these, 62% were screened because the report seemed to indicate a serious problem. Of those screened, 25%, or about 800,000 children were reported to have been maltreated on the basis of evidence found in investigations--- this number, you will remember, turned up during a single year.
Interestingly, 75% of these children whom evidence showed to have been maltreated had NO previous history of abuse or neglect. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that they had never been maltreated, but it does mean that any previous incidents had not been reported, or investigated if reported, or showed corroborating evidence if they were investigated. It is all too possible that maltreatment can go unreported because of lack of public understanding or interest, and that even reported cases can remain uninvestigated because of lack of staff in child protective services agencies. But certainly this 75% figure reminds us that child maltreatment is not necessarily a matter of repeated events of abuse or neglect of a small number of individual children. We're talking about a lot of children here.
Dr Zielinski's presentation downplayed the old question about SES and child maltreatment-- "Do poor people maltreat their children more?"-- and emphasized a newer question: "Are children who were maltreated more likely to grow up to be poor?". In taking this approach, he was following a human ecological perspective that examines people's lives within the context of multiple factors that affect them directly, including living conditions, employment, education, exposure to domestic violence and substance abuse, and so on. Such a perspective recognizes that the adult characteristics of a child are determined by many factors, and that different characteristics can be determined by different factors. This kind of work can be difficult to do and to understand, but it does avoid the pitfalls of thinking that a complex experience like maltreatment would be the only cause of a single outcome (like being abusive to one's own children).
In Dr. Zielinski's work, he looked at some factors that labor economists find to be good indicators of employment and income. These included level of education, physical health, and problems of mental health. Research evidence shows that adults who were maltreated in childhood had more problems than those who were not, on every one of these indicators. They were more likely to have academic problems and to drop out of college if they attended at all; they were more likely to have problems of physical health such as obesity; and they were at higher risk for mental health problems like depression, post-traumatic stress or anxiety disorders, Antisocial Personality Disorder, and substance abuse. It may be as a result of those factors that in Dr. Zielinski's own study, there were significantly lower personal incomes for individuals who had experienced maltreatment-- and especially for those who had been neglected.
Dr. Zielinski began his presentation by commenting on the existing gap in research that looks at the outcomes of maltreatment. There is no question that thorough research of this type is very difficult. Dr. Zielinski's work was based on a questionnaire study in which respondents were left to decide whether or not they had experienced abuse or neglect as children. This approach was based on practical necessity, as detailed interviews with over 5000 people would have been expensive and required many trained staff members. Unfortunately, if we leave it to respondents to decide what abuse and neglect are, we have no way of knowing what definition they use-- and these definitions do change over time as well as differing from culture to culture. For example, punishments that used to be considered acceptable-- like washing a child's mouth out with soap-- are now considered abusive. Certainly respondents are likely to define themselves as well- or ill-treated partly on the basis of what they knew happened to other children of their acquaintance, not on some absolute definition. Questionnaire studies may just enable us to study the characteristics of people who report that they were abused or neglected, which is not necessarily the same as having been maltreated according to objective standards.
Nevertheless, it seems to be an effective step toward dealing with child maltreatment if we have evidence that there are long-term impacts on abused or neglected children's lives, and that these impacts have the potential for affecting the entire national economy. Moral arguments against child maltreatment are powerful, but economic arguments may have a good deal more clout when it comes to funding intervention programs.
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