Child maltreatment is an important source of childhood morbidity and mortality with approximately one million U.S. children reported each year as abused or neglected. Child maltreatment is reported to be the leading cause of trauma-related death in children under four years of age.
Child maltreatment has a complex etiology that remains poorly understood.
An ecological perspective or framework conceptualizes child maltreatment as resulting from a complex interaction of both risk and protective factors across multiple ecological levels that encompass individuals, families, communities, and the larger society and culture. Despite long standing calls for an ecological perspective on child maltreatment, contextual factors have been largely neglected in favor of emphases on caretaker, child, and family characteristics. The empirical studies that have been directed specifically to the relationship between neighborhood and child-maltreatment have indicated that neighborhood conditions are highly correlated with rates of reported child maltreatment. These neighborhood conditions have included socioeconomic status, satisfaction with the neighborhood as a place to raise children, availability and use of resources, and characteristics of the physical and social environment. Our research in Cleveland, Ohio, has indicated that structural properties of neighborhoods explain approximately half of the variance in child abuse and neglect report-rates.