Child poverty and maltreatement

This NSPCC report draws on incidence studies (number of new cases within a time period) and prevalence studies (proportion of the population affected by maltreatement). The authors are keen to note that poverty does not cause maltreatment and that many parents in poverty do excellent jobs at raising their children, however the evidence is clear that a link between poverty and maltreatement exists:

"We have found that different measures of material deprivation remain independently predictive of child maltreatment. This includes factors that may refer to neighbourhood characteristics, such as the housing tenure, or overcrowding in the home, as well as more individual measures such as car ownership. Poverty in all its manifestations is damaging to children’s well-being”

Key points:
- There is an association between socio-economic status, financial problems in the family and parental child maltreatment, though it is much stronger with physical and emotional maltreatment and absence of physical care than with either sexual abuse outside the family or absence of supervision.
- Compared to young professional respondents, young people working in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs were three times more likely to have suffered serious physical abuse, and ten times more likely to have experienced a serious absence of care in childhood; compared to respondents in higher education, they were twice as likely to have experienced such neglect.
- There is a ‘clustering’ of children on child protection registers in deprived areas of cities.
- Generally, stronger links are found with neglect and physical abuse, while the link with sexual and emotional abuse is much weaker.
- Correlation does not establish cause. There are specific problems in attributing cause in child abuse. The causative pathways are complex with many inter-related variables at work and disentangling the relative influence of different variables is problematic.
- The most widely used and accepted theoretical perspective for explaining the relationship between poverty and maltreatment focuses on stress. It is argued that the multitude of factors associated with poverty and social deprivation, especially when compounded by drug misuse or mental health problems, negatively impact on parenting by increasing vulnerability to stress.
- In order to better safeguard and support children and families living in poverty, more awareness and understanding of the impacts of financial hardship and the different forms of adversity that families are living in need to be recognised if their needs are to be effectively met.