The Economic Environment of Child Abuse*

One of the most frequent and controversial claims made in the child abuse literature is that poverty increases the risk for child abuse. However, virtually no research has gone beyond measuring either child abuse or poverty at one point in time, despite the dynamic nature of both of these experiences. Based on 185 substanti-ated cases of physically abused youth, this paper examines whether poverty persistence is a significant predictor of both severe and recurrent child abuse. Results indicate that these relationships are more complicated than previous research leads us to believe. Persistent poverty has no significant effect on the severity of abuse and the observed relationship between current poverty and severity is eliminated once race is controlled. Moreover, while poverty persistence is significantly related to recurrent abuse, virtually all of this effect appears to be explained by factors associated with the stress of economic deprivation. Poor children are more likely than nonpoor children to be physically abused (McLoyd 1990). Official data, as well as case studies and clinical data, indicate that child abuse cases are disproportionately drawn from low income families (Gil 1970; Gelles 1973, 1992; Maden and Wrench 1977; Garbarino 1989). Unofficial data from two nationally representative fam-ily surveys (Gelles and Straus 1988; Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 1980) also show that vio-lence toward children is more likely to occur in households with annual incomes below th