Culture and context in understanding child maltreatment: Contributions of intersectionality and neighborhood-based research

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect commissioned a series of reviews that appeared as the edited volume, Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect ( Melton & Barry, 1994). Using the 1994 review “Sociocultural Factors in Child Maltreatment” ( Korbin, 1994) as a background, this article reconsiders culture and context in child maltreatment work. Since 1994, conditions promoting research and practice attention in this area include immigration-driven global increases in diverse, multicultural societies where different beliefs and practices meet (and clash); expanding purview of the human rights discourse to children; and the disproportionate and disparate representation of cultural, ethnic, and racial groups in child-welfare systems. Although research on child maltreatment has advanced in many ways over 20 years, the complexity of child maltreatment leaves many critical questions demanding further attention, culture and context among them. To help address these questions, we propose two approaches for future maltreatment research: intersectionality – the simultaneous examination of multiple identities (such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status) – as a framework for understanding the complexity of cultural factors; and neighborhood-based research as a means for understanding the context of child maltreatment from the perspective of an ecological framework.