by Leroy H. Pelton

About the author: Leroy H. Pelton is a professor in the School of Social Work at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. He is the author of For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United States, from which this viewpoint is excerpted.

There is by now overwhelming evidence of a strong relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect. The great majority of families to whom child abuse and neglect have been attributed live in poverty or near-poverty circumstances. This finding has been obtained across a range of methodologies and definitions. Moreover, poverty is the single most prevalent characteristic of these families, who tend to be the poorest of the poor.

Every national survey of officially reported child neglect and abuse incidents has indicated that the preponderance of the...