Skip over navigation

Journal Issue: Preventing Child Maltreatment Volume 19 Number 2 Fall 2009

Creating Community Responsibility for Child Protection: Possibilities and Challenges
Authors: Deborah A. Daro Kenneth A. Dodge

Why Does Community Matter if You Are Trying to Prevent Child Abuse?

The most sophisticated and widely used models in current child maltreatment policy and program development emphasize the continuous interaction and reciprocal interplay among such diverse domains as environmental forces, caregiver and familial characteristics, and child characteristics.4 Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model frames individual-family behavior as being embedded in broader neighborhood, community, and cultural contexts. Although the most frequently cited risk and protective factors for maltreatment reflect parents’ individual functioning and capacity, community factors can influence parent-child interactions in myriad ways. Community norms frame what parents may view as appropriate or essential ways to interact with their children and set the standards as to when and how parents should seek help from others.5 Context can increase or reduce parental stress by influencing perceptions of personal safety—that is, by creating a sense of support or reconfirming feelings of isolation. Community resources can offer temporary respite from parental responsibility. Community professional services can improve parents’ mental health and capacity to take on the role of parenting. Although many scholars agree on the need to cast a broad net in examining how the vulnerable infant becomes the responsible adult, few can agree on the most salient contextual factors and, most important for our purpose, how to manipulate these factors to increase the likelihood parents will seek out, find, and effectively use necessary and appropriate support.

A series of reports issued by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect between 1990 and 1993 explicitly recognized the continuous interplay between individual and community environment in addressing the problem of child maltreatment.6 Frank Barry explains this interplay using four basic assertions, based on theory and empirical findings.7 First, child abuse and neglect result in part from stress and social isolation. Second, the quality of neighborhoods can either encourage or impede parenting and the social integration of the families who live in them. Third, both external and internal forces influence the quality of life in neighborhoods. And, fourth, any strategy for preventing child maltreatment should address both internal and external dimensions and focus simultaneously on strengthening at-risk families and improving at-risk neighborhoods.

Over the past ten years, a growing body of research has attempted to measure and describe the mechanisms by which neighborhoods influence child development and support parenting. In summarizing this research, the Working Group on Communities, Neighborhoods, Family Process, and Individual Development concluded that neighborhood matters both directly, in providing, for example, schools, parks, and other primary supports, and indirectly, in shaping parental attitudes and behaviors and in affecting a parent’s self-esteem and motivational processes.8

Context also has long been viewed as important in explaining why neighborhoods that share a common socioeconomic profile can have different levels of maltreatment. In a study of contrasting neighborhoods in Omaha, Nebraska, James Garbarino and Deborah Sherman found that two communities with similar demographic characteristics but different rates of reported child maltreatment differed dramatically in terms of their human ecology.9 Specifically, the community with higher rates of maltreatment reports was less socially integrated. It also experienced less positive neighboring and more stressful day-to-day interactions. Robert Sampson and his colleagues have found that these neighborhood assets, which they summarize as “collective efficacy,” predict variation in neighborhood violence in Chicago.10

Building on his earlier work, Garbarino and Kathleen Kostelny found support for the hypothesis that neighborhood social capital affects maltreatment rates in a dynamic model.11 Examining child abuse reports in four economically disadvantaged Chicago communities during 1980, 1983, and 1986, they found significant differences in the relative ratings of neighborhoods over time. To explain this pattern, the authors interviewed a sample of residents about their view of community morale and their perceptions of their neighborhood as a social environment and as a source of “neighboring.” On all dimensions, residents of the community with the greatest increase in maltreatment rates expressed the most negative views of their community, knew little about existing community services or agencies, and demonstrated little evidence of a formal or informal social support network.

One particularly promising pathway for understanding the role community can play in shaping parental capacity and behaviors is the concept of social capital, defined by Robert Putnam as “features of organization such as network, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” 12 Jill Korbin and Claudia Coulton used census and administrative agency data for 177 urban census tracts in Cleveland to find that variation in rates of officially reported child maltreatment is related to structural determinants of community social organization: economic and family resources, residential instability, household and age structure, and geographic proximity of neighborhoods to concentrated poverty. Children who live in neighborhoods characterized by poverty, a high ratio of children to adults, high population turnover, and a high concentration of female-headed families are at highest risk for maltreatment.13

When the study team interviewed residents in both high- and low-risk communities, those living in areas with higher rates of reported maltreatment and other negative outcomes perceived their neighborhoods as settings in which they and their neighbors had little ability to intervene in or control the behavior of children. In justifying their lack of action, they were likely to express concerns that the youths being corrected would verbally or physically retaliate. In contrast, residents in low-maltreatment communities were more likely to monitor the behavior of local children because they believed it was their responsibility to “protect” children from violent or dangerous neighborhood conditions, such as traffic or broken glass.14

Valuing collective actions to accomplish a common good also has potency in reducing violence, particularly in communities whose profiles would suggest high levels of social disorganization. Robert Sampson and his colleagues, for example, found lower crime rates in neighborhoods whose residents shared the same values and were willing to intervene on behalf of the collective good. Their sample included personal interviews with 8,782 Chicago residents living in 343 distinct “neighborhood clusters” varying in race and socioeconomic status. The researchers used interviews to construct measures of “informal social control” (the degree to which residents thought that they could count on their neighbors to help in such ways as correcting adolescent behavior, advocating for necessary services, or intervening in fights) and of “social cohesion” (the degree to which respondents felt they could count on their neighbors to help each other or be trusted). Together, three dimensions of neighborhood stratification—concentrated disadvantage, immigration concentration, and residential stability—explained 70 percent of the neighborhood variation in collective efficacy. Collective efficacy, in turn, mediated a substantial portion of the association between residential stability and disadvantage and multiple measures of violence.15 In other words, although structural issues such as poverty are critical in establishing a community’s social milieu, neighborhoods that are able to establish a sense of community and mutual reciprocity develop a unique and potentially powerful tool to reduce violence and support parents.

Another community approach, based in the mental health services sector, is system of care. Less well supported by empirical findings but theoretically and clinically strong, system of care involves developing a sound infrastructure of coordinated individualized services. The concept emerged partly in response to Jane Knitzer’s dramatic 1982 call for help for children, which grew out of stark findings that too many children were living in poverty and suffering mental disorders. System of care also evolved in response to a legal mandate to provide services to high-risk violent youth within their local communities rather than detaining them in far-away training schools.16 System of care is based on a four-part foundation that includes a continuum of services ranging from outpatient therapies to in-home family preservation; coordination of services so that a family can move from one to another without disruption; service individualization whereby services are “wrapped around” the child and family rather than having families conform to service requirements;17 and cultural competence in services so that professionals understand the community and culture of families.18