Ethnicity, Culture, and Child Maltreatment

Increasingly, child maltreatment research has begun to address ethnicity and culture in both empirical studies and theoretical articles. Despite the expansion of these efforts, cross-cultural research in child maltreatment has raised more questions than it has answered; and it has highlighted the elusiveness of culture-specific constructs to scientific study. Research to date has been hampered by several challenges including the failure to disentangle ethnicity and culture. In this article, we provide a review of research in this area and offer a critique and recommendations for enhancing the study of the role of culture and ethnicity in child maltreatment.