The Protective Effect of Neighborhood Social Cohesion in Child Abuse and Neglect

Background and Purpose:

Millions of child maltreatment incidents are reported to authorities every year. While exploring preventive factors has become a focus of child welfare researchers, less is known about protecting against specific types of abuse and neglect. Guided by social disorganization theory, it is believed that relations between parents living in the same neighborhood can provide a supportive environments for healthy and positive parenting.  Neighborhood social cohesion, or the mutual trust and support among neighbors, is one process through which parenting may be improved.  The current study investigates the association between neighborhood social cohesion and abuse and neglect, as well as specific types of abuse and neglect. 

Methods: 

The sample for the study is comprised of 1,119 parents who are 18 years of age and older with at least one child living in their home in an urban Midwestern County in the United States. Particpants were surveyed at Women, Infants, and Children clinics and childcare centers on parenting stress, social support, neighborhood social cohesion and social control, mental health concerns, social service availability, economic hardship and parenting behaviors including child maltreatment.

Negative binomial regression was used to examine the association between neighborhood social cohesion and child maltreatment behaviors. First, the relationship between neighborhood cohesion and physical child neglect and physical abuse was observed. Next, we looked at the individual neglect items separately, to understand the potentially protective effect of neighborhood social cohesion on different types of neglect.  Similarly, we examined corporal punishment separately from severe assault, to determine whether there is an association between neighborhood social cohesion and these different physical abuse behaviors.

Results: 

In this sample, neighborhood social cohesion is associated with child neglect, but not abuse.  When inspecting the relationship with specific types of abuse and neglect, it was found that neighborhood social cohesion may have a protective role in lower-order needs, such as having sufficient food for children and providing adequate supervision of children; but not potentially more complex needs like parental substance abuse. While physical abuse was not associated with neighborhood cohesion, higher levels were associated with mental health concerns, parenting stress, and economic hardship experiences.

Conclusions and Implications:

These results suggest that there are protective factors associated with having more cohesive communities, but that there is a limit to their protection. The findings are interpreted to mean that having reliable and trustworthy neighbors is related to a parent’s ability to provide adequate care, attention, supervision, and affection; but not a parent’s use of physical violence against their children. It is possible that parents rely on their neighbors to meet basic caregiving needs but do not obtain the support needed to prevent abusive behaviors. 

Further research is needed on specific types of maltreatment and their protective factors. Additionally, implementing programs or campaigns to increase connections between parents and their neighbors must be done in conjunction with other strategies that have been shown to be effective at targeting more extreme forms of maltreatment.