Describe the relationship between social class and abuse. Explain why you agree or disagree with this relationship

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• Surveys indicate a high rate of reported abuse and neglect among people in lower economic classes—children from families with a household income of less than $15,000 per year experience more abuse than children living in more affluent homes.
• Childcare workers indicate that most of their clients either live in poverty or face increased financial stress because of unemployment and economic recession. These findings suggest that parental maltreatment of children is predominantly a lower-class problem.
• One view is that low-income families, especially those headed by a single parent, are often subject to greater environmental stress and have fewer resources to deal with such stress than families with higher incomes.
• A relationship seems to exist between the burdens of raising a child without adequate resources and the use of excessive force.
• Self-report surveys do show that indigent parents are more likely than affluent parents to hold attitudes that condone physical chastisement of children.
• Higher rates of maltreatment in low-income families reflect the stress caused by the limited resources that lower-class parents have to help them raise their children; in contrast, middle-class parents devote a smaller percentage of their total resources to raising a family.
• This burden becomes especially onerous in families with emotionally and physically handicapped children.
• Stressed-out parents may consider special-needs children a drain on the families' finances with little potential for future success; research finds that children with disabilities are maltreated at a rate almost double that of other children.
• Student views will vary.