Robert L. Burgess

Child abuse: A test of some predictions from evolutionary theory

Abstract Data on twenty-four two-parent households in which there was at least one known victim of child abuse are analyzed with respect to a number of predictions from an evolutionary model of social behavior. As expected (1) stepparents and their stepchildren are much more at risk to child abuse than are parents and offspring, (2) parents are much more likely to abuse their stepchildren than their own children, (3) males are more likely than females to be abusers, (4) handicapped children are more likely than nonhandicapped children to be abused, and (5) the youngest child is less likely to be abused than any other child within the family. Although the results of the present and previous studies of child abuse are consistent with sociobiologic theory, such findings do not, as yet, represent a strong test of evolutionary models of social behavior.

Child Abuse: A Social Interactional Analysis

One of the jurors covered her mouth in horror at the sight of 7-year-old Daniel Brownell. Tears dampened the eyes of other jurors and many of the spectators.

Beyond the “Cinderella effect”

A central thesis of this paper is that understanding the nature of child maltreatment is so complex that no one disciplinary specialty is likely to be sufficient for the task. Although life history theory is the guiding principle for our analysis, we argue that an evolutionary explanation adds precision by incorporating empirical findings originating from the fields of anthropology; clinical, developmental, and social psychology; and sociology. Although evolutionary accounts of child maltreatment have been largely limited to the role of the coefficient of relatedness, the prospective reproductive value of a child, and the residual reproductive potential of parents, a case is made for expanding this basic application. An explanatory model is presented that describes how ecological conditions as well as parental and child traits interact to influence the degree of parental investment. As shown in the model, these various “marker variables” alter parental perceptions of the benefits and costs associated with child care and promote low-investment parenting, which leads to disrupted family management practices and to a downward-spiraling, self-perpetuating system of coercive family interaction, increased parental rejection of the child, and even lower parental investment. Child maltreatment is the ultimate outcome of this downward trajectory of family relations.

Project interact: A study of patterns of interaction in abusive, neglectful and control families

Abstract Child Abuse refers to non-accidental physical and psychological injury to a child under the age of 18 as a result of acts of omission or commission perpetrated by a parent or caretaker. Conceptual problems abound in part because we are clearly dealing with behavior which falls along a continuum of caregiver-child relationships. At one end of the continuum we have seemingly innocuous verbal punishment — disparagement, criticism, threat and ridicule. Or, we have fairly typical forms of physical punishment such as a slap on the hand or a swat on the bottom. Then there are forms of physical punishment that exceed current community standards — hitting the child with a closed fist or with an object such as a razor strap, belt, cord, or paddle, slamming the child against the wall, kicking him, burning the child with a cigarette, scalding the child with hot water, torturing or even killing the child. It is not always clear where a particular case should be placed on this conceptual continuum. What is more devastating to the development of a child, a single occasion where a parent loses control and slams a child across the room, in the process knocking out a tooth and breaking a childs arm, or the persistent day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year use of ridicule, criticism and sarcasm toward that child? Nor is it always clear whether acts of omission which are harmful to the child (i.e., neglect) are functionally equivalent to acts of commission that harm the child. This problem of definition and the establishment of a uniform response class is but one of many problems plaguing the systematic study of child abuse. Other problems such as the tendency to dramatize the bizarre and extreme use of physical violence or aggression at the expense of more subtle forms of verbal punishment, the tendency to equate child abuse either with psychopathology, on the one hand, or with poverty, on the other, and the tendency to rely upon impressionistic accounts of behavior also have retarded the accumulation of sound knowledge about the causes, consequences, treatment and prevention of abusive behavior.

Marital Role Attitudes and Expected Role Behaviors of College Youth in Mainland China and Taiwan

This study examines differences in marital role attitudes and expected behavior among college students in mainland China and Taiwan. It is hypothesized that people in mainland China have become more egalitarian than have people in Taiwan with respect to the division of marital roles. Survey responses from 339 Taiwan students and 288 mainland China students are compared on four dimensions of marital role attitudes and six areas of traditional husband and wife role behaviors. These dimensions were determined through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The data indicate that although most of the hypothesized societal differences are supported, some are not. Possible regressive changes in mainland China and progressive changes in Taiwan during the past decade were speculated to be responsible for the discrepancy between hypotheses and results.

Ultimate and Proximate Determinants of Child Maltreatment: Natural Selection, Ecological Instability, and Coercive Interpersonal Contingencies

For most people, the family is assumed to function as Christopher Lasch (1977) aphoristically summarizes: a “haven in a heartless world.” However, research over the past 25 years indicates that Doris Lessing (1973) may have been the more perceptive observer when she wrote that “Behind every door there is a disaster.” Cumulative research findings indicate that the family is often a storm center marked by disaffection, disengagement, conflict, aggression, and violence. In this chapter, we shall attempt to provide some theoretical coherence to the multitude of attempts that have been made to explain violence and other forms of harmful mistreatment directed toward children in their homes.

The family in a changing world

Increasing numbers of young mothers in the work force, more and more children requiring extrafamilial care, high rates of divorce, lower rates of remarriage, increasing numbers of female-headed households, growing numbers of zero-parent families, and significant occurrences of child maltreatment are just some of the social indicators indicative of the family in a changing world. These trends and their consequences for children are described and then examined from the perspectives of microeconomic theory, the relative-income hypothesis, sex-ratio theory, and one form of modernization theory. The paper concludes with a preliminary examination of the added explanatory power provided by evolutionary theory.

Social and Ecological Issues in Violence toward Children

In the first edition of this book, Burgess (1991) described a biosocial approach to an analysis of the social and ecological issues involved in child maltreatment. Since the publication of that edition, research and theoretical developments have continued at an ever accelerating pace. On the one hand, there has been the expansion of evolutionary-based studies that have led to a renewed consideration of our fundamental nature as humans and the role that evolution by natural selection has played in designing our pan-specific nature (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Buss, 1994; Wright, 1994). On the other hand, there has been an explosion of research from the perspective of developmental behavior genetics, where the issue has centered around the joint contribution of the environment and a person’s genetic endowment to the socialization of children and development over the life span (e.g., Rowe, 1994; Sulloway, 1996). Consequently, in the present chapter, we will once again examine social and ecological issues as they bear upon the maltreatment of children from a biosocial perspective.

Evolutionary theory and the social sciences

Gintiss article is an example of growing awareness by social scientists of the significance of evolutionary theory for understanding human nature. Although we share its main point of view, we comment on some disagreements related to levels of behavioral analysis, the explanation of social cooperation, and the ubiquity of inter-individual differences in human decision-making.