Are the poorest families the most violent?

Claudia Cappa and Isabel Jijon

Chapter 17 in Handbook on Child Poverty and Inequality, 2025, pp 271-288 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Interpersonal violence has a grave impact on children. It damages their physical, psychological, and emotional well-being, undermines their future, and, in the most severe cases, can lead to death. The most common form of violence against children is violent discipline. Research shows that many factors lead to such discipline, including household poverty. However, most research focuses only on poverty in high-income countries and uses inconsistent measures. This chapter first reviews the existing literature and then examines the relationship between poverty and violent discipline around the world, using household survey data from 12 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. We find that in some countries, children in poorer households are at a higher risk of violence than their richer peers, but this relationship is not consistent across national contexts. The poorest families are not necessarily the most violent. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Keywords: Violence; Discipline; Children; Poverty; Data; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781802200423
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802200430.00027 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20907_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().