Preliminary issues

We come, then, to the final issue to be dealt with in this book, that concerning the relevance of the foregoing theory and research for crime prevention policy. Even without any consideration of theory the salience of our empirical analysis for crime prevention policy is obvious. As we noted in the overview to this book, increases in reported child abuse and neglect have been recorded in Britain and Australia while the estimated risk of child abuse and neglect in the United States was one and one-half times higher in 1993 than it was in 1986. Much of this risk is concentrated, as might be expected, among families exposed to economic or social stress. The 1993 national incidence study on child abuse and neglect in the US (NIS-3 1999) indicated that the children of single parent families faced a 77 per cent greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse and an 87 per cent greater risk of being harmed by physical neglect than children living with both parents. It also showed that children from families with annual incomes below $15,000 as compared with children from families with annual incomes above $30,000 per year were over twenty-two times more likely to experience some form of maltreatment.