Treatment of child abuse: a review of the behavioral interventions.
Forty years ago we had no clear behavioral definitions or data on child abuse treatment—today you can borrow ready-made, well-defined packages like DRA and finally answer the call.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Greer (1982) scanned every behavioral paper on child abuse up to that year.
The author asked a simple question: what do we know about treating abusive families with ABA?
The review found almost no studies with clear definitions or long-term follow-up.
What they found
The field was still a baby. Most papers used fuzzy labels like "poor parenting" without saying which behaviors counted.
No one tracked if treated families stayed safe months later.
The paper ends with a plea: write your goals in observable terms and test them.
How this fits with other research
Castañe et al. (1993) later counted child ABA studies from 1980-1990. Only 16 % even checked if staff followed the plan, proving the 1982 gap was real.
Matson et al. (1989) and Brosnan et al. (2011) show the wider field moved on. They cataloged 382 and dozens of studies each, showing clear behavioral packages for aggression in developmental disabilities.
Bhaumik et al. (2009) closes the loop. Their review of 116 DRA papers gives the exact thing 1982 asked for: an operationally defined, well-tested intervention for destructive behavior.
Why it matters
If you work with high-risk families, start by writing abuse in plain, countable verbs: hits, shakes, ignores cries for 30 s. Then pick an intervention like DRA that already has a data trail. Track integrity and safety each week. The 1982 warning still rings true: without clear definitions and numbers, we can’t prove we protected a child.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Child abuse has probably existed as a social problem as long as parents and children have lived under the same roof, and in recent years it has received tremendous attention. Most of the research has focused on etiology rather than treatment, leaving large gaps in our knowledge about remediating abuse. Behavioral scientists have only begun to formulate a conceptual framework from which to work. Many theoretical questions are yet unanswered, particularly the question of what constitutes abuse. Burgess (1978) believes that conceptual problems exist because abuse falls along a continuum of parent-child relationships--a continuum that at one end might include verbal punishment (e.g., threats, ridicule) or milder forms of physical punishment (e.g., slap on the hand, spanking), and at the other end include extreme forms of physical punishment that exceed community mores (for example, hitting a child with a closed fist, scalding a child in hot water, torturing or killing a child). Thus, the question-- where does discipline stop and abuse begin?-- faces every researcher who must operationally define abuse. Identifying the consequences of abuse in a child's development is another area of inquiry that remains untreated. Most of the literature is filled with the subjective impressions of professionals speculating that abused children become the juvenile delinquents and the child abusers of the future; however, as yet no longitudinal studies have been conducted that compare the developmental outcomes of abused and non-abused children from early childhood to later adulthood. What if there were no differences? How might this influence our approaches to the treatment of abuse? Answers to these and other questions will take years of study. Increased awareness of the problem of child abuse has led to greater efforts to remediate the problem. Treatment efforts with abusive families are still in the initial stages, but, undoubtedly, information from these early programs can be the foundation for future researchers to formulate new, more effective intervention programs. Future researchers should focus on identifying those aspects of existing programs that lend themselves to empirical study and have led to more successful parent-child relationships.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1982 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1982.15-273