Jill E. Korbin

Jill E. Korbin
Case Western Reserve University | CWRU · Department of Anthropology

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91
Publications
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Publications

Publications (91)
Chapter
Accumulating evidence around the globe has strengthened the notion that COVID-19 and the related policy responses increased the risk factors for child maltreatment while dramatically decreasing protective factors in children’s and families’ lives. This alarming reality resulted from various contexts, a key context being the impact the pandemic had...
Article
Full-text available
The Gary B. Melton Visiting Professorship was created to honor and celebrate the legacy of Dr. Melton and to encourage scholars and advocates to continue to build on his impressive body of interdisciplinary work on children’s rights, global approach to child health and well-being, and social frameworks of family and community. A collaboration of th...
Article
Background Alongside deficits in children's wellbeing, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an elevated risk for child maltreatment and challenges for child protective services worldwide. Therefore, some children might be doubly marginalized, as prior inequalities become exacerbated and new risk factors arise. Objective To provide initial insight int...
Article
Full-text available
This invited commentary considers how the cultural context matters in understanding child maltreatment.
Article
Background Nearly one-quarter of the approximately 400,000 reports to child protective services originating from non-mandated reporters come from neighbors. Understanding factors leading non-mandated reporters to contact authorities is important because if modifiable, they might serve as intervention targets to promote reporting of suspected maltre...
Chapter
Approximately 1 in 8 U.S. children will become victims of child abuse and neglect within the first 18 years of life (Wildeman et al. JAMA Pediatrics 168:706–713, 2014). There is wide recognition that neighborhoods play a critical role in parenting behaviors, and impact the likelihood that a child will experience maltreatment (Coulton et al. Child A...
Article
Background A year has passed since COVID-19 began disrupting systems. Although children are not considered a risk population for the virus, there is accumulating knowledge regarding children's escalating risk for maltreatment during the pandemic. Objective The current study is part of a larger initiative using an international platform to examine...
Article
Drawing on Coleman’s concept of social capital, researchers have investigated how the quality of neighborhood social networks influences child development and well-being. The role of non-kin older neighbors in advancing child well-being through the enhancement of social capital, however, has been under-studied. Our objective was to delineate specif...
Article
While relationships between neighborhood violent crime and adverse child outcomes are well-established, less is known about how neighborhood violent crime influences child-rearing strategies. To address this gap, we blend neighborhood ecologies and stratified reproduction frameworks and examine interview data collected in 2014-2015 from 107 adult c...
Chapter
Children and parents interact with their environment in important ways that affect the likelihood of child maltreatment. Geographic disparities in social problems such as poverty and criminal activity, can lead to disparities in exposure to child maltreatment. The current chapter investigates the ways in which geographic context affects racial disp...
Article
Abstract Background Child protection is and will be drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Comprehending this new reality and identifying research, practice and policy paths are urgent needs. Objective The current paper aims to suggest a framework for risk and protective factors that need to be considered in child protection in its various...
Article
Topic of Review The current study sought to review the state of existing knowledge on rural maltreatment. Method of Review We conducted a scoping literature review to answer two research questions: (1) Is maltreatment higher in rural areas compared to urban areas? and 2) Are there unique correlates of maltreatment in rural areas? Number of Resear...
Article
The significant role of the community in the lives of children and youth at-risk has become increasingly clear to social work academics and professionals over the last three decades. Alongside the more traditional individual and family responses, community interventions have been designed to catalyze change in the environment of children and youth...
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Full-text available
This article addresses child protection in close-knit religious communities. Specifically, it presents the findings of a qualitative research project that examined Ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents’ perceptions and ascribed meanings of child risk and protection based on fifty in-depth interviews with parents from Israel and the USA. Here, we hone in on...
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Research on caregivers' views of factors that contribute to child maltreatment and analyses of neighborhood structural factors offer opportunities for enhancing prevention and intervention efforts. This study compared explanations of the factors that contribute to child maltreatment in a neighborhood-based sample of adult caregivers at two-time poi...
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Full-text available
The purpose of this pilot cross-national study was to uncover similarities and differences in three areas that might affect the development of community-based programs targeting child maltreatment: behaviors considered to be maltreatment, perceived contributors to maltreatment, and whether the government or neighbors can do anything about maltreatm...
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Full-text available
Children around the world are vulnerable to multiple and varying sources of adversity and risk, the meanings, experiences, and outcomes of which are shaped by the cultural context and the individual’s place in that context. In this paper we explore how the cultural context and intersectionality frameworks may aid in understanding which children are...
Article
This study examines how changes in the social and economic structure of neighborhoods relate to changes in child maltreatment report rates over an extended period. The panel study design allows us to partition the changes in child maltreatment report rates into a portion associated with how the levels of socio-economic risk factors have changed ove...
Article
Rationale: Child maltreatment remains a serious but potentially preventable public health concern in the United States. Although research has examined factors associated with child maltreatment at the neighborhood level, few studies have explicitly focused on the role of the neighborhood built environment in maltreatment. Objective: We begin to ad...
Article
Full-text available
Neighborhood processes have been shown to influence child maltreatment rates, and accordingly neighborhood-based strategies have been suggested as helpful in intervening in and preventing child maltreatment. Although child-welfare workers are at the forefront of child maltreatment work, little is known about the extent to which their perspectives o...
Article
Although approximately one-fifth of child maltreatment reports originate with family members, friends, neighbors, or community members, their efforts to identify and report child maltreatment are still not well understood. Nor is it well understood how these individuals' perceptions of what constitutes maltreatment may change over time. This study...
Article
Providing effective mental health services requires knowledge about and cultural competence across a wide array of beliefs and practices. This study provides an example of a successful project to improve public mental health service delivery in an Amish community. County boards of mental health in a rural area of Northeast Ohio contacted researcher...
Book
Full-text available
To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need a diverse set of questions and methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods That Matter offers compelling and successful exam...
Chapter
The Old Order Amish are a relatively isolated religious group found in North America, most easily recognized by their horse-and-buggy mode of transportation, seventeenth-century style of dress, and homes without electricity. Amish life is organized around the church and the family. This entry examines features of Amish faith, communities, family li...
Article
Full-text available
In the early 1990s, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect commissioned a series of reviews that appeared as the edited volume, Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect ( Melton & Barry, 1994). Using the 1994 review “Sociocultural Factors in Child Maltreatment” ( Korbin, 1994) as a background, this article reconsiders culture and cont...
Chapter
Full-text available
The introductory chapter for The Handbook of Child Well-Being sets forth major issues and areas of concern in understanding child well-being and outlines the structure of the book. This multi-volume compendium on child well-being takes as its starting point that child well-being is best understood within a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary fram...
Book
This Handbook examines core questions still remaining in the field of child maltreatment. It addresses major challenges in child maltreatment work, starting with the question of what child abuse and neglect is exactly. It then goes on to examine why maltreatment occurs and what its consequences are. Next, it turns to prevention, treatment and inter...
Book
The well-being of children represents a challenge not yet fully confronted and The Handbook of Child Well-being supplies its readers with a thorough overview of the complexities and implications regarding the scientific and practical pursuit of children’s well-being. The handbook addresses the concept of well-being through an in-depth analysis of t...
Chapter
This chapter introduces Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Child Abuse, the paper by C. Henry Kempe that is the focus of this section, and summarizes the commentaries written in response to this paper.
Chapter
This chapter introduces the orientation of the volume around four papers published by C. Henry Kempe and his colleagues. Each paper is followed by invited commentaries that consider the impact and legacy of Dr. Kempe’s work.
Book
This volume is the first book in the new series, Child Maltreatment: Contemporary Issues in Research and Policy. This first volume focuses on the legacy of the work of C. Henry Kempe, M.D., the pediatrician widely credited with galvanizing public and private attention to abused and neglected children. 2012 marks 50 years after the appearance of the...
Article
Well-being can be conceptualized and measured in a number of ways and at multiple ecological and ecocultural levels. At the neighborhood or community level, indices of well-being can be constructed using administrative data such as census measures as well as by considering the views of neighborhood residents, both children and adults. In this paper...
Article
The articles in this special issue, and the practice and policy commentaries that accompany them, highlight distinctive contributions of psychological anthropology to understanding adolescence, and extend these understandings to the collaborative framing of practice and policy concerns. In consideration of pressing matters for adolescents that incl...
Article
This paper addresses the policy recommendation that child protection efforts be reoriented to the neighborhood level. Residents of neighborhoods with varying rates of reported child maltreatment were questioned as to the roles of neighbors and/or the government in preventing child abuse and neglect. Residents in all neighborhoods were more optimist...
Article
A growing literature on small-area effects has linked neighborhood conditions with indicators of child well-being. This paper addresses some of the challenges in identifying and understanding these linkages, with a focus on children’s definitions and perceptions of their neighborhood geographies. The study included 60 children aged 7 to 11 and one...
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Full-text available
The six papers from five continents in this collection reflect growing awareness of the importance of small areas for understanding the context of child well-being. The papers point to the need for concerted efforts to capture the contexts in which children and families live and the need for innovative approaches to these issues. The papers lend th...
Article
Anthropological attention to children and childhoods has had an uneven but lengthy history, both within the discipline and in interdisciplinary endeavors. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of children, with work often carried out under the rubrics of “Childhood Studies” or the “Anthropology of Childhoods.” In these fram...
Article
Adverse child outcomes tend to be concentrated in neighborhoods with constellations of adverse conditions and risk factors. This paper examines the challenges of developing meaningful and useful indicators of child well-being at the level of the neighborhood. Recent technological advances have made it more feasible for communities to develop neighb...
Article
To review the literature on the relationships between neighborhoods and child maltreatment and identify future directions for research in this area. A search of electronic databases and a survey of experts yielded a list of 25 studies on the influence of geographically defined neighborhoods on child maltreatment. These studies were then critically...
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Full-text available
The capacity of communities to prevent violence is examined from three perspectives: youth violence, child maltreatment, and intimate partner violence. The analysis suggests that community social control and collective efficacy are significant protective factors for all three types of violence, but these need to be further distinguished for their r...
Article
Anthropological literature on children and violence has been constrained by similar considerations that have limited an anthropology of childhood more generally, and by difficulties in conceptualizing children both as victims of violence and as violent themselves. A review of the anthropological literature on violence directed toward children revea...
Article
As we were visiting households in one of the study neighborhoods in order to recruit participants, we heard the crash of a bicycle on pavement. Tw o young girls (9-10 years of age) were bicycling, and one of them had fallen over in the street. The girl sat next to her bicycle and cried. We started to walk towards her and as we neared the site, we w...
Article
The objective of this article is to comment on current issues in the relationship between culture and child maltreatment. A review of the literature on culture and child maltreatment is the basis of the article. While attention has been directed to the relationship between culture and maltreatment for more than 20 years, there is a need for further...
Article
Awareness of worsening conditions in urban areas has led to a growing interest in how neighborhood context affects children. Although the ecological perspective within child development has acknowledged the relevance of community factors, methods of measuring the neighborhood context for children have been quite limited. An approach to measuring ne...
Article
The Loss of Innocents: Child Killers and Their Victims. Cora E. Richards. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000.237 pp.
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Full-text available
Neighborhood influences on children and youth are the subjects of increasing numbers of studies, but there is concern that these investigations may be biased, because they typically rely on census-based units as proxies for neighborhoods. This pilot study tested several methods of defining neighborhood units based on maps drawn by residents, and co...
Article
The purpose of this study, as part of a larger study on neighborhoods and child maltreatment, was to determine how parents residing in neighborhoods with differing profiles of risk for child maltreatment reports defined child abuse and neglect and viewed its etiology. Parents (n = 400) were systematically selected from neighborhoods (n=20) with dif...
Article
To better understand how neighborhood and individual factors are related to child maltreatment. Using an ecological framework, a multi-level model (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) was used to analyze neighborhood structural conditions and individual risk factors for child abuse and neglect. Parents (n = 400) of children under the age of 18 were syste...
Article
Playing on the Mother-Ground: Cultural Routines for Children's Development. DAVID F. LANCY. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996. xii. 240 pp., references, index.
Article
Although it is well documented that child maltreatment exerts a deleterious impact on child adaptation, much less is known about the precise etiological pathways that eventuate in child abuse and neglect. This paper reports on a multimethod ecological study of the relationship between neighborhood structural factors and child maltreatment reports i...
Article
Ethnic and generational variation in elder mistreatment has only recently been explored. This research builds upon pioneer work in the field by examining perceptions of elder mistreatment across four ethnic groups (European-American, African-American, Puerto Rican, and Japanese-American) and two generations (elder and 'baby boom' caregiver). Focus...
Article
Using census and administrative agency data for 177 urban census tracts, variation in rates of officially reported child maltreatment is found to be related to structural determinants of community social organization: economic and family resources, residential instability, household and age structure, and geographic proximity of neighborhoods to co...
Article
Using census and administrative agency data for 177 urban census tracts, variation in rates of officially reported child maltreatment is found to be related to structural determinants of community social organization: economic and family resources, residential instability, household and age structure, and geographic proximity of neighborhoods to co...
Article
Perpetrators of elder abuse (n = 23) and child abuse (n = 21) reported on violent behaviors experienced during their childhoods using the Conflict Tactics Scales. Elder abusing adult offspring and child abusing parents did not differ significantly in their experience of "overall" violence as children. However, child abusing parents were significant...
Article
The purpose of this chapter was twofold. First, the chapter put forward a brief cross-cultural perspective indicating that multiple types of intrafamilial violence occur cross-culturally. Second, the chapter placed social networks at the core of a complex etiology of intrafamilial violence. The purpose of giving centrality to social networks is not...
Article
A comparison group study of abusing and nonabusing caregivers suggested a correlation between alcohol use and abuse and violence against elderly parents. Findings reveal that abusers were more likely than nonabusers to drink, to become intoxicated, and to be identified as having a drinking problem. Policy and practice implications are discussed.
Article
This study examined Amish patterns of perinatal health care utilization from the perspective of Amish women and local health care providers in Geauga County, Ohio. Participant observation and interviews with health care providers and 15 Amish women yielded data on perinatal beliefs and utilization patterns for 76 pregnancies. While local health car...
Article
This paper reports an exploratory study of elders who use the legal system in resonse to adult offspring perpetrated abuse. When compared with agency-identified abused elders, those using the legal system were younger and more likely to be of African-American descent. The abusive adult offspring were overwhelmingly male and had a history of mental...
Article
Elder abuse has been compared with other forms of intrafamilial violence. Despite obvious age and status differences, elder parents and young children exhibit similarities that make the linking of elder and child abuse compelling. However, difference in the nature of child-to-parent and parent-to-child relations and in the social and legal status o...
Article
This paper proposes a framework for understanding fatal maltreatment by mothers based on an in-depth study of incarcerated women. Despite its extreme outcome, fatal maltreatment is not homogeneous. While the specifics of each case varied, the circumstances leading to the fatality followed a similar progression. The framework is characterized by a r...
Article
This paper provides a background and suggests a strategy for an international approach to policy development concerning child abuse. First, child abuse is defined in a way that makes it applicable across cultures and national boundaries as that portion of harm to children that results from human action that is proscribed, proximate and preventable....
Article
Fatally maltreated children are an elusive component in the complex interaction that has led to their premature deaths. Retrospective research with women imprisoned for fatal child maltreatment indicated recurring themes of maternal interpretations of their children as rejecting and developmentally abnormal, either advanced or delayed. Separations...
Chapter
This chapter offers an exploratory survey of child sexual abuse based on a review of the cross-cultural record and the literature on child sexual abuse in Euro-American nations. Anthropological complacency about the rarity of incest and sexual conduct within the family has been seriously challenged by recent epidemiological, sociological, and clini...
Article
A history of childhood maltreatment is the most consistently reported characteristic of abusive parents. Retrospective research with nine women imprisoned for fatal child abuse revealed childhood histories of maltreatment. Detailed life histories indicated that the meaning of the abuse to the individual had an important impact on later abusive pare...
Chapter
Glimpses into the feelings and thoughts of retarded individuals are rare. Novelist Keyes vividly portrayed what life might be for a retarded man aware of his limitations while anthropologist Edgerton (1967) has provided unique insights on the coping mechanisms used by borderline retarded persons to give the illusion of normalcy, to wear their “cloa...
Article
All eleven adult females in one generation of an extended family had experienced childhood sexual abuse by either a father/uncle or an older cousin/brother. The sexual abuse had been a closely guarded secret of each victim for up to 20 years despite the fact that all of the women had close and frequent involvement in one another's lives. Protection...
Article
A serious and potentially life-threatening disease in a young child was identified and resolved through medical intervention. However, in the course of hospitalization, a conflict arose between the mother and the health care providers that required legal constraints on the mother. A retrospective account of this conflict between Western health care...
Article
This paper provides a brief description of the scope and nature of the Fourth National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect held in Los Angeles, California in October of 1979. The underlying goal of the Conference, in addition to providing a forum for the exchange of information, was to move towards a multi-dimensional definition and approach to t...

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