Objective:

The purpose of this study was to explore which of 17 categories of child maltreatment South Africans evaluated as most serious and to determine if those working with abuse and neglect evaluated abuse and neglect differently from those who did not.

Method:

A revised version of Giovannoni and Becerra’s [Giovannoni, J., & Becerra, R. (1979). Defining child abuse. New York: The Free Press] questionnaire exploring the definition of abuse and neglect was completed by 181 residents of Cape Town, South Africa. The new form had 17 categories of child maltreatment, including 4 categories of societal abuse. Respondents were social workers (n = 57), human service workers (n = 42), laypersons (n = 65), and members of the child protection unit of the South African Police (n = 18). ANOVA was used to compare the groups’ responses. When significant differences among groups were found, a Bonferroni post hoc test was run to determine differences between groups.

Results:

The respondents ranked sexual abuse and child prostitution as most serious and housing and child labor as least serious of the 17 categories. There was a significant difference (p ≤ .01) between groups on nine categories. When post hoc tests were run, differences were found for eight categories with laypersons generally evaluating categories as significantly more serious than social workers.

Conclusions:

Reasons for the order of the rankings are discussed, but concern remains that differences in the evaluation of child maltreatment will lead to difficulty in implementing a protocol for identifying and responding to incidents of abuse and neglect.