The volume has great potential to encourage better research, practice, law, and policy. It will inform scientists across various sub-fields of psychology about the most current knowledge in the discipline and the limits of that knowledge. It will encourage psychologists to think creatively about the issues from psychological, sociological, medical, and legal perspectives. It will bring balance within the current socio-political context of child maltreatment research, focusing research and policy on important issues that arise in actual child abuse cases rather than issues that surround controversial false child maltreatment allegations.

This volume demonstrates how new research findings can (a) provide practitioners with information that can support treatment efforts, (b) spawn better future programs of research, and (c) directly aid new prevention efforts and better social policy and law. This information will advance psychologists’ collective understanding of child maltreatment.