Poverty as a risk factor of neglect
The first researches on the phenomenon of child neglect concluded that the concerned families were the poorest among the poor, and this assessment holds ever since. However, this dimension of the neglect problem has not been thoroughly dealt with in research nor in intervention guides. The reasons for this link between poverty and neglect and the concrete implications of this link for the intervention are rarely approached and hardly elaborated in research works. The article aims to gather the research data and the authors' reflections on this question. It defines the concept of poverty according to the dimensions retained in the researches and indicates the dimensions of this concept that exercise a particular influence on the risk of neglect. It also describes the various possible interpretations of the link between poverty and the risk of neglect and their implications for planning and intervention. Considering the importance of the poverty in the neglect problem, we can conclude that a direct or indirect intervention on this factor seems unavoidable if we aim, with a minimal efficiency, at decreasing the continuously increasing child neglect rates.