Recent years have witnessed an increase in attention to the development of children who have experienced parental maltreatment. Although early studies focused mainly on documenting physical injury and cognitive impairment in maltreated children, investigators have recently begun to pay increasing attention to the social and emotional sequelae of abuse and neglect. As a result of this trend, a handful of studies has emerged that examine maltreated children's functioning in an important area of social and emotional development: interaction with age-mates and the formation of peer relationships.

Increased understanding of the relationship between maltreatment and peer relations is important for several reasons. First, establishing successful relations with peers is recognized to be a central task of childhood. Peer relations may contribute uniquely to the growth of social and emotional competence, to the acquisition of social skills and values, and to the development of the capacity to form relationships with others (Hartup, 1983; Youniss, 1980). Furthermore, investigators have found that the quality of a child's peer relations is significantly associated with the quality of functioning in other realms, both during childhood and in later years. In particular, childhood peer relations have been identified as one of the most powerful predictors of concurrent and future mental health problems, including the development of psychiatric disorders (Cowen, Pederson, Babigian, Izzo, and Trost, 1973; Roff, Sells, and Golden, 1972; Sundby and Kreyberg, 1968). Maltreated children – by virtue of their placement on the extreme end of the “continuum of caretaking casualty” (Sameroff and Chandler, 1975) – can be hypothesized to be “at risk” for a variety of difficulties.