The cultural context provides a perspective that is core to understanding families and their troubles. Families around the world vary in the forms that they take, the circumstances in which they live and the troubles that they experience. There is not a single consensus definition of culture, of family or of trouble that offers an opportunity to explore how diversity and variability can contribute to understanding the connections among these phenomena. This chapter will first consider the relationship of the cultural context to understanding families and troubles and will then turn to a consideration of child maltreatment as an illustration of the complexities of these issues.

Families are fundamental building blocks of human societies. We spend most of our lifetimes as family members, from the family or families in which we are reared to the family or families that we form or relate to as adults. The ‘right’ to a family is prominent in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, and when families are disrupted or absent, a substitute arrangement with as many familial features as possible is most often sought (McCall et al, 2011). Yet, despite the centrality of families in social organisation and human development, families are rife with contradictions. Families, by their very nature, are at once both cooperative and conflictual, both stable and changing, and both safe and dangerous. ‘Troubles’ arise both from within and from outside families, and are variably experienced by different family members by virtue of attributes including age, gender, sibling position or family role.

The cultural context offers an important framework for understanding families and ‘troubles’. A major review of child development research identified culture as one of 10 major principles impacting human development, but yet one that was poorly studied and understood: