This study proposes a model explaining the association between physical abuse of children
and children's social and affective status as one in which children's social
expectations and behavior, developed within the context of abusive parenting, mediate current
functioning in these two outcome domains. Subjects included one hundred 9 to 12-year-old
physically abused children recruited from consecutive entries onto the New York State Register
for Child Abuse for New York City and 100 case-matched classmate nonabused comparison
children. Sociometric assessments were carried out in classrooms, interviews were conducted
with the children and their parents, and teachers, parents, and classmates rated the
children's behavior. Path analysis was utilized to test the conceptually derived models.
Children's social expectations regarding peers, and two social behaviors—aggressive
behavior and prosocial behavior—were found to mediate between abuse and positive and
negative social status, as well as between abuse and positive and negative reciprocity. Social
expectations and withdrawn behavior mediated between abuse and positive social status, but only
where withdrawn behavior was a function of social expectations. Social expectations were
generally found to mediate between abuse and internalizing problems. Negative social status (peer
rejection) added to social expectations in producing internalizing problems. Identification of these
mediating pathways can serve to guide secondary preventive intervention efforts so that they best
address the problems abused children face in the absence of adequate parental and peer support as
the children enter adolescence.