At Yale-New Haven Hospital, the medical records of children suspected of being abused or neglected are specially marked or "darted" and the children are referred for investigation and disposition to a special hospital Dart Committee. The study population included the mothers of all children referred to the hospital Dart Committee for suspicion of abuse and/or neglect in a single year, between July 1977 and June 1978, 116 mothers in all. The trauma screen used in the study was designed to identify abuse in a population that had not been explicitly identified as battered and to generate sufficiently large groups of abused and nonabused women to permit statistical analysis and comparison. Data were obtained on the significance of battering in families that were experiencing child abuse, the identity of perpetrators, whether mothers who were battered came disproportionately from problem homes, and whether current dispositions responded appropriately to the family situation. Findings show that men were the typical child abusers. In at least half of all child abuse cases, men were battering the mother as well. In the modal situation studied, child abuse appeared as tangential spouse abuse, that is, as a stage in the perpetrator's attempts to control the mother. Whichever parent abuses the child in a battering relationship, however, the woman's capacity to protect the child is compromised by a continuum of control that extends from the violence at home through inappropriate clinical interventions, to punitive interventions by child protective services. When a battered woman sacrifices her child to be hit instead of her, becomes enmeshed with her child, or scapegoats the child to prompt removal by child protective services, she often does so to break a bind in which personal identity is equated with intolerably rigid gender roles. Implications of these findings for strategies in addressing child abuse are discussed. 3 tables