It has been suggested that there is a relationship between child abuse and learning disability. Perhaps child abuse causes learning disability; perhaps learning disability places a child at particular risk for being abused; perhaps both are true. No adequate investigation of the possible relationship(s) of child abuse to learning disability can be carried out in the absence of adequate, consensual definitions of both "child abuse" and "learning disability," and such definitions have been lacking in the work done thus far. Furthermore, the extant research has been plagued by methodological problems, which further impede a clear view of possible cause-effect relationships. This paper is a review of the pertinent studies that have been done, with an analysis of their shortcomings. It is concluded that at this time, despite the fact that case reports link child abuse with learning disability in some individual cases, there is no evidence either that abused children are more likely than nonabused children to have a learning disability or that learning disabled children are more likely than children without learning disabilities to be abused.

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