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Recently, the church has been urged to take a more active role in the awareness and prevention of child maltreatment both inside and outside of the church. Thus, understanding graduate divinity students’ perceptions of maltreatment is an important endeavor to provide foundations for assessing how the church can help in the prevention and intervention of child maltreatment. This study is the first to embark on a journey to understand divinity students’perception of maltreatment. A total of 68 participants were given a vignette-based measure to assess their perceptions of maltreatment. Divinity students’ perceptions were compared to those of counseling graduate students. Sexual abuse was considered to be the most severe maltreatment while neglect and ambiguous situations were considered to be the least severe. Some situations that are commonly seen in Korea but can be viewed as idiosyncratic in other cultures – such as a mother hitting a misbehaved child with Heo-cho-ri (a stick typically used in Korea for discipline) – were considered less serious compared to other maltreatment categories. There were no noticeable differences between the two majors in their perception.
