With April marking National Child Abuse Prevention Month in the United States, there is no more apt time for our attention to turn to our efforts to address the globally pervasive and destructive form of trauma exposure precipitated by childhood maltreatment. For example, international prevalence rates gathered by Gilbert and colleagues (2009) found that parent- or child-reported physical abuse occurs at rates ranging from 3.7 to 29 percent in various countries around the globe. A further estimated 150 million girls and 73 million boys under the age of 18 experience sexual violence (World Health Organization, 2010). In the US alone, approximately 6 million children are reported to social service agencies due to suspected maltreatment in a given year and 22.1 per cent of these cases are substantiated (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2010). In its many co-occurring forms, which include physical, emotional, and medical neglect as well as physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, childhood maltreatment has pervasive effects on all domains of a young person’s development, with a long shadow that persists throughout adulthood (see Becker-Blease & Kerig, 2012). Even more grimly, data compiled by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF, 2003) indicate that two children die from abuse and neglect every week in Germany and the UK, four a week in Japan, and 27 a week in the US. Nor does the currently-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic allow us to shift our attention from this issue, with concerns raised that maltreated children are at increased risk when their families are homebound and laboring under the stressors of COVID-related school/daycare closures and parental job losses. Compounding these risks, maltreatment is not only increasingly likely to occur but decreasingly likely to be detected when children are not at school or attending regular events outside the home. In this regard, media accounts coming in from all over the world indicate accelerating reports of intimate partner violence among adults during the COVID-19 crisis, but decelerating rates of child abuse reports, attributable to the fact that children are now sequestered from the adults who are mandated to report abuse—teachers, medical providers, clergy, and therapists. In response, recently over 500 organizations in the United States joined together to ask to the US Congress to allocate emergency funding to support the child welfare system in order to address this emergent mental health crisis by funding community-based prevention, mental health services, and emergency responding for child abuse-related programs. In recognition of the ongoing importance of this issue for the field of traumatic stress studies, this virtual special issue brings together studies of the proximal and distal impacts of child abuse published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress.