TORONTO – Parental discord as seemingly innocuous as frequent belittlement can significantly increase a child's risk of psychological maltreatment, according to results of a study presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies.
Even when children manage to escape the direct consequences of their parents' arguments, simply witnessing parental abuse can cause a ripple effect that seeps into a child's adolescent romances, results of a second study suggested.
“They're witnessing it young, and they're being abused young–and that's where the cycle is starting,” said Christine Forke, R.N., of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. “I think we have to intervene very early, as opposed to working with adolescents,” she said in an interview.
Psychological maltreatment–defined as threatening to kick or lock a child out of the house, threatening to leave or abandon a child, or calling a child stupid, ugly, or useless–is the most common form of child abuse linked to intimate partner violence (IPV), reported Dr. Adam J. Zolotor of the family medicine department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In his survey of 1,232 mothers with partners, he found that, compared with nonviolent homes, those with IPV raised the risk of child physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and neglect. (See chart.)
Although physical violence and verbal threatening between partners posed the greatest risk of child psychological maltreatment, with an odds ratio of between 6.67 when the mother was the victim and 8.44 when the partner was the victim, the risks associated with frequent belittling between partners were not that much less, with an odds ratio of 4.88 and 5.83, respectively.
“I actually think it's critical to get at the belittling part when we're talking to parents, but I don't know that there's a standard question or tool,” Dr. Zolotor said in an interview.
Even children who are not themselves abused by their fighting parents seem to be scarred simply by witnessing the abuse, according to Ms. Forke's survey of 901 college students whose mean age was 20 years. She found that 23% reported witnessing adult physical, sexual, or emotional abuse as children (mean age 8 years); of those witnesses, 67% had since experienced intimate partner violence as an adult–either as a victim or a perpetrator.
Compared with nonwitnesses, witnesses were more likely to be victims of physical (29% vs. 14%), sexual (30% vs. 20%), and emotional (38% vs. 22%) abuse. They also were more likely to be perpetrators of physical (24% vs. 8%), sexual (7% vs. 3%), and emotional (12% vs. 5%) abuse. A total of 27% of witnesses reported being both victims and perpetrators of abuse, compared with 11% of nonwitnesses.
The effects of childhood witnessing alone may be subtly different from the reported effects of direct child abuse. “There's clear evidence in the literature that if you're abused as a child, and you are a boy, you grow up to abuse women. And if you're a girl and you're abused as a child, you tend to grow up to be a victim. But our results suggest that if you witness abuse as a child, you could be either a victim or a perpetrator, and gender doesn't seem to be as important,” she said.”
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