AES/Sibling Project – Blog Post 1
Editor’s Note: This blog series is written by Lynette Renner an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work. Her research focus is family violence including intimate partner violence and child maltreatment. The goal of this blog series is to provide information and encourage discussion of expanding our understanding of children’s exposure to violence—specifically within the child welfare system.
Effective responses to the safety and well-being of children can only emerge from a comprehensive assessment of victimization. In this blog post, we describe the prevalence and behavioral effects of children’s exposure to child abuse.
Prevalence data on all forms of child maltreatment does not capture the extent of this public health crisis. However, in fiscal year 2013, approximately 3.9 million children were the subjects of at least one report to Child Protective Services and 17.5% of those children were found to be victims with dispositions of substantiated. Researchers estimate that 15.5 million children live in families in which physical intimate partner violence (IPV) occurred at least once in the previous year, with seven million children living in families in which severe IPV occurred.
The immediate and later negative mental health, physical health, academic, and social outcomes associated with child maltreatment, including exposure to IPV, have been well documented. In fact, empirical research devoted to examining the effects of child maltreatment and exposures to domestic violence, community violence, school violence, and media violence and other forms of trauma on children’s development have flourished in the past several years and shown rather consistent findings. What remains lacking, however, is exploration into the prevalence and effects of children’s exposure to child abuse.
Studies of direct child abuse focus primarily on one child in the family—the child who is maltreated—and do not often account for how other children in the family experience the abuse. In a national sample of 1,467 children ages 2-17, researchers found that 7.2% experienced physical abuse, 6.8% were exposed to IPV, and 2.8% were exposed to the physical abuse of a sibling. A handful of studies and publications in the 1970s-1980s revealed that children who witnessed the abuse of their sibling had behavioral health outcomes that were similar to those found among victims of child physical abuse (see Beezley, Martin, & Alexander, 1976; Bolton, Reich & Gutierres, 1977; Pfouts, Schopler & Henley, 1982). More recent research has shown that young children and adolescents who were exposed to a sibling’s physical abuse had higher mean externalizing scores than either children who had been physically abused or exposed to physical IPV. Some researchers have also started to note that siblings and other non-offending family members are negatively affected by incidents of child sexual abuse. Despite this extant literature, little attention has been paid to the potential effects of witnessing a sibling being harmed by a parental figure and the developmental effects of children’s exposure to child abuse remain grossly unacknowledged and understudied.
In our next blog post in this three-part series, we will describe federal and state policies that relate to siblings in the child welfare system, with an emphasis on exposure to child maltreatment.
References
Beezley, P., Martin, H., & Alexander, H. (1976). Comprehensive family oriented therapy. In R.E. Helfer & C.H. Kempe (Eds.), Child abuse and neglect. The family and the community (pp. 169-194). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company.
Bolton, F.G., Reich, J.W., & Gutierres, S.E. (1977). Delinquency patterns in maltreated children and siblings. Victimology: An International Journal, 2(2), 349-357.
Pfouts, J.H., Schopler, J.H., & Henley, H.C., Jr. (1982). Forgotten victims of family violence. Social Work, 27, 367-368.