Mothers who experience violence or aggression at the hands of an intimate partner are at greater risk for maltreating their children than mothers who do not experience intimate partner abuse.
Intimate partner aggression and violence “impacts the whole family, raising health risks for children in the home as well as adult victims,” Dr Catherine A. Taylor.
Moreover, the presence of intimate partner aggression and violence appears to confer a unique burden of maltreatment risk to children, Dr Taylor, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and colleagues have found.
Dr Taylor’s group assessed reports of intimate partner aggression/violence, parenting stress, major depression, and indicators of mother-to-child maltreatment among 2,508 mothers who participated in the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study.
About 40 per cent of the women said they experienced aggression or violent acts, such as hitting, kicking, insults, isolation, or forced sexual acts, with their current partner, the investigators report in the American Journal of Public Health.
They also report that mothers who suffered intimate partner violence, compared with mothers who did not, used psychological and physical aggression against their children more frequently and had higher odds of spanking their children and of reporting at least one instance of neglect toward their children.
Mothers’ parenting stress and presence of depression did not explain the associations between intimate partner aggression/violence and child maltreatment, Dr Taylor said, even though both parenting stress and mothers’ depression can result from partner violence and increase child maltreatment risk.
She and colleagues suggest child welfare agencies integrate partner aggression/violence interventions into child protection programs.
Dr Taylor also calls for further research “to better assess the overlapping risk of intimate partner violence and child maltreatment for both parents, not just mothers.”
Reuters Health
Source: American Journal of Public Health, January 2009