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Article Summary

English, D., Graham, J., Newton, R., Lewis, T., Thompson, R., Kotch, J., & Weisbart, C. (2009).
At-risk and maltreated children exposed to intimate partner aggression/violence: What the conflict looks like and its relationship to child outcomes. Child Maltreatment 14(2), 157.

     English et al. (2009) address children’s exposure to a broad array of intimate partner aggression and violence (IPAV) in a sample of 554 homes where Child Protective Services identified children as at-risk for maltreatment. Prior research has demonstrated that children who witness domestic violence and who are maltreated exhibit higher levels of distress, and negative physical and mental health outcomes. The authors examined the IPAV using a broad measure that included verbal aggression and minor and more serious forms of aggression and violence. They also focused on the directionality and nature of the IPAV by examining who was doing what and to whom. They used a wave of longitudinal data from the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN). The sample for their analyses was restricted to the wave of data where child participants were 6 years old at the time of data collection and to only those female caregivers who reported having an intimate partner at the time of data collection.
     The authors found that younger caregivers were more likely to report IPAV, but there were no differences in IPAV attributable to the gender of the child, family income, or whether or not the child had been reported as maltreated. The majority of the IPAV in the sample was bidirectional verbal aggression (which co-occurred with female-to-male and male-to-female), with low rates of minor violence and even lower rates of serious violence. They also found that children in homes with no reported IPAV had significantly fewer negative behavioral outcomes than did those in homes with reported IPAV. The authors suggest that even less serious IPAV, such as verbal aggression and conflict in the home, can have negative consequences for children, and that these consequences occur regardless of the perpetrator’s gender. They found few differences in the effects of IPAV based on the gender of the perpetrator in the family (either female-to-male/or male-to-female). Females in the sample reported more perpetrating and more IPAV than did their male partners, but the authors caution that this aggression and violence does not necessarily equate to what is commonly referenced as domestic violence or woman beating. “Thus, overall, there appears to be little evidence that males engage in more IPAV than do women in the families studied here. It is important to note that women may nonetheless have experienced more harm…” (p. 166). Males in families with bidirectional IPAV reported twice as much verbal aggression as males in relationships where the aggression was male-to-female only, and women in relationships where the IPAV was bidirectional were more likely to resort to violent conflict tactics than women in relationships where the IPAV was unilateral (female-to-male only).
     The effects of child maltreatment in this study were stronger than the negative effects of exposure to IPAV. This conflicts with some previous research. The authors suggest that more understanding of the implications of bidirectional IPAV is necessary to better assess the need for intervention strategies for children.