Early violence exposure doesn’t raise future risk

Children who witness domestic or other interpersonal violence are no more likely to become adult victims of violence than those who do not witness abuse, results of a new study suggest.

Abuse is common and many children witness abuse, co-author Dr. Amy A. Ernst, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told Reuters Health. “Still, it’s not necessarily a correlation,” she said.

The findings of the study were presented last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in San Francisco.

Previous reports have suggested that those who perpetrate interpersonal violence are more likely to have witnessed domestic violence during their childhood. To further investigate, Ernst and colleague evaluated 280 men and women who visited a local emergency department. Half of the subjects were male, 46 percent were Hispanic and 36 percent were white.

Using a touch-screen computer, which allowed the subjects to remain anonymous, the participants were asked if they had witnessed interpersonal violence as a child and if their children are now exposed to such violence.

Twenty-six percent of all study participants reported witnessing interpersonal violence as a child, and, similar to previous research, these individuals were also more likely to have also experienced child abuse.

However, these subjects were no more likely to become adult victims of abuse than those who had not witnessed violence during their childhood, the study findings indicate.

“Maybe when children witness interpersonal violence they learn not to become victims,” Ernst said. Boys who witness such violence may instead “wind up becoming perpetrators” of abuse in later years, while girls who witness abuse may “avoid having it happen to them” as adults, Ernst speculates.

In general, 23.5 percent of all study participants were victims of ongoing interpersonal violence, including 32 percent of those who had witnessed interpersonal violence as a child and 21 percent who had not witnessed such violence.

In other findings, those who witnessed early domestic violence were more likely to be abused as a child, earn less than $20,000 per year and to be younger than other study participants. Contrary to prior reports, they were no more likely to drink or do drugs - or to marry a substance abuser—than those who did not witness violence in childhood.

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