Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 42, April 2015, Pages 1-9
Child Abuse & Neglect

Attachment as a mediator between community violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms among adolescents with a history of maltreatment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.11.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Experiences that are detrimental to the attachment relationship, such as childhood maltreatment, may reduce feelings of safety among survivors and exacerbate the effects of exposure to subsequent violence, such as witnessing community violence. Though attachment style has been examined in regard to posttraumatic stress in adults who have a history of exposure to violence in childhood, less is known about the influence of attachment on the relationship between exposure to violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms in children and adolescents. The current study aimed to explore the role of attachment in the link between exposure to community violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms in adolescents with a history of childhood abuse. Participants included adolescents (aged 15–18 years) who had a history of maltreatment (N = 75) and a matched sample without a childhood abuse history (N = 78) from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (Salzinger, Feldman, & Ng-Mak, 2008). A conditional process model using bootstrapping to estimate indirect effects showed a significant indirect effect of insecure attachment on the relationship between exposure to community violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms for adolescents with a history of childhood physical abuse, but not for adolescents without this history. Implications for a cumulative risk model for post-trauma pathology starting in adolescence are discussed.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants in the current sample consisted of adolescents re-recruited from a sample of preadolescent physically abused and matched non-maltreated children. The original sample included 100 physically abused urban schoolchildren, ages 9–12 years (M = 10.5, SD = 0.96) in grades 4–6, and 100 non-abused classmates matched case by case for gender, age, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The original abuse sample were all confirmed cases of physical abuse consecutively registered on the New

Results

Participants in the non-abused group were exposed to an average of 12.27 (SD = 7.59) violent events in their communities, while participants in the abused group were exposed to an average of 14.43 (SD = 7.39) violent events in their communities. Adolescents with a history of maltreatment reported higher PTSS (M = 22.19, SD = 17.31) and lower attachment scores (M = 3.44, SD = .90) than adolescents without a history of maltreatment (M = 17.39, SD = 13.49; M = 3.76, SD = .68). To test the first hypothesis, that there

Discussion

The current study explored the role of attachment in the pathway from exposure to community violence to posttraumatic stress symptoms in a group of adolescents with and without a history of maltreatment. Consistent with previous research suggesting an additive effect of exposure to multiple forms of violence (Cecil et al., 2014, Garrido et al., 2010, Lynch and Cicchetti, 1998), adolescents exposed to community violence with a history of childhood physical abuse had higher rates of PTSS than

Acknowledgements

The data used in this publication were made available by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and have been used with permission. Data from Adolescent Outcome of Physically Abused Schoolchildren were originally collected by Suzanne Salzinger, Richard Feldman, and Daisy S. Ng-Mak. The collector of the original data, the funder, NDACAN, Cornell University and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations

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    Funding for this project was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (Award Number: R01 MH048917 05-08).

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