Citation

Scrafford KE, Grein K, Miller-Graff LE. J. Child Adolesc. Trauma 2018; 11(3): 317-326.

Affiliation

Clinical Psychology Department and Peace Studies Department, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s40653-017-0188-2

PMID

32318158

PMCID

PMC7163855

Abstract

The objective of the current study was to evaluate the direct and indirect effects of childhood victimization on adult mental health, focusing on adult re-victimization as a mediator. Participants (n = 279) were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk reported on childhood victimization, adulthood victimization, and current mental health. Sixty percent of the sample reported at least one incident of re-victimization in adulthood. Three regressions were conducted in SPSS using the PROCESS macro for mediation, and the indirect effect was tested through bootstrapping (10,000) confidence intervals. Total childhood victimization was a significant predictor of current anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress. For all models, adulthood re-victimization was a significant mediator of the relationship between childhood victimization and current mental health. The effects of childhood victimization on mental health are at least in part explained by the high risk of chronic re-victimization into adulthood.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Language: en

Keywords

Childhood violence exposure; Mental health; Poly-victimization; Re-victimization