Session: Preventing Child Abuse By Reducing Household Food Insecurity (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Food insecurity is a major public health concern. Today, more than 13 million children in the U.S. are living in households where there isn't enough food. These children are more likely to have substandard physical health, impaired cognitive development, and reduced emotional functioning. There are reasons to believe food insecure parents face many of the same social and environmental risk factors as parents who are at risk for child abuse, including high rates of poverty, maternal mental health problems, domestic violence, and unemployment. Recent studies have supported this exploratory correlation. However, the causal role food insecurity may have in child abuse is virtually unexplored. This gap in knowledge may be a missed opportunity for prevention, as the lack of access to food is a potentially modifiable antecedent to child abuse.

The purpose of this symposium is to move beyond prior correlational analyses limited to geographically circumscribed samples and begin to approach the links between food insecurity family violence in a more nuanced time-ordered fashion using population-based samples and in-depth qualitative exploration. One way to extend prior studies is to look at changes in predictor variables over time and the resulting effects on outcomes. Three of the four presenters utilize longitudinal panel data and statistics that are better able to infer causality and test mediation effects, including structural equation, distributed lag, and fixed effects modeling. In terms of understanding how food insecurity may increase the risk of family violence, we posit that parental depression and impulsivity mediate the relationship. Both parental depression and impulsivity are correlated with greater food insecurity as well as child abuse potential, making understanding these two potential intervening variables important to our analyses.

Dr. Jackson begins the symposium by investigating how ongoing, compared to sporadic, food security is related to young child victimization and witnessing violence in the home. He finds that the risk of violence exposure or witnessing are almost 6 times higher if a family is consistently food insecure. Dr. Helton then presents findings on how changes in food access over time affects parental reports of minor and severe child physical assaults, and whether parent depression mediates this relationship. He finds that becoming food insecure is associated with a 75% increase in child physical assault, and that parental depression does not attenuate this relationships over time. Dr. Vaughn and colleagues present findings from a sample of adults on childhood hunger, lifetime prevalence of interpersonal violence, and problems with impulsivity. They find a direct effect between childhood hunger and lifetime interpersonal violence, as well as an indirect effect in which impulsivity mediates the relationship between hunger and violence. Finally, Mr. Scheetz presents a qualitative look at very food insecure mothers and the emotional toll hunger plays in parenting young children. This final presentation provides a thick description of what environmental, physical, and emotional factors might be the most important amenable to prevention efforts.