Understanding the Interplay Between the Drug Environment, Drug Use, and Child Physical Abuse

Introduction. Although drug and alcohol use are considered risk factors for child physical abuse, very little work has examined how the drug environment may affect use of physical abuse by parents. Much of this work, instead, has been conducted has occurred at the ecological level (e.g., Census tracts) making it difficult to disentangle the relationships of the overall drug environment vs. individual drug use. Several plausible mechanisms exist through which the drug environment may affect parenting behaviors. A more active drug environment (e.g., illicit drug markets, sales and possessions) may contribute to physical abuse by intensifying the disruption of social ties, networks and support in these local areas. In areas where drug market activity are higher, increased drug availability may contribute to overall or more frequent parental drug use. The combination of living in an area with an active and extensive drug environment and using illicit drugs may place children at additional risks for being physically abused.

Methods. Data were collected via a telephone survey from parents of children aged 12 or younger in 43 cities in California resulting in 2,594 respondents.  Frequency of child physical abuse was measured using the Conflict Tactics Scale, Parent Child version.  Drug environment was measured at the city-level where we obtained police data on all drug incidents for each of the 43 cities. Survey items on local drug activity included whether or not the respondent thought that drugs were a problem in the neighborhood or had seen drug sales. Negative binomial models with random effects (to address issues of clustering within cities) were used to analyze the relationship of the drug environment to child physical abuse. The study controlled for a variety of individual demographic and psychosocial characteristics of parents and families.

Results. Major findings related to the drug environment include (1) survey participants who witnessed drug sales used physical abuse more frequently; (2) city-level drug environment as measured by the density of police drug incidents in the city was not directly related to frequency of using child physical abuse; and (3) city-level drug environment moderated the relationship between drug use and frequency of physical abuse.

Conclusions.   Parents who witness drug sales may feel the need to use physical force when disciplining their children in order to convey the seriousness of misbehavior in neighborhoods with lots of visible drug activity. Alternatively, drug markets are also known to use violence to enforce drug transactions which may lead to a culture of violence in those neighborhood areas. More active drug environments may also make it easier for parents to obtain illicit drugs for their own use.  The combination of these environments and parental drug use may place children at greater risk for being physically abused.  While most child welfare interventions focus on reducing parental drug use in order to reduce child abuse, these findings suggest environmental prevention approaches designed to reduce the supply of illicit drugs may also reduce child abuse through multiple mechanisms.