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The current study examines the revictimization of children, and whether there may be continuity in the typology of maltreatment from first report to second. A growing literature has highlighted the downstream sequelae associated with maltreatment. This has included some focus on revictimization in adulthood of those maltreated in childhood. What has received far less attention, however, is revictimization during childhood. Work to date has tended to not account for continuity in typology, or in the perpetrator from one event to the next. We explored continuity in typology of maltreatment across maltreatment reports, including across different perpetrators, in the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW-I and NSCAW-II) and replicated findings in administrative data describing a statewide sample.
Methods:
Data: Samples of multiply-maltreated children were drawn from the baseline and 18-month follow-up waves of NSCAW-I and NSCAW-II, restricted to all children with a second report of maltreatment after the index report at baseline and the 18-month follow-up wave (NSCAW-I: n=669; NSCAW-II: n=230). The statewide sample includes children whose first maltreatment report was in 2009, followed by at least one additional report in the subsequent four years (n=9,283).
Analyses: Three categories of maltreatment allegations were examined in each sample: physical abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse. Two-tailed z-tests were used to examine whether the distributions of first report allegation types within these three groups differed significantly from the distribution of allegation types across all first maltreatment reports. We tested the robustness of results by restricting the sample to children whose first and second reports implicated different perpetrator.
Results:
Analyses indicate substantial consistency in maltreatment type for children with multiple reports of abuse or neglect. Across all three samples, results indicated that there was significant continuity in maltreatment type from the first to second report for each of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. The effects were strongest for sexual abuse; for example, in the statewide sample, 23% of youth with second reports of sexual abuse also had first reports alleging sexual abuse, compared with 6% of the total sample (z=17.84, p<.001, d=.87). When restricting the samples to children with different perpetrators across reports, the continuity in maltreatment type largely held.
Conclusions and Implications:
The results underscore the importance of understanding the mechanisms by which children may be revictimized in a similar manner by different perpetrators following the experience of maltreatment. These findings suggest the need to better understand the transactional relationships between caregiver and child that lead to the replication of maltreatment experiences for vulnerable children and families.