Caregiving, Attachment, and Adverse Childhood Experiences Among Sexually Abusive Youth

Background and Purpose:

Childhood experiences can contextualize sexual offending behaviors in juveniles. Some research has focused on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and attachment, demonstrating that individuals who commit sexual crimes have much higher rates of ACEs and more insecure attachments relative to other groups. It is possible that caregiver or parenting practices can contribute to higher ACEs and insecure attachments. Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge on how the relationship between caregiving practices and insecure attachments may be explained by ACE’s or how these pathways may be differentiated by offender type. This study partially tests a theoretical model (Grady, Levenson, & Bolder, 2016) to propose three distinctive hypothesis: H₁: There are direct relationships between mother’s caregiving styles and ACE’s and insecure attachments. H₂: The relationship between mother’s caregiving and insecure attachments is partially mediated by ACE’s. H₃: Youth adjudicated of a sexual crime will have more severe pathways.

Methods:

This study uses data on residentially placed youth in a Midwestern state (N=505). Youth completed validated measurement tools and asked to retrospectively report on their caregiver’s styles of parenting, early adverse childhood experiences, and caregivers’ attachment characteristics. The measures included the Caregiving Styles Questionnaire, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, and the Inventory of Parental and Peer Attachment. This study employed a moderated-mediated structural equation model (SEM) by first determining model fit using a confirmatory factor analysis to solidify the latent factors’ structures, and then conducted a path analysis between the factors.

Results:

Results revealed good model fit (RMSEA=.043; CFI=.955; TLI=.953). The standardized path analyses revealed we could accept H₁; there were statistically significant direct pathways between harsh and indifferent mother caregiving (β=.897, p<.001) and insecure attachments and between harsh and indifferent mother caregiving (β=.619, p<.001) and ACEs. However, we failed to accept H₂; the pathways between ACEs and insecure attachment were not significant (β=-.101, p=.150, ns), as ACEs did not mediate the relationships between mother caregiving and insecure attachment(β= -.04, p=.169, ns). We were able to partially accept H₃; there were statistically significant moderating effects of adjudication type, such that youth sexual offenders with hasher and more indifferent mothers (γ=.139, p=.006) reported higher rates of ACEs relative to non-sex offenders and relative to other youth sexual offenders with less harsh or indifferent mothers.

Conclusion and Implications:

This study’s findings demonstrate that those adolescents who experienced harsh or indifferent mother caregiving were more likely to report higher rates of ACEs and they demonstrated higher rates of insecure attachments. These findings indicate the need to attend more specifically to parenting styles in working with families, including a focus on positive parenting and positive discipline. Augmenting parenting skills may enhance parent-child interactions, with the intent of reducing ACEs and insecure attachments, and ultimately reduce offending behaviors. With growing attention on ACEs, it is possible that practitioners are asking about and addressing ACEs, but they may not be attending to the cumulative effects of harsh or indifferent caregiving and its impact. Trauma-informed approaches should also consider a cumulative-stress model in addition to larger traumatic events or ACEs.