Sticks, Stones, and Hurtful Words: Relative Effects of Various Forms of Childhood Maltreatment
You may be right about moving away from the gender bias. Especially in Lesbian, Gay and Bi-Families.. I don't know a lot about this form of violence but I have a family in my practice where this is a pernicious form of violence that the kids are seeing (this is anecdotal). I try to educate all I can but I have experienced witnessing violence against a sibling. For me this was terrible.... maybe even one of the worse experiences I have had... So I will share an email conversation from a researcher at Harvard who is looking at this currently... You make good points... I thank you...
Here is a series of correspondence I had with Dr. Teicher about his research on affects on brain development in the context of witnessing violence against siblings. I believe this is an important form of trauma. So I believe question 7 needs tweaking to include not only violence against a parent but also against a sibling.
Here is an Abstract from Dr. Teicher’s Article “Witnessing Violence Towards Siblings: an Understutied but Potent form of Early Adversity”
Abstract
Research on the consequences of witnessing domestic violence has focused on inter-adult violence and most specifically on violence toward mothers. The potential consequences of witnessing violence to siblings have been almost entirely overlooked. Based on clinical experience we sought to test the hypothesis that witnessing violence toward siblings would be as consequential as witnessing violence toward mothers. The community sample consisted of unmedicated, right-handed, young adults who had siblings (n = 1,412; 62.7% female; 21.8±2.1 years of age). History of witnessing threats or assaults to mothers, fathers and siblings, exposure to parental and sibling verbal abuse and physical abuse, sexual abuse and sociodemographic factors were assessed by self-report. Symptoms of depression, anxiety, somatization, anger-hostility, dissociation and ‘limbic irritability’ were assessed by rating scales. Data were analyzed by multiple regression, with techniques to gauge relative importance; logistic regression to assess adjusted odds ratios for clinically-significant ratings; and random forest regression using conditional trees. Subjects reported witnessing violence to siblings slightly more often than witnessing violence to mothers (22% vs 21%), which overlapped by 51–54%. Witnessing violence toward siblings was associated with significant effects on all ratings. Witnessing violence toward mother was not associated with significant effects on any scale in these models. Measures of the relative importance of witnessing violence to siblings were many fold greater than measures of importance for witnessing violence towards mothers or fathers. Mediation and structural equation models showed that effects of witnessing violence toward mothers or fathers were predominantly indirect and mediated by changes in maternal behavior. The effects of witnessing violence toward siblings were more direct. These findings suggest that greater attention be given to the effects of witnessing aggression toward siblings in studies of domestic violence, abuse and early adversity.
Email Correspondance:
Dr. Teicher,
Hello. I am a pediatrician and am working on using the ACE screening questions in the pediatric office along with resiliency questions. I strongly suspect that observing sibling violence may be more harmful than experiencing that against adults. I saw your article on witnessing violence towards siblings: an understudied but potent form of early adversity, and wondered if you could comment. I have a hard time understanding “relative importance – variance decomposition”. I am a pediatrician and I believe that the question 7 of the ACE screening may miss some significant negative psychological impact in adults exposed during childhood by not including violence towards siblings (anecdotally — my experience of seeing sibling violence was much worse that anything I saw against a parent). Thank you for your time. Your response is much appreciated.
Dear Tina,
I expect that you are correct. We certainly see the predominant effect of witnessing violence to siblings in our data. The “relative importance – variance decomposition” is just a statistical way of accurately indicating the percent variance in clinical ratings that could be accounted for by exposure to different types of maltreatment. It’s a sophisticated way of determining it, which is important because exposure to one type of maltreatment is often correlated with exposure to another type, and this approach untangles the interrelationships.
We’re just starting to look at whether there are brain differences associated with witnessing violence to siblings, and preparing an abstract for presentation as part of a symposium on witnessing interparental violence. I’m hoping for the opportunity to open more eyes to the importance of this type of domestic violence. It also fits with my clinical experience.
We’ve developed a scale to serve as an alternative to the ACE that does include sibling violence (and also physical and emotional peer victimization). Right now it exists as a lengthy research instrument, but it’s more that 2X better than the ACE in predicting adverse psychiatric outcome. I’m about to produce a shortened