NCJ Number
208508
Journal
Child Abuse & Neglect Volume: 26 Issue: 4 Dated: April 2002 Pages: 371-386
Date Published
April 2002
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This study identified any long-term effects on a sample of Mexican women of parental use of childhood physical and verbal punishment.
Abstract
All mothers reported and referred to child protection agencies in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico from September 1996 through September 1997 were selected for this study. Out of the 90 women reported as child abusers, 75 agreed to participate in this study. A community sample of 75 families, matched to the reported sample in demographic characteristics, was also interviewed. A questionnaire solicited information on subjects' parental history of abuse, parents' use of alcohol, mothers' levels of depression and anxiety, parents' antisocial behavior, and demographic characteristics of the families. The Conflict Tactics Scale was used to determine the nature and frequency of the women's use of physical punishment/abuse with their children. Trained clinical psychologists interviewed the women in their homes. In the structural model used in the study, the long-term effects of mothers being punished by their parents was considered an exogenous latent variable that directly affected three other factors: mothers' antisocial behavior, alcohol consumption, and their levels of depression/anxiety. This latent variable, in turn, influenced mothers' harsh discipline; the history of abuse was thus modeled as having direct and indirect long-term influences on the subjects' behavior. The study found that a history of childhood physical and verbal abuse had long-term effects on women's behavior and psychological functioning, which translated into the women's punitive behavior against their children. The implications of these findings for the theoretical framework of intergenerational transmission of violence are discussed. 4 tables, 1 figure, and 53 references