Early life sexual abuse as a risk factor for crack cocaine use in a sample of community-recruited women at high risk for illicit drug use

Abstract

Subjects for this study were 1,478 community-recruited women sexual partners of male injection drug users who were participants in the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-supported Women Helping to Empower and Enhance Lives (WHEEL) project. This study assessed the association between child/adolescent sexual abuse—including specific type of abuse and perpetrator of abuse—and lifetime crack use in this sample of women. About 64% of sample women had ever used crack; 56% had been sexually abused by age 18. In logistic regression analyses, any sexual abuse in childhood, penetrative sexual abuse in childhood, and sexual abuse by a family member in childhood were significantly associated with lifetime crack use. Sexual abuse in adolescence was indirectly associated with lifetime crack use through running away from home and rape in adulthood. Given that many of these subjects reported drug treatment experience, such programs may provide the best setting for helping women with both substance use and sexual abuse issues.