Testing gender-differentiated models of the mechanisms linking polyvictimization and youth offending: Numbing and callousness versus dissociation and borderline traits

ABSTRACT

The increasing prevalence of girls in the juvenile justice system suggests the importance of examining whether models of adolescent offending are differentiated by gender. Polyvictimization has emerged as a robust predictor of youth justice involvement, especially for girls, and research exploring mechanisms underlying the link between polyvictimization and offending suggests further gender differences in that callous-unemotional (CU) traits have been implicated in samples of boys whereas borderline personality (BP) traits have been implicated amongst girls. However, a limitation of these studies is that most have included all-male or all-female samples, thus not allowing for comparisons across gender. Further, few studies have used a trauma-informed lens to investigate posttraumatic symptoms, particularly dissociation and emotional numbing, that might account for these associations. To address this gap, this study investigated associations among polyvictimization, dissociation, numbing, CU, BP, and offending in a sample of 782 youth (579 boys and 203 girls) recruited from a detention center. As hypothesized, for both genders, polyvictimization was related to BP through the indirect effect of dissociation and to CU through the indirect effect of emotional numbing. Further, for both genders, path models indicated indirect effects on the association between polyvictimization and offending through dissociation and BP. These results suggest the value of using a trauma-informed approach to understanding youth justice involvement and continuing to fine-tune models of gender differences in traumatized girls’ and boys’ offending.

KEYWORDS:

• PTSD
• gender
• delinquency
• dissociation
• emotional numbing
• callous-unemotional traits
• borderline traits

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Anthony Fortuna for his valuable help with the preparation of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to report.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice (2014-90914-UT-IJ) to the first author and by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (No. 1256065) to the second author. Portions of an earlier version of this work were presented at the International Family Violence and Child Victimization Research Conference, Portsmouth, NH.