Childhood Sexual Abuse and Adulthood Parenting: The Mediating Role of Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

This study examined the role of intimate partner victimization in mediating the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and adulthood parenting in a community sample of mothers reliant on public assistance (N = 483). Baron and Kenny's (1986) method for establishing mediation was used to address this question. A recent history of intimate partner violence mediated the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and psychological aggression; however, a lifetime history of intimate partner violence did not. Depressive symptomatology was found to mediate the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and parental warmth. The impact of childhood sexual abuse on corporal punishment was indirect through its association with childhood physical abuse and witnessing domestic violence. Implications for research, theory development, and practice are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• battered women
• childhood sexual abuse
• domestic violence
• family violence
• intimate partner violence
• motherhood
• parenting
• woman abuse

Acknowledgments

The Illinois Families Study and the Illinois Families Study Child Well-Being Supplement were supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Woods Fund of Chicago, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD39148 and K01 HD41703), the U.S. Department of Education, and the Administration for Children and Families (90PA0005). Administrative data linkages were developed by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, and survey data were collected by the Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC). The author would like to acknowledge Kristen Slack, Joy Newmann, Sherrill Sellers, Mariamne Whatley, and Lawrence Berger from the University of Wisconsin, Madison for their comments and support on this project. The author would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of the JAMT Editorial Board for their helpful comments.