Child and Adolescent Trauma across the Spectrum of Experience: Underserved Populations and Psychological Abuse

Abstract

This article introduces the second in a two-part special issue focusing on child and adolescent trauma across the spectrum of experience. This issue examines current research specifically geared toward underserved populations of children and traumatic experiences that are primarily emotional or psychological. We briefly introduce the articles, which address the areas of exposure to war and terrorism, racial trauma in the lives of African American children and adolescents, home-based exposure to violence, and the impact of emotional abuse on children who have mild intellectual disabilities.

Keywords:

• adolescent trauma
• child trauma
• emotional abuse
• exposure to violence
• intellectual disability
• racial trauma
• racism
• terrorism
• war

This article introduces the second of a two-part special issue focusing on child and adolescent trauma across an array of potentially traumatizing experiences. The articles chosen for this issue build upon and complement those included in the first part of this special double issue. In this issue, we explore types of trauma that may not be as obvious to observers for a number of reasons. These include the fact that some forms of trauma are subtle and are not primarily manifested through more easily discernible physical or concrete injury. Instead, we highlight traumatic stress that is primarily emotional, thus more readily eluding detection and validation. In addition, we have attempted to emphasize issues related to particularly vulnerable youth, including children and adolescents who have mild intellectual disabilities and African American youth who are confronted with the challenges of coping with racism on a daily basis. Too often, professionals and the public may be prone to minimize and marginalize psychological trauma as a serious concern. Here, we strive to include articles that summarize and/or explore the research, as well as emphasize that the impact of emotional abuse such as the experience of racism or exposure to violence can be profound and long-lasting.

Thus, two of the articles in this special issue present research expanding our understanding of trauma from an empirical vantage point, while two are current literature reviews. One review is an overview of children's exposure to violence in their community due to war and terrorism, and the other focuses on the traumatic effects of racial trauma in the lives of African American children and adolescents. The two research articles focus on the psychological aspects of exposure to violence and abuse in the home and on the impact of emotional abuse on adolescents who have a disability.

Articles in This Special Issue

We begin this issue with Yahav's synthesis of the literature related to the traumatic impacts of war and terrorism on youth. Unfortunately, military conflicts and unpredictable, life-threatening acts of terrorism are common across the globe, representing destructive acts perpetrated by human beings against one another, which are unlike natural disasters and other forms of unavoidable trauma. As Yahav notes, children and adolescents exhibit a wide range of traumatic reactions in such conditions and can contraintuitively also exhibit tremendous resilience under certain circumstances. She conveys her information from ecological and developmental frameworks, and she discusses traditional as well as novel approaches to intervention.

The second article in this issue explores the cognitive impact upon children of witnessing violence (Swartz, Graham-Bermann, Mogg, Bradley, & Monk). Specifically, these authors test whether attention bias to or away from threat is exhibited by children exposed to intimate partner violence. Such information is theoretically consistent with mechanisms for understanding the development of posttraumatic stress symptoms in youth and can inform the basis of empirically informed interventions that enhance coping and diminish symptoms of anxiety in at-risk children.

Jernigan and Daniel's discussion of racial trauma is the focus of the third article. Racial trauma is a fundamental issue yet is only rarely discussed within the literature on childhood trauma. Issues of race impact all youth in the United States, and the authors provide a thorough synthesis of data utilizing a developmental framework. They note that an argument can be made for understanding traumatic stress relevant to race-based experiences that do not necessarily physically endanger the victim but can be nonetheless traumatizing (e.g., Carter, 2007). We include this article because of the continued potential deleterious impact of race-related stress and the need for empirically based research to further explore the developmental consequences of overt and covert racism on children and adolescents. Ultimately, such information should help in efforts to raise awareness regarding these corrosive experiences and, as advocated by Jernigan and Daniel, should encourage assessment and intervention models that incorporate racial experiences as a component of treatment.

The final article in this issue represents another empirical attempt to understand aspects of traumatic responses in children. The article by Weiss, Waechter, and Wekerle uses data from the Maltreatment and Adolescent Pathways (MAP) Longitudinal Study. The authors explore the impact of emotional abuse on psychological distress among adolescents with and without borderline-to-mild intellectual disabilities. This is an important area to research, with implications for understanding how a disability contributes to risk and resilience when children are faced with traumatic stress and interpersonal violence. It is particularly meaningful to shed light on the experiences of youth with subtle disadvantages, as represented by adolescents with less obvious intellectual disabilities whose needs are not easily identified and therefore not consistently addressed. Individuals who have developmental disabilities are disproportionately at high risk for violent victimization, abuse, and neglect (Petersilia, Foote, & Crowell, 2001; Rand & Harrell, 2009). According to the Department of Justice, youth with disabilities experience violence at nearly twice the rate as those without disabilities (Rand & Harrell, 2009). Therefore, research can and should prioritize the examination of optimal assessment and intervention strategies geared toward populations of youth with varying forms of disability.

The overarching goal of this special double issue is to promote attention to the spectrum of possible traumatic experiences impacting children and adolescents, noting continuities and unique factors. As many have observed, including Jernigan and Daniel (this issue), our understanding of trauma can be enhanced by including incidents that are not only physical in nature but psychological as well. We hope that the field of child and adolescent trauma will continue to advance by tackling the most difficult of issues from a nuanced point of view. This would include integrating developmental, cultural, and ecological perspectives into conceptualizations of trauma with the ultimate goal of effective, evidence-based interventions for all youth challenged by traumatic stress.