Preventing Your Child’s Maltreatment Is Good For His Future Health —Study

Preventing Your Child’s Maltreatment Is Good For His Future Health —Study

From conception, children bring joy and delight to their families and those around them. However, despite the joy associated with the birth of children many remain victims of maltreatment or exposure to abuse and neglect under the age of 18.

Over the past two decades, research has demonstrated that exposure to childhood maltreatment at any stage of development can have long-lasting consequences. It is associated with a marked increase in risk for psychiatric and medical disorders, including mood, anxiety disorders, suicide, type 2 diabetes, asthma, and certain forms of cancer.

Dr Haleem Abdulrahman, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University College Hospital, (UCH), Ibadan, stated that young people who grow up in abuse environments that are constantly maltreated may end up developing a constant state of emotional instability, lower resilience to mental health problems and greater impulsivity.

He added that the persistent state of emotional turmoil and lower resilience to mental health problems can push them to severe depression or severe psychosis and then subsequently can make them have suicidal thoughts or suicidal behaviour.

In a study, children who experience physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect are at least two to three times more likely to attempt suicide in later life.  Such children who experienced multiple cases of abuse are as much as five times higher to attempt suicide.

The psychologists at the University of Manchester and University of South Wales, in the review of 68 studies on the connection between abuse or neglect in childhood and suicide attempts later on in life said that as people who experienced abuse as children get older, the risk of suicide attempts increases.

The 68 studies were carried out across the world, producing about 262,000 adults aged 18 years or older, who were exposed to childhood abuse and neglect.

According to UNICEF, six out of every 10 children experience some form of violence – one in four girls and 10 per cent of boys have been victims of sexual violence. Of the children who reported violence, fewer than five out of 100 received any form of support.

The drivers of violence against children (VAC) are rooted in social norms, including around the use of violent discipline, violence against women and community beliefs about witchcraft, all of which increase children’s vulnerability.

The outcome of abnormal interactions between the child, parents/guardians and society due to the alteration of society by rapid socioeconomic and political changes had also resulted in other forms of child abuse, including the abandonment of normal infants by unmarried or very poor mothers and abuse of children in urban nuclear families by child-minders.

Aside from the immediate physical injuries children can experience through maltreatment, a child’s reactions to abuse or neglect can have lifelong and even intergenerational impacts depending on a combination of factors.

This includes the child’s age and developmental status when the maltreatment occurred; the type, frequency, duration, and severity of the maltreatment; and the relationship between the child and the perpetrator.

Dr Abdulrahman said that aside from persistent maltreatment leading to behavioural problems like Oppositional Defiant Disorder in some children that get victimized or scolded for no just reason, severe and persistent physical abuse or maltreatment in childhood often continues into adulthood in the form of substantial mental health problems, including suicidal behaviours.

He added, “Individuals with suicidal behaviours often times fall on a cry for help; they may not know the right places to go for help. They are having this emotional turmoil, depression or constant anxiety that keeps mountains in them. And then the next thing is they want to harm themselves.

“So such individuals that present with symptoms of self-harm need to be helped, they need to be identified and the underlying condition treated as well as providing a safe environment where they will be away from the trauma, stresses and neglect that they are suffering from.”

Dr Abdulrahman, however, declared that suicide and suicidal behaviours should not be categorized as criminal offenses that must be reported to the police.

“No, it is a cry for help by such individuals to get appropriate mental health care,” he added.

He said the chances of emotional turmoil, depression or constant anxiety from maltreatment resulting in suicidal behaviours is much higher in individuals from families in which there have been some suicidal behaviours in maybe the parents or relatives.

Suicidal ideation or behaviour sometimes graduates to actual suicide. Suicide has been associated with a lot of factors, including depression, alcohol abuse, mental illness, sexual and physical abuse,  family discord, and family history of suicide and broken homes.

In 2020, in a prior review on childhood adversities and resilience as predictors of suicidal ideation among 350 undergraduates of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka in the journal, Practicum Psychologia, also said that childhood emotional abuse was significantly predictive of suicidal ideation.

Also, another which studied relationships between suicidal ideation or attempts and family environment among 1,285 randomly selected children and adolescents, aged nine through 17 years, and showed that suicidal attempters were significantly more likely to have experienced stressful life events, to have become sexually active, to have smoked more than one cigarette daily, and to have a history of ever having smoked marijuana.

Certainly, childhood maltreatment entails negative experiences that are outside the control of the child and have the potential to impede or alter normal development. But these are adverse experiences better avoided to mitigate suicide ideation.