The Co-occurrence of Marital Violence and Child Maltreatment

The research design of this study was cross-sectional and correlational. This study used a questionnaire to collect data from 208 families who were reported incidents of family violence to official agencies. The questionnaire had two versions, answered by one parent and one child.

The CTS2 and CTSPC were the major contents of the questionnaire. The internal consistency alpha of the CTS2 and CTSPC was .95 and .93 (parent’s version); the alpha of the child’s version was .96 and .93, indicating good reliability of the scales. Research results showed that marital violence and child maltreatment are significantly related.

The co-occurrence rate had been 65.2% for the past year, and approximately 1/4 of the families had experienced severe physical violence both between spouses and between parents and children. The “ever” co-occurrence rate was 84.1%, and approximately 1/2 of the families had at some time experienced severe physical violence. The predictors of double violence families included: the mother being mentally ill, children having less education, children being too afraid to do anything when marital violence occurred, mother was the decision maker, more children, and parents would vent their anger on children when marital violence occurred.

The predictors of physical and severe physical abuse co-occurrence families were similar, but different from the above predictors. Our research findings indicated that the psychological and sexual violence between spouses, and the psychological violence between parents and children were the more powerful predictors of physical violence and physically severe violence in families than what demographic predictors were. These three variables could explain 50% of the variances.

Other significant demographic variables of severely violent families also included: mother’s drinking, single parent families, the official agency had open cases, and father had no gambling habits. The article ends with the discussion of the limitations and contributions of this research, and further suggestions