中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: Societal responses to marital violence and child maltreatment have developed along separate tracks for a long time. These two issues were often studied and intervened by separate researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. However, Western empirical studies over the past 30 years have provided overwhelming evidence that marital violence and child abuse occur in the same families. In contrast, there are few empirical research reports concerning the co-occurrence of marital violence and child abuse in Taiwan. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the co-occurrence rate and the relationship of marital violence and child maltreatment in order to enhance professionals' understanding and intervention strategies.Methods: The research design of this study was cross-sectional and quantitative. This study used a questionnaire to collect data from 208 families (including 208 adults and 208 children) who were reported incidents of family violence to official agencies. The questionnaire had two versions, answered by one parent and one child in each family. The CTS2 (Revised Conflict Tactics Scale, including 80 scale items) and CTSPC (Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale, including 56 scale items) were the major contents of the questionnaire. The internal consistency alpha of the CTS2 and CTSPC were .95 and .93(parent's version) respectively; the alpha of the child's version were .96 and .93 respectively, indicating good reliability of the scales. A pilot study of the questionnaire was conducted during January and February of the year 2003. The formal data collection took place from May to October in 2003. In term of the demographic characteristics of the adult participants, the vast majority of them were females (98.6%). Approximately half of the adult participants (47.1%) had been married for at least 16 years. A large percentage (67.8%) of the participants lived with their spouses and had three children (41.8%). In terms of the children participants, 41.3% of the children were primary school students. The gender frequency distribution of the children was even.Results: Chi-square analysis showed that marital violence and child maltreatment are significantly related (χ^2=6.2, p=.013), which supported the hypothesis of this study. The co-occurrence rate had been 65.2% for the past year (including all types of violence). 39.6% of the families had experienced physical violence both between spouses and between parents and children. In addition, 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. In addition, comparing the co-occurrence rate reported by parents and their children, research results indicated that childrsen tended to underreport the occurrence of family violence compared to their parents. In terms of the prevalence rate of marital violence for adult participants, 73.4% of them had experienced psychological violence 35.5 times on average during the past year; 63.3% of the adult participants had experienced physical violence 38.1 times on average during the past year. In terms of the prevalence rate of child maltreatment for children participants, approximately half of them had experienced psychological or physical violence from either their fathers or mothers during the past year. The prevalence rates of child maltreatment between fathers and children were very similar to the prevalence rates of child maltreatment between mothers and children for all kinds of violence. These research findings indicate that children not only could be maltreated by their abusive father, but also by their abused mother. Conclusions: Research findings indicate the importance and severity of the overlap between marital violence and child maltreatment. The article ends with the discussion of the limitations and contributions of this research and further suggestions for research and practice.