Preventing Adolescent Maltreatment: A Focus on Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice, and Sexual Exploitation

Abstract

Compared to young children, fewer resources have been devoted to examining the etiology and circumstances related to maltreatment experienced by adolescents. This is unfortunate given adolescents have been found to experience similar, and sometimes higher, rates of maltreatment. This chapter discusses the prevalence of adolescent maltreatment, explores the need to develop interventions and prevention strategies for adolescent maltreatment within alternative contexts, and identifies emerging strategies and necessary next steps for improving the collective response to adolescent maltreatment prevention. The authors focus specifically on how practices and policies within the child welfare, foster care, and juvenile justice systems, and the response to sexually exploited youth present opportunities for targeting and improving treatment and prevention efforts among adolescents.

Reflection: Adolescent Maltreatment

• James Garbarino 

1. Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

   James Garbarino

When I think about how things have changed regarding the issue of adolescent maltreatment in the 40 years that I have been involved in studying abuse and neglect issues, I focus on two developments: changes in the continuum of “sympathetic victimhood” and appreciation for the role of trauma and resilience in the dynamics of how adolescent maltreatment affects long-term development.

Looking back, I recall what I wrote in 1980 (in my book Understanding Abusive Families) about the simple “purity” of child victims vs. adolescent victims. I posited a circular continuum of victimization, a clock face in which children and the elderly are at the 1:00 and 11:00 points respectively, and adolescents and spouses are located at 4:00 and 7:00. At that time there was a sense that children and the elderly were more unambiguously “innocent” victims than adolescents and spouses, who were “suspect.”

One was more likely to hear that adolescents and spouses who were subject to abuse “deserved,” “asked for,” and “chose” to be in and stay in abusive relationships. On the other hand, it was rare (but not unheard of) to find allegations that “difficult” children “caused” abuse because of their aversive behavior (e.g., crying) and that “cranky” elders invited abuse (particularly as a kind of payback from their offspring for the way they treated their own children when they were younger). I think decades of public awareness campaigns about domestic violence have succeeded in increasing sympathy for the abused spouse, but adolescents still lag behind spouses as “sympathetic” victims.

The second change is a dramatic shift in the way trauma is conceptualized as a factor in human development. This has important implications for the way we understand the developmental pathways that flow into and from adolescent maltreatment—most notably involvement in the foster care and justice systems. Understanding troubled and troubling adolescents as “untreated traumatized children inhabiting the bodies of teenagers” can reorganize policy and practice.

It can highlight the need for “trauma-informed therapy” for the most common developmental pattern: maltreated adolescents who come out of abuse and neglect in childhood. Their needs in detention (where a large majority have diagnosable mental health problems) or foster care (where foster parents and youth need therapeutic support and care that extends beyond the legal age of maturity—18 years old) are starkly evident within this trauma perspective. In addition, however, those kids who experience an onset of maltreatment when they become teenagers have mental health needs as well. But they are more likely to be the victims of “classic” single incident—acute trauma—and have more internal resources with which to deal with PTSD and find a path to resilience.