Abstract
Although it is now recognized that children may exhibit widespread symptoms of stress following exposure to abuse or neglect, the impact of traumatic experiences on children with pervasive developmental disorders has received little attention. The present paper describes a strategy devised to assess the long-term effects of abuse on a group of children who had attended a specialist autistic school where physical and emotional mistreatment of pupils was well documented. Because most of the children had very limited communication skills, the evidence relied heavily on retrospective parental reports. Despite the problems inherent in using such data it was possible to derive reliable measures that could be used to test hypotheses about predicted patterns of behavioral change, based on work with other children who have been abused. In most cases, too, parental reports could be corroborated by information from other sources. Consistent patterns in both the nature and timing of behavioral disturbances were found, which seemed to relate specifically to the period of abuse at the school.
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Thanks are due to all the families who took part in the assessment, and for their patience in going over events that were clearly very traumatic. Thanks, too, to Charles Gillot who made the experience as comfortable and supportive as possible for both us and the families.
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Howlin, P., Clements, J. Is it possible to assess the impact of abuse on children with pervasive developmental disorders?. J Autism Dev Disord 25, 337–354 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02179372
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02179372