Dr. H.B. Franchino-Olsen, Department of Health Behavior and Health Promotion
Rank at time of award: Faculty Fellow
and
Dr. Elizabeth Klein, College of Public Health,
Rank at time of award: Professor
and
Dr. Franziska Meinck, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh,
Rank at time of award: Associate Professor
Abstract
Young children (aged 6–11) can experience violence and abuse in many settings and from many sources, including their home, school, community, online, caregivers, siblings, extended family, peers, teachers, the justice system, and strangers. Evidence from older children (adolescents, aged 12–17) has demonstrated that, for many children, violence they experience is not isolated to a single form or a single setting/domain in their lives. Instead, many experience violence in a complex pattern across their childhood, such as child abuse at home and bullying by their peers or community violence in their neighborhood and structural/systemic violence from law enforcement. Violence in early childhood is a risk factor for subsequent violence experiences in adolescence, making young children a population who should be prioritized for violence prevention and intervention to interrupt the consequences of violence across the life course. Despite the advantages of understanding violence in lives of young children, this population has not been sought to participate in survey research seeking to understand childhood violence often due to concerns about obtaining reliable data from young children and the potential of causing distress or re-traumatization for children who have experienced harm. Instead, children’s caregivers may be surveyed about the child’s violence exposures and/or adolescents or young adults are asked to report retrospectively on violence they experienced in young childhood. Despite the barriers and concerns to data collection with young children, there are evidence-based methods available to collect reliable and developmentally appropriate data from this population which can be coupled with rigorous safeguards and distress protocols to prevent and manage the risk of harm via their participation.
This pilot study will survey young children about their experiences of violence and abuse and ask them to describe their views and feelings on the experiences. Using existing techniques that have been effectively applied in low-income settings with young children, this study will use play- and arts-based methods with ethical safeguards in place to ask children about their experiences in a developmentally appropriate way. The findings will illuminate the complex patterns of violence experiences, including experiences of multiple forms of violence (polyvictimization), experienced by young children in the Columbus metropolitan area of Ohio. The children’s caregivers will also be sampled to provide contextual information on the family’s stability and economic strain, as well as the child’s physical health history. Together, the data will illuminate the patterns of violence shouldered by young children in central Ohio while considering the contexts in which they live. Young children’s understandings of and feelings around their violence experiences will also be examined to illuminate how children make sense of and speak about violence and harms in their lives, which can impact how and to whom they may disclose violence/abuse. Together, the findings will inform the creation of targeted prevention and response to protect young children from violence.