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Webinar: Parental and child mental health and intimate partner violence

This webinar is over. 27 June 2023, 17:00 – 18:30 BST, Zoom

VISION director, Professor Gene Feder, led the webinar, Interrelationships between parental mental health, intimate partner violence and child mental health – implications for practice, with Dr Shabeer Syed and Dr Claire Powell on behalf of the NIHR Children and Families Policy Research Unit.

They presented findings from a mixed methods study that seeks to improve responses to families affected by intimate partner violence (IPV) and parents and children’s mental health problems.

Then, they presented preliminary findings on the relationship between parental IPV and a range of clinically relevant adversity and mental health-related indicators (www.acesinehrs.com) in anonymised health records from parents and children presenting to GPs, A&E and hospital admissions between one year before and five years after birth.

Their research shows that 1 in 5 (20%) families experienced IPV, although only 1 in 50 (2%) had IPV recorded in the GP record.  Recording of other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) was better, with 1 in 2 (53.4%) families having at least one recorded in the early life course. Compared to families without ACEs, families with ACEs had a higher risk of parental IPV, especially when at least one parent and child had recorded a mental health problem. Gene will discuss the implications of these findings for national guidance on supporting families experiencing IPV and mental health problems, articulating how data already within medical records can help identify those families. 

For further information please see: Interrelationships between parental mental health, intimate partner violence and child mental health – implications for practice – ACAMH

Photo by Sebastián León Prado on Unsplash

Different childhood adversities lead to different health inequalities

Even experiencing just one type of adverse childhood experience (ACE) increases the risks of poor health outcomes in adulthood, including health-harming behaviours, poor sexual and mental health, and crime and violence.

Among people experiencing one type of ACE, this study examined which ACEs were most strongly related to each type of health harms, using a combined study sample of 20,556 18–69 years living in England and Wales. The research team, including VISION researcher Mark Bellis, found that sexual abuse in childhood strongly predicted subsequent obesity. Sexual abuse also showed the biggest increase in later cannabis use. Household alcohol problems in childhood was the ACE most strongly associated with violence and incarceration in adulthood. 

Toxic stress can arise from ACEs such as physical and sexual abuse, but other more prevalent ACEs, for example verbal abuse and parental separation, may also contribute substantively to poorer life course health.

For further information, please see: Comparing relationships between single types of adverse childhood experiences and health-related outcomes: a combined primary data study of eight cross-sectional surveys in England and Wales | BMJ Open

Or contact Mark Bellis at M.A.Bellis@ljmu.ac.uk

Photo by Adam McCoid on Unsplash

Accounting for Inequalities

In this research, Dr Alexandria Innes, Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Co-Investigator within the VISION research grant, draws on a case study of gender-based violence and subsequent responses to argue that Ontological Security Studies – a sub-paradigm of International Relations that focuses on a sociology of security based on identity and social environments – have thus far failed to fully account for intersectional inequalities within social narratives of security. 

She argues that the state is incapable of providing lived experiences of security for all residents, because of inherent inequalities that underlie national identity, affecting services people have access to and the level of support they might receive from state-based agencies such as the police and social services. It is only in attending to those inequalities among the population that we can attend to the biases at the heart of the state. 

Through the case study of the murder of Sarah Everard and the responses, the value and necessity of an intersectional approach to security is made clear: trauma responses that are positioned as transgressive by the patriarchal and White supremacist dominating account are used to undermine the credibility of alternative narratives of security. The state adopts a technique of dividing identity and constructing normatively oppressed identities as transgressive to consolidate the state narrative of security. 

For further information please see: Accounting for inequalities: divided selves and divided states in International Relations – Alexandria Innes, 2023 (sagepub.com) or contact Andri at alexandria.innes@city.ac.uk