Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 29, Issue 11, November 2005, Pages 1297-1312
Child Abuse & Neglect

Measuring poly-victimization using the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2005.06.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

Children who experience multiple victimizations (referred to in this paper as poly-victims) need to be identified because they are at particularly high risk of additional victimization and traumatic psychological effects. This paper compares alternative ways of identifying such children using questions from the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ).

Methods

The JVQ was administered in a national random digit dial telephone survey about the experiences of 2,030 children. The victimizations of children 10–17 years old were assessed through youth self-report on the JVQ and the victimizations of children 2–9 assessed through JVQ caregiver proxy report.

Results

Twenty-two percent of the children in this sample had experienced four or more different kinds of victimizations in separate incidents (what we term poly-victimization) within the previous year. Such poly-victimization was highly associated with traumatic symptomatology. Several ways of identifying poly-victims with the JVQ produced roughly equivalent results: a simple count using the 34 victimizations screeners, a count using a reduced set of only 12 screeners, and the original poly-victimization measure using follow-up questions to identify victimizations occurring during different episodes.

Conclusion

Researchers and clinicians should be taking steps to identify poly-victims within the populations with which they work and have several alternative ways of doing so.

Résumé

French-language abstract not available at time of publication.

Resumen

Spanish-language abstract not available at time of publication.

Introduction

While interest in child victimization has grown, much of the research and public policy has focused on specific individual kinds of victimization, such as sexual abuse, bullying or exposure to domestic violence (Duncan, 1999; Fantuzzo & Mohr, 1999; Kendall-Tackett, Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993; Kolbo, Blakely, & Engleman, 1996). The focus on single types of victimization may have obscured the degree to which children suffer from multiple kinds of victimization (Rossman & Rosenberg, 1998; Saunders, 2003). Recent research has confirmed that multiple victimizations are common, that victimization risks are inter-correlated, and that children with multiple victimizations are more likely to be distressed and symptomatic (Finkelhor, Ormrod, & Turner, in press; Lauritsen & Quinet, 1995; Outlaw, Ruback, & Britt, 2002).

In previous research on this topic, we reported that one half of a national sample of children 2–17 had been victimized more than once in the previous year, and that the mean number of victimizations per victimized child was 3 (Finkelhor et al., in press). We proposed that the group of children with extremely high levels of victimization be called poly-victims. Poly-victims had considerably higher levels of traumatic stress symptoms than non-victims or even victims who had suffered a single type of victimization. In fact, the total number of different victimizations for a child was a much more powerful predictor of symptomatology than the presence of any particular type of victimization. These results suggested the importance of identifying poly-victims for both research and clinical purposes and the utility of a comprehensive instrument like the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ) in such identification.

In a number of fields there appears to be a convergent interest in individuals with multiple and reinforcing adversities (Felitti, Anda, & Nordenberg, 1998), such as poly-drug users or dual mental health diagnoses (Kaufman, 1977, Sacks, 2003). The importance of cumulative risk is being increasingly recognized and adopted in child development (Evans, 2003, Rutter, 1983, Rutter, 1993). We expect that the interest in juvenile poly-victims will also grow, and this will inevitably raise questions about the best way to operationalize the concept. While it appears a matter of commonsense that poly-victimized children would be more distressed, it does not follow that poly-victimized children should be identified through a simple, unweighted count of the number of their different victimizations. It has long been believed that some victimizations are more consequential than others. Should some victimizations be counted more than others? Is a complete inventory of all victimizations necessary? Could poly-victims be identified from a short inventory of victimization types? The intent of this paper is to explore possible alternative ways of operationalizing the concept of poly-victimization using the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ).

Section snippets

Participants

This research is based on data from the Developmental Victimization Survey (DVS), designed to obtain 1-year incidence estimates of a comprehensive range of childhood victimizations across gender, race, and developmental stage. The survey, conducted between December 2002 and February 2003, assessed the experiences of a nationally representative sample of 2,030 children age 2–17 living in the contiguous United States. The interviews with parents and youth were conducted over the phone by the

Survey sample

The final sample represented 2,030 children age 2–17 living in the contiguous United States. Half (50%) of the sample is male; 51% are 2- to 9-year-olds, while 49% are age 10–17. Almost 10% of the sample reported a household income of under $20,000 while about 34% had annual incomes between $20,000 and $50,000. The survey sample was 76% White (non-Hispanic), 11% Black (non-Hispanic), 9% Hispanic (any race), and 3.5% from other races including American Indian and Asian. The sample somewhat

Data analysis

Alternative versions of a poly-victimization measure were validated through their ability to predict trauma symptoms. Three alternatives were developed and compared. The first was the original conceptualization of poly-victimization (Finkelhor et al., in press) based on counting separate victimization incidents of different types. In this version, termed the Separate Incident Version (SIV), each counted incident represented a different type of victimization occurring at a different time and

Original poly-victimization measure

Assessed with the JVQ, many children and youth in a national sample were found to have experienced multiple types of victimization in the last year. Of the 71% who had experienced any victimization, 69% had experienced at least one additional, different type of victimization in a different episode (separate time and place of occurrence) in the last year (the original, incident-based measure of victimizations that we will refer to as the Separate Incident Version). The mean number of

Discussion

The concept of poly-victimization would appear to be an extremely important and useful one in understanding victimization risk and victimization trauma. Youth with a large number of victimizations are different in terms of their victimization profile. They are also the youth with the highest level of trauma symptoms. Moreover, associations between individual victimization types and trauma symptoms are greatly reduced or in many cases eliminated entirely when poly-victimization is taken into

Conclusion

Topics in the area of maltreatment and child victimization have been rich targets for social scientific inquiry, but they have not benefited from the integrative processes that some other broad fields, like juvenile delinquency and mental health, have been subjected to, which have forced a consideration of how various sub-phenomena fit together and interrelate. The identification of the importance of poly-victimization and the development of ways of measuring it may be positive steps toward the

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