The Role Of Child Maltreatment Perception In Intergenerational Transmission Of Child Maltreatment

Child maltreatment has been a worrying phenomenon.Much is known that child maltreatment has the characteristic of intergenerational transmission.Generally,intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment refers to people who were abused or neglected by their parents when they grew up are more likely to abuse or neglect their own children.Actually,there are still some maltreated individuals that break this cycle and not maltreat their own children.It indicates that there are some protective factors that may buffer or modify the continuity of child maltreatment.According to the social learning theory,maltreatment perpetration is a result of observational learning from their parents,in which maltreatment is perceived as acceptable.Also,social information processing model points out that pre-existing cognitive schema such as beliefs and values of a child,has great impacts on the process of intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment.Both the attitude and belief are caused by various factors.In summary,perception of child maltreatment plays a important role in intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment.This paper aims to investigate whether maltreatment perceptions mediate or moderate the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment.The participants are composed by 433 children(age from 9 to 12)and their mothers(age from 28 to 53).Childhood Trauma Questionnaire was used to investigate childhood maltreatment experience of children and mothers,and we investigated mothers' perceptions of child maltreatment with Perceptions of Child Maltreatment Scale.All measures showed good psychometric properties.Also,SPSS22.0 and Mplus 7.4 were used to analyze the data.SPSS 22.0 was used to examine the common method bias,gender difference of maltreatment experience of children,and Person correlation between mothers' maltreatment experience and children's.Besides,Mplus 7.4 was used to examine mediating or moderating effect.The results showed that:(1)gender difference was found in children's maltreatment experience,the maltreatment experience of boys is higher than girls.(2)There was significantly positive correlation between maltreatment experience of mothers and maltreatment experience of children,and both homotypic and heterotypic intergenerational transmission were existing.(3)Perceptions of child maltreatmenthad suppressing effects on intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment.(4)And perceptions of child maltreatment could also moderate the bintergenerational transmission process of child maltreatment.Mothers with high perception of child maltreatment are more likely to break the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment while mothers with low perceptions of child maltreatment tend to continuously make child maltreatment.Our research firstly testified the intergenerational transmission phenomenon of child maltreatment in the context of Chinese.We found the suppressing effect and moderating effect of perceptions of child maltreatment in the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment.According to the results,we provide a new perspective to prevent child maltreatment,and the likelihood can be reduced by improving awareness of child maltreatment of abused individuals.