Maternal History of Child Sexual Abuse and Maladaptive Outcomes in Sexually Abused Children: The Role of Maternal Mental Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The effects of child sexual abuse (CSA) have been found to surpass generations as maternal history of CSA is associated with increased difficulties in sexually abused children. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this association. The present study aimed to test maternal mental health symptoms including psychological distress, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and dissociation as mediators of the relationship between maternal CSA and children's internalizing, externalizing, and dissociation symptoms in a large sample of sexually abused children. A total of 997 sexually abused children aged 3-14 years old and their mothers were recruited at five specialized intervention centers offering services to sexually abused children and their families. The children were divided into two groups depending on their mothers' self-reported history of CSA. Mothers completed a series of questionnaires assessing their mental health and children's functioning. Maternal history of CSA was associated with increased maternal psychological distress, PTSD symptoms, and dissociation following children's disclosure of CSA. In turn, maternal psychological distress and maternal dissociation were associated with increased child internalizing, externalizing, and dissociation symptoms. Maternal PTSD symptoms were associated with child internalizing symptoms. Maternal mental health difficulties mediated the association between maternal CSA and sexually abused children's maladaptive outcomes. Clinicians should assess for possible history of CSA in mothers of sexually abused children and determine how best to support them to cope with the aftermaths of their child's disclosure and with their own traumatic past.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".