The Effect of Chronic and Acute Exposure to Local Violent Crime on Children’s Mental Health and PTSD

• In Event: 1-014 - Indirect Effects of Violence On Human Development: Lessons from Diverse Latin American Samples

Integrative Statement

Meta-analyses reveal that exposure to community violence predicts internalizing and externalizing symptoms, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms (Fowler, Tompsett, Braciszewski, Jacques-Tiura, & Baltes, 2009). At the same time, emerging evidence suggest that these consequences underestimate the far-reaching effects of community violence, broadly defined, on local inhabitants and communities (Sharkey, 2018). Indeed, even indirect exposure to community violence (e.g., witnessing or hearing about a crime, knowing a victim, or living in a high-crime area) have been found to be related to adolescents’ and adults’ mental health and PTSD symptomatology (e.g., Cuartas & Roy, 2018). Yet, most research on children has focused on direct exposure, and less is known about the effects of indirect exposure to community violence on children’s mental health. Examining how community violence affects children’s mental health remains imperative to better understand the needs of children living in high crime areas, with important implications for the design and tailoring of interventions aimed at fostering resilience and reducing children’s early exposure to community violence.
The present study builds upon a bioecological systems perspective (McCoy, 2013) to analyze the chronic and acute effects of community violence on children’s mental health and PTSD symptoms. To do so, this study employs a unique dataset that combines geocoded, police reported information on violent crimes and the spatial location of a representative sample of 404 children’s homes (M_age=8.99;SD=1.46) with information on mental health (i.e., Reporting Questionnaire for Children – RQC) and PTSD (i.e., PTSD Check List – PCL) symptoms in Bogotá, Colombia. Two empirical strategies were followed. First, similarly to McCoy et al. (2016), this study begins by exploring associations between chronic exposure to community violent crime and children’s mental health and PTSD symptoms, using different operationalizations of exposure at different spatial areas around homes and temporal windows preceding the assessment. Second, in keeping with prior research (e.g., Cuartas, McCoy, & Molano, 2018) this study leverages exogenous variation in the timing and spatial location of an incident of violent crime relative to an interview with information on children’s mental health and PTSD to assess the acute effect of a case of community violence.
Preliminary results suggest that one additional homicide the year preceding the interview within a 250-m radius around sample households was associated with 0.05 SD higher mental health problem score; on average, there is a ½ SD gap in the mental health score between children not exposed to any homicide and those who were exposed the most, other things held constant. No associations were found with other violent crimes, nor for PTSD. More proximal exposures (spatially and temporally) were associated with larger observed coefficients (e.g., Figure 1). On the other hand, findings suggest that having a violent crime in the residential block produces increments by 0.24 SD to 0.32 SD in the mental health index (Figure 2). Additional exercises, including matching techniques and falsification tests are conducted to further assess the internal validity of estimates. Finally, methodological and policy implications are discussed.

Authors

• Jorge Armando Cuartas Ricaurte, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Tama Leventhal, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author