Printer Friendly
A new, large-scale study conducted jointly by UMass Lowell and the Harvard School of Public Health found that Indian children whose mothers experience domestic violence are more likely to die before age 5.
The research results which will be published in the November issue of Pediatrics Journal involved more than 39,000 children younger than 5 from the 2005-2006 Indian National Family Health Survey. Trained personnel interviewed mothers of the children face-to-face to collect information on personal exposure to domestic violence and child health outcomes.
“Domestic violence is a terrible ordeal for any woman to go through, and we have long known that such abuse has harmful effects on a woman’s health. Here is strong evidence that violence against women has ripple effects that can have a detrimental, even lethal, impact on her children,” says Asst. Prof. Leland Ackerson of UMass Lowell’s Community Health and Sustainability Department and lead author of the study.
The researchers found that children whose mothers reported being physically abused by their husbands had a 21 percent increased likelihood of dying before age 5 as compared to children with no family history of violence. Infants seemed particularly vulnerable to multiple forms of familial abuse, as those less than a year old were nearly 50 percent more likely to die if their mothers suffered physical abuse in combination with sexual or psychological abuse.
The study was conducted in India because of the high levels of abuse and childhood deaths there, but the same links between abuse and child deaths could also be made in the United States, according to researchers.
Ackerson explains that women in any country who are abused are more likely to suffer from physical and psychological illnesses. These illnesses, in turn, may make a mother less able to access health care services for her child or to attend to her child’s daily health needs. Also, children who observe abuse in their homes have higher levels of stress, which can lead to a suppressed immune response.
“The difference is that in the United States, children are less likely to die overall because they are more likely to get emergency medical care. Nevertheless, the American child may still be at risk of a bad health outcome if in a home with abuse,” says Ackerson.
The authors of the study believe that reducing domestic violence is clearly important from a moral perspective, and that this study provides a compelling case to address the problem at the source.
S.V. Subramanian, Harvard associate professor of society, human development and health and senior author of the study concludes, “More efforts need to focus on the 'non-health' aspects or 'social' conditions that influence health, and domestic violence represents one such adverse social aspect that we’ve identified in Indian society.”
The study was supported by National Institutes of Health Career Development Award.
An article published in the Times of India under the headline "Abused mums’ kids may die before 5 yrs" references Ackerson's study.