Families seeking services for sexual abuse: Intimate partner violence, mothers' psychological distress, and mother-adolescent conflict.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) are both global problems with negative health implications. This study examines whether mothers' lifetime experiences of IPV relate to their own psychological distress and to mother-adolescent conflict in families in which an adolescent has disclosed sexual abuse. The recency of IPV was examined as a potential moderator of these relations. Participants were 356 adolescents and their nonoffending mothers. Families were seeking services from a children's advocacy center in the southern United States. Mothers reported their IPV victimization (both lifetime and past month) and symptoms of psychological distress; mothers and adolescents both reported on mother-adolescent conflict. In bivariate analyses, mothers' lifetime experiences of IPV were positively related to mothers' psychological distress, and to mother and adolescent reports of mother-adolescent conflict. These same relations emerged in regression analyses that controlled for characteristics of the sexual abuse (time between the disclosure of CSA and the assessment, severity, relationship to the alleged perpetrator, duration), and adolescent age and sex. Recency of IPV did not moderate these relations. In exploratory analyses, mothers' lifetime experiences of IPV were more strongly associated with mother-son conflict than with mother-daughter conflict. In addition, mothers' psychological distress partially mediated the relation between their lifetime experiences of IPV and their reports of mother-adolescent conflict. The findings point to the potential utility of conducting IPV screenings with caregivers in families seeking services for an adolescent after a sexual abuse disclosure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).