Assessing childhood maltreatment on the population level in Germany: findings and methodological challenges

Childhood maltreatment (CM) is both prevalent and consequential. Unfortunately little is known about the true prevalence of CM in the general population in Germany. The differences between findings from top down vs. bottom up approaches and the problem of the dark field of CM is discussed. Different assessment methods like trauma lists, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and the Childhood Trauma Screener (CTS) are described and the respective findings about the prevalence of CM in the adult German general population are discussed. With the example of childhood sexual abuse (SA) the challenges of quantification of CM is shown up. For instance, even if all the prevalence findings were based on methodologically sound large-scale studies, it could only be assumed that the retrospectively investigated prevalence of SA in the German general population ranges between 1.0 and 12.6 % in different studies. These findings provide an insight into the complexity of the quantification of the true prevalence of CM on the population level. Hopefully it reminds the readers of handling prevalence rates of CM carefully and to dip into the methodology of the studies before citing the respective prevalence of CM.