Prenatal Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence and Children's Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms

Experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy can have long-lasting effects on children's stress reactivity and psychological development. Despite this, prenatal exposures to IPV are rarely assessed among children with traumatic experiences, and the prenatal effects of these events on children's posttraumatic stress symptomatology remain mostly unknown. This study was a secondary analysis that examined the association between maternal exposure to IPV in pregnancy and child posttraumatic stress symptoms in a cross-sectional sample of 207 ethnically diverse, treatment-seeking, parent-child dyads. Children (M_age = 4.4 years; 55.1% male) had experienced at least one traumatic event since birth, and most children (n = 148, 71.5%) had at least one childhood experience of IPV; 23.7% (n = 49) had at least one prenatal exposure to IPV. Results of a two-step hierarchical regression analysis revealed that children's prenatal IPV exposures were positively associated with child posttraumatic stress symptoms (b = 2.82, 95% CI [0.16, 5.49], β = .15, t(193) = 2.09, p = .038), even after accounting for the effects of childhood IPV exposures and maternal depression. Post-hoc analyses also tested associations between prenatal IPV and children's posttraumatic stress symptom clusters (i.e., arousal, avoidance, intrusion), showing positive associations between prenatal IPV and children's avoidance symptoms [b = 1.24, [0.23, 2.25], β = .18, t(193) = 2.43, p =.016] after accounting for childhood IPV exposures and maternal depression. Findings suggest that prenatal exposures to IPV may be uniquely associated with the development of more severe posttraumatic stress symptomatology among preschool-aged children. This evidence calls for the assessment of prenatal exposures to violence when evaluating and treating trauma-exposed children.