Prevalence of recalled childhood emotional abuse among child welfare staff and related well-being factors

a r t i c l e i n f o This study examined 1) the prevalence of childhood emotional abuse retrospectively recalled by child welfare personnel, and 2) the relationship between emotional abuse and three measures of current well-being. Child welfare agency staff (n = 253) completed the emotional abuse subscale of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, as well as published scales measuring self-esteem, satisfaction with life, and sense of social support. Findings included a roughly 30% rate of recalled emotional abuse. Among associated factors that were examined, emotional abuse level was most strongly related to lower self-esteem, lower satisfaction with life, and lower sense of social support. Implications for agency practice are discussed. It is generally recognized within social work that the child welfare work place fosters a climate that is stressful. It is an environment where personnel are daily faced with abused and neglected children and their caretakers, as well as with complex dispositional decisions in an area where definitive knowledge about solutions may all too often be lacking. Because of such stressful surroundings, many studies of child welfare workers have focused attention on emotional Although some authors have examined mitigating factors such as compassion satisfaction, or positive benefits, from working with traumatized persons (Conrad & Kellar-Guenther, 2006), most writings in child welfare have focused on the stressful results of working with children and families who have been traumatized. Furthermore, some authors consider compassion fatigue, or secondary traumatic stress, a serious issue that can contribute to burnout and a decision to leave a job among child welfare personnel (Anderson, 2000). Much of this literature has focused on the stressful effects of the environment on child welfare personnel. Much less attention in the literature has been paid to historical background factors within child welfare personnel that may be associated with the general well-being of members of the child welfare workforce. The study reported here is an attempt to begin to fill this gap by examining one aspect of workers' inner environment, namely their recollections of their own emotional abuse as they were growing up, and by examining the association of such memories with various current well-being factors. Many reports have been published on the relationship of childhood sexual or physical abuse, or multi-type maltreatment, and later adult functioning Much less attention has been paid to the association between emotional or psychological maltreatment in childhood and various aspects of adult …