Children in families of torture victims: transgenerational transmission of parents’ traumatic experiences to their children

Abstract

This article details a study to test the hypothesis that immigrant children whose parents have been tortured before coming to Sweden suffer from depressive symptoms, post‐traumatic stress symptoms, somatisation and behavioural disorders. Fifteen families where at least one of the parents had experienced torture were compared with fifteen families from a similar ethnic and cultural background where their parents might have experienced violence but not torture. The parents were investigated using interviews, the Karolinska Scales of Personality (KSP) and Harvard/Uppsala Trauma Questionnaire (H/UTQ). The children were assessed using the DICA‐interview according to DSM‐IV. On the H/UTQ test, traumatised parents scored higher with respect to post‐traumatic stress disorder, depression, somatisation, anxiety and psychosocial stress symptoms. On the KSP, they scored higher on nine of the fifteen sub‐scales. The fathers in the tortured group scored higher than their wives only on the sub‐scale for guilt. According to the DICA‐interviews, the children of tortured parents had more symptoms of anxiety, depression, post‐traumatic stress, attention deficits and behavioural disorders compared with the comparison group. Social workers, psy‐chiatrists, psychologists and teachers need to be aware of a possible transmission of parents’ traumatic experiences to their children and to develop treatment methods for children of torture victims.

The transmission of trauma in refugee families: associations between intra-family trauma communication style, children’s attachment security and psychosocial adjustment

“…Hypotheses 1) Firstly, based on previous studies (Blankers, 2013;Daud, 2008;Daud et al, 2005) it was hypothesized that there would be an effect of the parental trauma history on the psychosocial adjustment of their children, and that the children's mean scores on The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) Total Difficulties would differ significantly from the Danish host country norms, which might indicate a negative impact of parental trauma on nontraumatized children.…”

“…In a study of children of Vietnamese refugees using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), Vaage et al (2009) found that children of refugee parents born in Norway have significantly lower Total Difficulties Scores than their Norwegian peers, however children's Total Difficulties Scores were positively associated with a paternal diagnosis of PTSD (Vaage et al, 2011). Daud, Skoglund, and Rydelius (2005) compared 15 refugee families from Lebanon and Iraq, where parents had been subjected to torture, with a matched control group of 15 non-traumatized refugee families where the parents did not have a history of direct torture. This study found that children of tortured parents had more symptoms of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, attention deficits, and behavioral disorders compared with the control group.…”

Trauma, exile and mental health in young refugees

“…A recent study of 15 refugee families with torture surviving parents, compared with 15 families with similar backgrounds but without having been exposed to torture, suggests that the parentsÕ trauma can indeed be passed on to the children (94,95). Children of torture survivors showed a higher level of psychological symptoms than refugee children without this family background, and there was a significant association between parentsÕ and their childrenÕs symptoms, and more children from the torture surviving families showed an insecure type of attachment.…”

Training the next generation of psychotraumatologists: COllaborative Network for Training and EXcellence in psychoTraumatology (CONTEXT)

“…The global mental health literature demonstrates that trauma experienced by a parental figure can adversely affect offspring and subsequent generations (Dalgaard, Todd, Daniel, & Montgomery, 2016; Sirikantraporn & Green, 2016). The impact of trauma on the dyadic relationship is further complicated when a parent has experienced torture (Daud, Skoglund, & Rydelius, 2005). This study will seek to elucidate communicative mechanisms underpinning the translation of trauma across generations.…”