Poly-victimization and its relationship with emotional and social adjustment in adolescence: Evidence from a national survey in Switzerland.

Abstract

Objective: The present study investigates, for the first time in a wealthy country of Central Europe, the prevalence of poly-victimization (exposure to multiple forms of victimization within the past year) in an adolescent population. It further examines associations between single victimization types (such as sexual or physical assaults) with emotional and social functioning when poly-victimization is controlled for. Method: Data from a large and near-representative national school survey in Switzerland (N ϭ 6,749, 52.2% male, M age ϭ 15.5 years) were examined using descriptive and multiple regression analysis. Results: When poly-victimization was controlled for, individual victimization types showed largely diminished association with emotional and social functioning measures. Particularly weak associations were found for physical and sexual victimizations. By contrast, emotional assaults (including emotional bullying by peers and emotional abuse by parents) and maltreatment by parents retained the strongest links with levels of functioning. This general pattern of results held even when chronic individual victimization types were considered. Conclusions: Many previous studies may have underestimated adolescents' capacities to cope with physical and sexual victimizations where these experiences happen in an otherwise functional environment. Meanwhile, concurrent exposure to multiple kinds of victimization serves as a strong indicator of declined emotional and social functioning. Taken together, the findings embolden practitioners in general to avoid the pitfalls of overspecialization and to promote holistic treatment approaches toward adolescent victims of violence. In the Swiss context, professionals working with vulnerable children and youth may feel encouraged to overcome the fragmentarization of services that currently characterizes the children and youth welfare system in this country.

Polyvictimization: What Is It and How Does It Affect Intervention?

“…Around the world, studies on polyvictimization report similar findings, suggesting that victimization is a norm in the lives of youth and that there is a significant population of polyvictims (Radford, Corral, Bradley & Fisher 2014;Chan 2014;Nilsson, Dahlstöm, Priebe & Svedin, 2015;Lätsch, Nett & Hümbelin, 2016). In Canada, Cyr, Clément and Chamberland (2014) studied polyvictimization among 2,800 youths aged 2 to 17 in Quebec.…”

“…It has been shown that childhood victimization is an explanatory factor for the presence of several mental health problems during childhood as well as into adulthood (Molnar, Buka & Kessler, 2001). For its part, polyvictimization is closely tied to a decrease in emotional well-being and social functioning, and this, more than any other individual type of victimization (Lätsch, Nett & Hümbelin, 2016). Young victims present an array of mental health problems such as depression, emotional disorders, anxiety, self-harm, substance abuse, dissociation and eating disorders (Brière and Lanktree, 2008).…”

“…Polyvictimization refers to having experienced a number of different types of victimization at a rate higher than the population average over the course of a given period of time (Finkelhor, Ormrod & Turner, 2007a). It is closely tied to a decrease in emotional wellbeing and social functioning, and this, more than any other individual type of victimization (Lätsch, Nett & Hümbelin 2016). When experienced during childhood, polyvictimization may lead to mental and physical health problems as well as behavioural problems, and these effects may continue into adulthood.…”

Novel Hand Gesture Alert System

“…The use of a CNN to extract the characteristics of the target being tracked is a prevalent and effective method. This approach focuses primarily on object detection and local features of the target to be used for monitoring purposes [6][7][8][9]. Qi et al [23] used two different CNN structures to distinguish the target from other distractors in the scene.…”

“…Most of the studies proposed in the past few years tend to answer the question: was it a sexual assault? However, few of them focus on the early detection of this crime [7,8]. Indeed, this is a difficult task, as the posture of both individuals (the rapist and the victim) might be both on the same abscissa of the camera, as shown in Figure 1.…”