How children recover from child abuse and neglect depends This slideshow introduces basic concepts for understanding the effects of child abuse and neglect. How children recover from child abuse and neglect depends upon resources that are available to them and their capacities to engage with these resources.

1. Protective Factors, Resilience,
and Child Abuse and Neglect
Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW
School of Social Work
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

2. Child abuse and neglect
 The effects of childhood abuse and neglect
can be life-long and have serious effects on
the quality of life
 Some child victims of abuse and neglect
cope with, adapt to, and overcome many of
the effects of abuse and neglect
 This suggests the existence of processes
that are protective

3.  Protective processes moderate the effects
of risks
 They are found within individuals, families,
peer groups, social institutions such as
schools, and through more nebulous
influences such as social policy and economic
forces
 Adults provide the resources and create
conditions that foster protective processes
when children have experienced risks and
other adversities
 Peers often are factors in protective processes

4. Developmental psychopathology
 Study of high risk groups, usually
longitudinally, in order to understand
factors associated with both adaptive and
maladaptive outcomes
 Risks developmental psychopathologists
have studied include:
 Child abuse & neglect, parental mental
health, parental death and abandonments,
foster care
 Unsafe neighborhoods, homelessness, natural

5. Vulnerability
 Child abuse and neglect results in
vulnerability
 That may include a sense of the self as
defective (shame) and may result in psychic
wounds
 Psychic wounds can be thought of as “hot
buttons” that when pushed results in intense
emotional pain
 When psychic wounds are restimulated,
persons may experience dysregulation

6. Dysregulation
 The person at least temporarily experiences
a sense of unmanageability of their
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors; pulse
and heart rates may accelerate
 Many possible signs of dysregulation:
anxiety, fear, depression, withdrawal,
lethargy, crying bouts, bedwetting, agitation
 Persons seek to re-regulate

7. Coping with dysregulation
 Re-regulation: To regain a sense of
self-efficacy, control, and mastery over self
and the environment
 Three strategies:
 Pro-social
 Anti-social
 Self-injurious

8. Pro-social efforts to re-regulate
 Seeking comfort and affirmation from caring
adults and peers
 Talking about hurt and confusion
 Engaging in behaviors that soothe emotional
pain (e.g., exercise & art)
 Reinterpreting the meanings of the abuse and
neglect

9. Anti-social efforts to re-
regulate
 Examples:
 Destruction of property
 Bullying
 Attacking others
 Inappropriate sexual behaviors
 Bragging and acts of bravado

10. Self-injurious efforts to re-
regulate
 Examples:
 Cutting
 Anorexia & bulimia
 Substance use and abuse
 Suicide attempts
 Recklessness
 Spending money

11. Protective Factors: Outcomes. A
factor is protective when we can identify
both the risks that lead to vulnerability
and the assets that persons use to cope
with, adapt to, and overcome risks.
 Close, long-term relationships with
persons who model pro-social
behaviors and who affirm pro-sociality
in the person who has experienced
abuse and neglect

12. Protective Factors (continued)
 Emulating the pro-social behaviors of
persons they admire
 Strong desire to be pro-social
 Ability to engage in self-soothing
behaviors
 Affirming ethnic/cultural identification
 Hope for the future
 Resources to attain life goals

13. Resilience
 Coping with, adapting to, and overcoming
risks; an outcome
 Flexible, help-seeking, problem-solving
behaviors when stressed
 Ability to maintain an integrated sense of
self when “hot buttons” are pushed
 Persons can be resilient in one situation
and fragmented and brittle in others

14. Roles of adults
 Adults as parents, policy makers, program
planners, prevention specialists, and direct
practitioners have pivotal tasks in the
promotion of resilience, including
 Providing resources that children and youth
recognize as important to them and are
consistent with what they want.
 Time and attention that eventually result in
young persons' increasing capacities to
regulate and re-regulate themselves in times
of stress.