Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Intimate partner violence, history of childhood abuse worsen trauma symptoms for new moms

A portrait of Heidemarie Kaiser Laurent.

Psychology professor Heidemarie Kaiser Laurent’s research focuses on how stress and developmental factors influence well-being.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A study assessed the interaction of new and old relationship traumas among women three to 18 months after the birth of their child – one of the most challenging periods of their lives. The study found that new experiences of sexual, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of a romantic partner during this period are associated with increasing symptoms of trauma such as anxiety, depression, self-harm and sleep disorders. It also found that having experienced abuse in childhood appears to worsen the impact of current abuse on those symptoms.

Published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, the research points to postnatal medical screenings as a potential point of intervention, giving health practitioners the opportunity to help young mothers recognize the signs of abuse and take steps to protect themselves and their children from harm.

The research suggests that recent episodes of relationship trauma can exacerbate a woman’s mental health problems above and beyond symptoms tied to childhood experiences of maltreatment, the researchers said. It also indicates that interventions at this time of life may help alleviate a woman’s symptoms, despite her personal history.

Studies have shown that intimate partner violence sometimes increases after parents bring a newborn into the home, said Patricia Cintora, a graduate student in the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research with U. of I. psychology professor Heidemarie Kaiser Laurent.

“In addition to the physical changes of pregnancy, there are a lot of emotional, social and economic changes that come along with parenthood that may cause stress or magnify prior stressors that feed into intimate partner violence,” Cintora said. “Rather than focusing on specific categories of abuse that fall under the umbrella of IPV, we decided to look at the total number of experiences and severity.”

The researchers followed 85 low-income women after the birth of a child. The women checked in at three, six, 12 and 18 months postpartum. They answered questions from standardized checklists designed to determine their trauma symptoms, history of childhood maltreatment and exposure to – or perpetuation of – intimate partner violence.

“We found that the higher their scores for experiencing intimate partner violence, the more symptoms they reported,” Cintora said. “We also saw that relative changes in their experience over time also had an important effect on their symptoms.”

Women who experienced childhood maltreatment also tended to report higher levels of traumatic stress in response to recent episodes of IPV, she said.

“This work is important because it highlights both the harms of worsening postpartum relationship dynamics – even before they reach clinically recognized abuse thresholds – and the opportunity to beneficially impact women’s health during this critical time,” Laurent said. 

Kaiser Laurent is a professor in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I.

Editor’s notes

To reach Patricia Cintora, email cintora2@illinois.edu.
To reach Heidemarie Kaiser Laurent, email hlaurent@illinois.edu.  

The paper “Childhood trauma exposure exacerbates the impact of concurrent intimate partner violence exposure on women’s posttraumatic symptoms” is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau.

DOI: 10.1002/jts.22545

Read Next

Life sciences Photo of Michael Ward standing in tall grass on a riverbank.

How are migrating wild birds affected by H5N1 infection in the U.S.?

Each spring, roughly 3.5 billion wild birds migrate from their warm winter havens to their breeding grounds across North America, eating insects, distributing plant seeds and providing a variety of other ecosystem services to stopping sites along the way. Some also carry diseases like avian influenza, a worry for agricultural, environmental and public health authorities. […]

Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010