Domestic violence is a predisposing factor that places many youths at increased risk of controlling emotional problems, including, aggressive behavior, depression, anxiety, and decreased level of social competence. In their article, Domestic Violence Exposure in Colombian Adolescents: Pathways to Violent and Prosocial Behavior, Roberto Mejia, Wendy Kliewer, and Larry Williams address five major issues.
These include, intimate partner violence and its effects in children behavioral and psychological problems, transmission of domestic violence between generations, domestic violence exposure in youths, the association between violent and antisocial behavior with domestic violence exposure, and the risk of intimate partner violence.
The research questions address the issues that were not evident from the previous research findings. In this topic, the authors intend to discover the extent of association of drug abuse to domestic violence exposure, violent and prosocial behavior among adolescents. This research study is not entirely new; it is an extension, as the authors referred to a research by to Roberto, Wendy, and Larry, which showed an indirect association between substance use and impulsivity in matters affecting family violence.
For the purpose of this study, a representative sample consisted of 1152 adolescents attending public and private schools and 148 juvenile offenders aged between 11 to 19 years. Only ten of the juvenile offenders were male and 42.6% of the adolescents were male. Of all the participants, only one juvenile offender declined to participate.
The sampling was in the city of Madellin in Columbia, South America in 2000. The aim of this study was to access the nature of risk, protective factors among the participants, and to create an avenue for implementation, intervention, and prevention measures for youths at risk through health care providers.
The controls for the study were students and cases. The selection of juvenile offenders depended on, type of school (public or private), levels of education offered at the school and number of students in each grade. There were no cases of deception in the procedure .This was censured by carrying out the sampling in stages.
The research revealed the connection between family violence and violent behavior by adolescent substance abuse, challenges, and impulsivity. In addition, the research work revealed that family violence and maltreatment directly and inversely linked to prosocial behavior rather than mediated by impulsivity something that De Gennaa, Larkby, and Cornelius observed in their earlier study.
In the discussion, the authors assert that the findings of this research approve previous research works that linked exposure to community violence to aggressive behavior both at home and school. This research also revealed the possible connection between substance use problems and impulsivity with violent and prosocial behaviors. The authors espoused that domestic violence encodes violence in the minds of its victims as the best way to address problems.
Though the findings of this research are in line with those of the previous works, they are distinct in that, they are the first study to provide evidence of reasonable magnitude to mediate processes that explain violent responses and adaptive outcomes.
The findings of this research will help in expanding scientific knowledge as researchers seek to explicate why adolescents exposed to these forms of domestic violence reported greater levels of violent behaviors such as carrying knives coupled with limited capacity to respond proactively towards others. This is interesting because the use of violent responses in problem solving which results to resilient behavior like being prosocial at school will be looked into.
These results will be important during the efforts to reduce cases of domestic violence among the youths in Columbia. This article is well written; it interprets and supports its findings with theoretical models based on some hypotheses. Following the shortcoming of this research, the future research should focus to increase the number of parameters in maltreatment cases such as, physical abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional malnutrition amongst others.
Hypothesis
Domestic violence is a result of drug abuse and is mostly associated with the adolescence stage and Ammerman, Loeber, Kolko, and Blackson assert in their research work. My main variables of interest are drug abuse and the adolescent people. This follows from the evident relationship between the two that the adolescents are adventurous and the moment they discover anything like drugs, they always go past the limitations and hence abusing them, only to arouse domestic violence.
Empirical Journals Used
Ammerman, Robert, Loeber, Rolf, Kolko, David, and Blackson, Timothy. “Parental Dissatisfaction with Sons in Substance Abusing Families: Relationship to Child and Parent Dysfunction.” Journal of Child & Adolescent Abuse 3.4 (1994): 23-37
De Gennaa, Natacha, Larkby, Cynthia, and Cornelius, Marie. “Early and Adverse Experiences with Sex and Alcohol are Associated with Adolescent Drinking Before and During Pregnancy.” Addict Behav 32.12 (2007): 2799-2810.
Mejia, Roberto, Kliewer, Wendy and Williams, Larry. “Domestic Violence Exposure in Colombian Adolescents: Pathways to Violent and Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 19.2 (2006): 257-267.