"There is a well-established a connection between intimate partner violence (IPV) and its deleterious impact on survivors and their children. While there have been numerous studies examining IPV in terms of psychological, physical, and economic abuse, far fewer have looked at the abusers' use of children as a tactic of abuse and its impact on both survivors' and their children's well-being. This study sought to add to the field by further exploring this relationship. The sample for this study, taken from a larger two-year longitudinal study examining the experiences of help-seeking IPV survivors' and their children, includes 105 survivors across three time points over the course of eight months. Using a time-ordered mediation model, this study examined the relationship between the use of children at a first time point and its impact on survivors' quality of life at eight months later as mediated by their children's behavior at a middle (four month) time point. Three models were examined in this study to understand the mediating effects of the children's behavior between the use of children and the survivors' quality of life. The first model, a simple mediation model, included the three (independent, mediator, and dependent) variables. The second model was the same simple mediation model while controlling for the children's ages. The third and final model was the same as the second model while also controlling for survivors' quality of life at the first time point. The findings from this study are mixed, indicating a mediated relationship in models one and two, and no mediation in the third model (when controlling for quality of life at the first time point). Preliminary findings from this study indicate that when abusers use children in order to control their partners and ex-partners, the children display higher levels of negative behavior, which in turn negatively effects survivors' quality of life yet the significance of these relationship may change when controlling for other variables."--Pages ii-iii.
Read
