The prevalence, contexts, and impact of children's exposure to domestic violence in Jamaica

This study explored the prevalence of children’s exposure to adult perpetrated domestic violence (DV) in Jamaica and investigated the contextual factors of the affected families and the wellbeing of exposed children. The study was a cross-sectional survey of 7,182 children aged 9 to 17 years, drawn from 20 primary and secondary schools. The sample consisted of 60.8% of girls with 69% living in rural communities. The surveys were completed in classroom settings. The questions from the IPSCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool (ICAST-C; Runyan et al., 2015) were used to assess respondents’ lifetime experience of witnessing three forms of adult-perpetrated DV; shouting and screaming that frightened the child, physical violence (e.g., hitting, slapping), and serious violent threat (e.g., the use of weapons to threaten or harm). Findings indicated that 41.6% of the children had been exposed to at least one type of DV (22.5% had experienced one, 11.8% had experienced two and 7.3% had experienced three forms of violence). There was a statistically significant difference in the children’s sense of safety in their homes depending on whether they had been exposed to DV. Those exposed to DV had a lower sense of safety than those not exposed and the more forms of DV experienced the lower their sense of safety. Of those not exposed, 85.8% reported always feeling safe at home compared with 37.2% of those exposed to three forms of DV. Study limitations and implications of the findings are discussed.