Children, Violence, and Trauma: Treatments That Work

Exposure to violence can have serious, long-lasting consequences for children. Children exposed to violence are more likely than their peers to—

Abuse drugs and alcohol.
Suffer from depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic disorders.
Fail or have difficulty in school.
Develop chronic diseases.
Have trouble forming emotional attachments.
Have aggression and behavioral problems.

These consequences are much more severe for children who are exposed to multiple forms of violence, sometimes called "polyvictimization." In fact, 1 in 12 children who responded to the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence¹ experienced 7 or more kinds of victimization.

The good news is that effective treatments are available to help these children and their families. Mental health professionals can choose from an array of therapeutic programs that have been rigorously studied and found to be effective. These evidence-based programs and services tend to share several common elements; specifically, they—

Involve both parents and children.
Combine home- and center-based approaches.
Combine multiple treatment strategies or different therapeutic models.
Offer parenting training, both as a preventive measure and as a healing strategy.
Educate and partner with service providers who interact with children and families throughout the stages of a child’s development.

Experts strongly recommend that counselors and therapists adopt evidence-based treatment strategies to ensure that children and families receive the best possible treatment. This video features only a few of the many approaches that are considered evidence based by researchers and experts. For more information about the programs featured in this video, please visit their Web sites:

Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Medical University of South Carolina.
National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

Related Resources

¹The National Survey of Children Exposed to Violence (NatSCEV) was conducted in 2008. It involved 4,500 telephone interviews with children ages 10–17, and caregivers of children ages 9 and younger, asking about 45 different kinds of violence, abuse, and victimization in the past year and over their lifetime. For more information on the survey and its findings, visit the National Criminal Justice Reference Service and search for NatSCEV.

Children, Violence, and Trauma: Treatments That Work

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