Facts & Statistics
Complex trauma affects all of us
Domestic Violence Statistics
FROM THE NCADV FACT SHEET:
- In the United States, more than 10 million adults experience domestic violence annually.
- 2% of women and 13.9% of men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner during their lifetime.
- From 2016 through 2018 the number of intimate partner violence victimizations in the United States increased 42%.
- 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men in the United States have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner.
FROM THE NCADV VERMONT FACT SHEET:
- 2% of Vermont women1 and 30.9% of men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner rape and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.
- In 2020, Vermont domestic violence organizations served 7,799 victims and answered 17,137 hotline calls.
ACEs
In 1995-1997, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted the landmark ACEs study (with the CDC and Kaiser Permanente) to examine the long-term health effects correlated with adverse childhood experiences. They asked over 17,000 predominantly white, middle-class participants to self-report on whether any of a list of ten experiences had occurred during their childhood. 60% of participants reported having experiences that fell into at least one category from the Adverse Childhood Experience list.
Another way of saying this is that 60% had at least one adverse childhood experience from the following list:
- Verbal abuse
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Emotional neglect
- Physical neglect
- Parental separation or divorce
- Witness violence against mother
- Household member with substance abuse
- Household member with mental illness
- Household member who was incarcerated
The study found that a higher ACEs score is correlated with increased incidence of:
- Health risk behaviors, e.g., substance abuse, multiple sexual partners
- Mental health conditions, e.g., anxiety, depression, PTSD
- Physical health conditions, including the leading causes of death and disability in the US: heart disease, COPD, and cancer.
Adversity in the family, community, and systems
In 2012-2013, the Philadelphia ACE Project undertook to expand the list of ACEs to examine the presence of “community-level adversity” in an urban environment, including discrimination, feeling unsafe in your neighborhood, being bullied, living in foster care, and witnessing community violence.
The findings from their initial study, which included predominately BIPOC, individuals from low-income households, show that the original, household-level ACEs inadequately depict the full range of childhood adversity when taking socioeconomic and racial realities into account.
The ACEs and expanded ACEs lists may have opened the door for researchers who study the impacts of systemic oppression to quantitatively demonstrate the mental and physical health effects of family and community/systemic adversity. The model of the ACEs study is being taken seriously by the medical, public, and mental health industries, and perhaps we can use this model to illustrate the far-reaching consequences of systemic oppression against people for reasons of race, class, ethnicity, gender identity, neurodivergence, ability, and more.
Complex trauma affects all of us
How Trauma Exposure Affects Children
Below is an extensive list of ways trauma can harm child development from the National Childhood Trauma Network’s 2003 white paper on childhood trauma.
Attachment
- Uncertainty about the reliability and predictability of the world
- Problems with boundaries
- Distrust and suspiciousness
- Social isolation
- Interpersonal difficulties
- Difficulty attuning to other people’s emotional states
- Difficulty with perspective taking
- Difficulty enlisting other people as allies
Biology
- Sensorimotor developmental problems
- Hypersensitivity to physical contact
- Analgesia
- Problems with coordination, balance, body tone
- Difficulties localizing skin contact
- Somatization
- Increased medical problems across a wide span, e.g., pelvic pain, asthma, skin problems, autoimmune disorders, pseudoseizures
Affect Regulation
- Difficulty with emotional self-regulation
- Difficulty describing feelings and internal experience
- Problems knowing and describing internal states
- Difficulty communicating wishes and desires
Dissociation
- Distinct alterations in states of consciousness
- Amnesia
- Depersonalization and derealization
- Two or more distinct states of consciousness, with impaired memory for state-based events
Behavioral Control
- Poor modulation of impulses
- Self-destructive behavior
- Aggression against others
- Pathological self-soothing behaviors
- Sleep disturbances
- Eating disorders
- Substance abuse
- Excessive compliance
- Oppositional behavior
- Difficulty understanding and complying with rules
- Communication of traumatic past by reenactment in day-to-day behavior or play (sexual, aggressive, etc.)
Cognition
- Difficulties in attention regulation and executive functioning
- Lack of sustained curiosity
- Problems with processing novel information
- Problems focusing on and completing tasks
- Problems with object constancy
- Difficulty planning and anticipating
- Problems understanding own contribution to what happens to them
- Learning difficulties
- Problems with language development
- Problems with orientation in time and space
- Acoustic and visual perceptual problems
- Impaired comprehension of complex visual-spatial patterns
Self-Concept
- Lack of a continuous, predictable sense of self
- Poor sense of separateness
- Disturbances of body image
- Low self-esteem
- Shame and guilt