The Association Between Maltreatment Characteristics, Mentalization in Children and their Interpretation of Intra-Familial Violence

Physical abuse of children within the family unit is a prevalent phenomenon both in Israel and worldwide, causing significant harm to the victims' physical and mental health. The way a child interprets the abuse has significant meaning and contribution to their willingness to cooperate in its disclosure, the success of therapeutic intervention, and their mental health later in life. While extensive clinical literature has examined and conceptualized interpretation mechanisms, there is a lack of research on children's interpretation of abuse from their perspective and close to the time of the incident.

Children's mentalization ability also predicts their capacity to successfully cope with the abusive experiences they've endured. It includes understanding behavior through emotions, thoughts, and intentions of self and others, allowing the child to deal with various life situations in an adaptive and beneficial manner. Initial findings link abuse situations with impaired mentalization development, but few have examined the relationship between characteristics of abuse experienced by children in the family unit and the development of mentalization. Moreover, the connection, if any, between the mentalization ability of children who experienced violence and the nature of their interpretation of events has not yet been clarified.

The current study aimed to examine the existence of relationships between abuse characteristics, the victim's mentalization ability, and the interpretation the victim attributes to the violent events experienced, and to check whether mentalization ability colors the relationship between abuse characteristics and its interpretation.

The study analyzed 120 forensic interviews conducted with children who were victims of violence in the family unit, aged four and a half to 14 (mean age = 9.28 years, SD = 2.27), about half of whom (52.5%) were boys. The interviewers were social workers with specialized training and authorization to investigate children. The interviews were conducted using the NICHD-Revised Protocol, which emphasizes reporting feelings and subjective experiences. Children's statements were classified using two coding schemes developed for the study. One rated the children's mentalization ability and was based on an existing mentalization scale (Ostler et al., 2010). The second scheme classified the child's interpretation and examined the victim's attribution of violence towards them, between stable attribution and unstable attribution. Subsequently, the codings were processed into quantitative data and analyzed using statistical tests.

The research findings indicate a connection between the age of the abused child and the nature of the abuse attribution, as well as connections between the child's age and also presence or absence of a supportive figure in their life (in addition to the abusive one), to their mentalization ability. Additionally, the findings show that mentalization ability moderates the relationship between the existence or non-existence of a supportive figure and the nature of the child's attribution of abusive events towards them. It was found that children with high mentalization ability that have been abused, who presented a supportive figure in the interviews, attributed their abuse more stably, compared to those who did not present such a character in the interviews. It was also found that mentalization ability moderated the relationship between abuse severity and attribution. Thus, victims with high mentalization attributed severe abuse in an unstable manner, compared to children with low mentalization ability, who in cases of severe abuse presented stable attributions.

The research findings allow for a deeper understanding of children's perspectives regarding the abuse they experienced. They demonstrate that high mentalization leads victims to a more experience-near and realistic interpretation of the abuse they endured and illustrate the centrality of the narrative created in children after traumatic events, and its implications for various developmental pathways, both emotional and cognitive. In addition, the research demonstrates the feasibility and validity of using complex coding schemes to analyze children's narratives. In the therapeutic field, the findings emphasize the importance of mentalization-based intervention among children who are victims of violence in the family unit, and can assist in tailoring beneficial treatment and more sensitive and appropriate consideration from support factors in the victims' environment.