Violence in Youth Ups
Risk of Violence in Dating

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Children who experience sibling violence--either physical or psychological--are more likely to enter into dating relationships filled with violence, as well, new study findings report.

"The bottom line is...the more violence you are exposed to, the greater chance there is" of experiencing later dating violence, lead author Dr. Virginia Noland of the University of Florida in Gainesville told Reuters Health.

Most siblings and couples fight, Noland conceded, but not all of those fights are harmless. Violence can be characterized by a chronic pattern of damaging blows or words, she explained, but not all instances of violence need happen over years. Noland suggested parents intervene in sibling squabbles if fighting escalates to the point a parent might step in if one of the children belonged to someone else.

"Yes, most siblings have conflict," Noland added. "And that's part of the nature of these relationships. But in some families, this violence that occurs is very serious violence."

Stopping sibling violence as soon as it starts could have a long-lasting, positive impact on children's lives, she noted.

"If you've got siblings that are violent, that's a good time to start looking at anger management techniques and things like that, because you may head off later violence," Noland said.

She and her colleagues obtained their findings from surveys of 538 college students on their experience of violence with a sibling--either inflicted by them or on them--between the ages of 10 and 14, and whether they had experienced violence with a date over the past 12 months. Almost 9 out of 10 people who completed the survey had at least one sibling.

Questions aimed at assessing violence in the two relationships included throwing things that hurt, using a knife or gun, calling them "fat" or "ugly," throwing them against the wall, or choking them.

Noland and her team discovered that students who reported higher amounts of violence with a sibling were slightly more likely to also report relatively high levels of violence in a dating relationship.

The researchers also found that siblings were more likely to have violent conflicts if their parents showed violence either to each other or their children. The most amount of violence seemed to take place between brothers, and the least amount between sisters. Levels of violence appeared to increase as the age difference between the two siblings narrowed.

Noland and her colleagues reported their findings at the recent 130th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Philadelphia.

In an interview, Noland said that future research is needed to understand the full impact of sibling violence on a child's life--investigations that could reveal a lot of information about a lot of people. For instance, she asked, are children who are violent with their siblings more likely to be bullies at school?

"The sibling relationship is a very important relationship, and it's one that affects so many people," she said.

Reference Source 89

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