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This study proposed that diagnosable levels of PTSD would be found among battered women and that the level of exposure to violence in the battering relationship would be an important contributing factor to the development of PTSD while other pre-trauma and post-trauma variables such as social support, intercurrent life events, religiosity, and developmental family stressors would also be related to PTSD symptom levels. Fifty-three battered women were given standardized self-report measures to assess these variables. As hypothesized, a significant proportion of battered women in the sample were diagnosed as PTSD positive. Multiple regression analyses revealed that violence exposure severity, recency of the last abusive episode, social support, intercurrent life events, intrinsic religiosity, and developmental family stressors predicted 43% of the variance in PTSD symptomatology.
When the epidemic proportions of domestic violence came to public attention in the 1970s, researchers found that the women they interviewed who had experienced chronic battering had developed significant psychological symptoms and that these symptoms were consistent across victims (Gelles, 1974; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980; Walker, 1979, 1983, 1984). Psychological sequelae noted among battered women included: anxiety, depression, memory loss, cognitive dissociations, reexperiencing of the traumatic event when exposed to associated stimuli, feelings of helplessness, sleep and appetite disturbances, fatigue, listlessness, self-imposed isolation, and disruption of interpersonal relationships. Noting that catastrophe survivors experience similar psychological sequelae, Walker (1984) suggested that these symptoms constitute a subcategory of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Despite a paucity of empirical data in this area, the notion that battered women are at risk for developing symptoms of PTSD continues to gain popularity, especially among advocates of battered women who have recognized the important social and political implications of a disorder directly related to traumatic stress. Nevertheless, only two published stuthes to date have used standardized measures to assess for the presence of PTSD and to suggest etiological factors of PTSD among battered women. Houskamp and Foy (1991) found that a significant proportion of their sample of battered women (45%) exhibited diagnosable levels of PTSD and that the level of PTSD symptomatology was significandy correlated with the amount of exposure to traumatic violence. This study was limited by a small (N=26) sample that was drawn from a community clinical sample of battered women, but did employ...