Resilience after maltreatment: the importance of social services as facilitators of positive adaptation

Abstract

This practice note will show that resilience among children who have been maltreated is the result of multiple protective factors, including the quality of the services provided to children exposed to chronic adversity. This social ecological perspective of resilience suggests that resilience is a process resulting from interactions between individuals and their environments, and depends upon individual characteristics (temperament and personality), the social determinants of health that affect children and children's families, formal interventions by multiple service providers (child welfare, special education, mental health, addictions, public health, and juvenile corrections), and the social policies that influence service provision to vulnerable populations. Clinicians and researchers concerned with the resilience of chronically abused and neglected children have tended to overlook the protective processes unique to children who have been abused that are different from the protective processes that promote positive development among children who have experienced no maltreatment. Most importantly, studies of resilience among maltreated children have rarely investigated the impact child welfare interventions have on the resilience of children who have been maltreated, mistakenly attributing children's abilities to cope to be the result of individual factors rather than the responsiveness of service providers and governments to tailor interventions to children's needs. To enhance the likelihood of resilience among maltreated children, those who design and implement interventions need to address three aspects of resilience-related programming: make social supports and formal services more available and accessibility; design programs flexibly so that they can respond to the differential impact specific types of interventions have on children who are exposed to different forms of maltreatment; and design interventions to be more focused on subpopulations of children who have experienced maltreatment rather than diffuse population-wide initiatives.