CHILDREN WHO WITNESS THE HOMICIDE OF A PARENT

THE traumatic nature of a child's experience viewing catastrophic fami ly violence is a relatively underreported area of exploration in psych iatry (e.g., Black and Kaplan 1988; Lystad 1986). This neglect is surp rising given the frequency of its occurrence in the United States. For example, epidemiologic data suggest that in the city of Los Angeles a lone there are approximately 1000 criminal homicides each year, about half of which occur in the home and involve adults of child-bearing ag e as victims (MMWR 1986). A conservative estimate of the number of dep endent children in Los Angeles exposed annually to the sight of lethal violence directed against a parent is 100-200. The figure for the ent ire United States would be greater by at least an order of magnitude. We are presenting detailed descriptive information gathered during the clinical psychiatric evaluation of a series of 55 children and adoles cents, each of whom personally observed the killing of a parent by ano ther person. Our assessment employed a specialized, semistructured int erview technique developed explicitly for this purpose (Pynoos and Eth 1986), which was conducted acutely from hours to weeks after the viol ent event for most of the cases in order to study the child's immediat e response. We also interviewed children and adolescents who had witne ssed a parent's homicide years earlier in order to document the contin ued impact of that event. The findings from these research interviews contribute to our understanding of the nature of the child's experienc e of trauma, the salience of the issue of human accountability in acts of interpersonal violence, the influence of developmental phase on sy mptom expression, and the interaction of grief and trauma in childhood .