The relationship between physical abuse, sexual victimization, and adolescent illicit drug use

Researchers have typically relied on clinically or legally involved persons to assess the influence of childhood maltreatment on illicit drug use, lim iting the generalizability of findings. A few studies have sampled from the general population to explore this relationship, although these studies fe nded to focus on a particular type of maltreatment (sexual assault vs. phys ical abuse vs. neglect). The present study attempted to elucidate the role of various measures of maltreatment, namely sexual victimization, physical abuse, and the cooccurrence of both types of abuse, in adolescent illicit d rug use and age of onset of drug use. Using a sample of Mexican-American an d non-Hispanic White adolescents, the current research addressed (1) whethe r the three measures of abuse were related to self-reported measures of ill icit drug use, (2) the relative effects of the three measures of abuse on i llicit drug use, and (3) whether among drug users, the three measures of ab use were related to self-reported age of onset of illicit drug use. Finding s indicated that physical abuse and sexual victimization, as well as the co -occurrence of both, were significantly associated with frequency of variou s types of illicit drug use, but that among drug users, no measure was a pa rticularly robust predictor of mean age of onset of drug use. Results also suggested that physical abuse was generally more strongly related to illici t drug use than sexual victimization or the co-occurrence of both. implicat ions of these findings for future research are discussed.