Childhood Trauma, Poverty, and Adult Victimization

Trauma exposure and revictimization have many serious personal and public health consequences. Both individual-level and community-level factors impact a person's risk of being victimized, and there are currently few studies examining both individual and community levels of analysis in the same study. The current study employs multilevel modeling to examine how community-level poverty interacts with individuals' trauma histories and dissociative symptoms to predict later victimization. In this study, a cross-level interaction was observed such that the relationship between childhood and adult victimization is stronger in communities with higher poverty rates. The importance of examining revictimization as a multifactorial process is discussed.