Community Care reported that child abuse is very closely related to the child’s exposure to 3 main factors:
- domestic violence
- parental mental health issues and/or learning disability
- parental alcohol and/or drug misuse.
The concept of this "toxic trio" emerged from research instructed by the Department for Education. Therefore, the Children’s Commissioner for England had found very little recent and representative empirical evidence how these factors affect child abuse.
According to the report, any research made on the hypothesis of the "toxic trio" gives definitive answers on how measures could be established, as the concept is not precise enough and never been tested.
There are also other factors, such as the type and the duration of the mental illness, as there are several categories and is it really the illness which matters or other factors associated with it, like stigmatization, loss of employment, etc. This concept does not take into consideration the age or the personality of the children, nor his or her background. Also, it is still not clear that well-treated mental illness is as damaging as untreated mental illness. Any studies have examined in any detail whether or how the availability of social, economic and environmental resources might influence the impact of these 3 factors.
To conclude: the researchers have found very little quality evidence of the incidence of the "toxic trio" factors in child maltreatment and few attempts to build models explaining the supposed relationships. These factors have certainly a very important rule in child abuse, but they are certainly not the only significant ones.
