Child abuse and mental disorders in juvenile delinquents: A systematic review

Abstract

The delinquency and its relationship with traumas and disorders is a topic of great interest. The main of this review is to analyse the possible association between traumatic experiences in childhood and the development of disorders in juveniles linked with the judicial system. For this, a bibliographic search was carried out in Web of Science (main collection), Scopus, Medline, Psycinfo, Cochrane, Teseo, Psicodoc and Scielo, of documents published until 2018 (included). A total of 43 documents met the inclusion criteria and therefore analysed in the present review. These results show that mood disorder (affective) is more frequent in this population and in the context of traumatic experiences, sexual abuse and different types of traumatic experiences. Within the associations, it was found that mood disorder was mostly linked to sexual abuse, while PTSD was associated with different traumatic experiences and personality disorder to the different traumatic experiences and physical abuse. There seems to be relation between childhood trauma and the development of mental disorders.