Childhood depression and violence: A study in a Brazilian low-income school-children

Childhood depression and violence are important problems of public health, which impacts the function of life, the course of other diseases and the public health cost. This work aims to investigate the associative relations between withdrawn/depressive behavior of schoolchildren and the presence/absence of different types of violence experienced at home, at school and in the community. It is a descriptive cross-sectional data based on a sample of 479 schoolchildren between 6-13 years of age, attending the first grade in the public elementary schools in a city of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, 2005. The multi-stage cluster sampling strategy involved three selection stages (schools, classrooms and students) with 50% of proportion, 98% confidence level and 5% relative error. Socio-demographic variables of child and family, withdrawal/depression sub-scale of Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla 2001), Conflicts Tactics Scale (Straus, 1981; Hasselmann & Reichenheim, 2003) and school and community scale (Kahn et al., 1999) are investigated. Multivariate Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis indicate that the different violence victimizations tend to be closer to clinical and borderline withdrawn/depressive behavior, whereas this behavior on non-clinical level is closer to non-victimization of family, scholar and community violence. Programs and public politics need to work on the conjecture of life childhood, with the focus on the intervention of mental health problems, violence experience and the victimization condition of violence in order to prevent depression, and interrupt violence re-victimizations and the consequences of that.