L’assessment psicodiagnostico di bambini vittime di Adverse Childood Experience (ACE): discussione di un caso clinico

Journal title MALTRATTAMENTO E ABUSO ALL’INFANZIA
Author/s Daniela D’Elia, Annamaria Scapicchio, Marta Sisto
Publishing Year 2019 Issue 2019/3
Language Italian Pages 11 P. 75-85 File size 305 KB
DOI 10.3280/MAL2019-003006
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The use of TSCYC in clinical assessment of children who suffered of Adverse Childhood Experiences. This article takes into account the concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and their assessment (Malacrea, 2007) which includes three levels of in-depth ex-amination through different instruments with "low", "middle" and "high" diagnostic impact, and two axes of observation: overt behaviours and the "inner world", thereby ensuring a wide frame of clinical elements to be used in the complex and detailed diagnostic reasoning. The Trauma Symptom Checklist for Young Children (TSCYC; Briere, 2005) is a checklist that evaluates post traumatic symptomatology in young children, from 3 to 12, and recently validated and published in Italy. The authors describes a clinical case example: Giulia, aged 6 referred for suspected sexual abuse. The scoring of TSCYC reveals how traumatic experience can impact on a child. In conclusion, despite the assessment of ACE is a complex evaluation process and requires to analyse data obtained from an entire battery of diagnostic tools, the TSCYC appears particularly useful to detect the presence of traumatized children’s psychological symptoms.^

Keywords: Adverse Childhood Experience, assessment, TSCYC, child sexual abuse, post-traumatic markers, report case.

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Daniela D’Elia, Annamaria Scapicchio, Marta Sisto, L’assessment psicodiagnostico di bambini vittime di Adverse Childood Experience (ACE): discussione di un caso clinico in "MALTRATTAMENTO E ABUSO ALL’INFANZIA" 3/2019, pp 75-85, DOI: 10.3280/MAL2019-003006