Poly-victimization, resilience, and suicidality among adolescents in child and youth-serving systems

Adolescents in child and youth-serving systems often present a high risk of emotional and behavior problems, which may include suicidal behavior. The presence or absence of these problems may be due to personal or contextual factors and the possible protective role that they may exert. To examine the relationship between poly-victimization, resilience, and suicidality among adolescents in child and youth-serving systems. Participants and setting: 227 adolescents, aged 12 to 17 years (M = 15.24; SD = 1.56), recruited from residential centers in Spain or the Spanish juvenile justice system, completed the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire, the Youth Self-Report, and the Adolescent Resilience Questionnaire for assessment of victimization, suicidality, and resilience respectively. Poly-victimization during lifetime was reported by 61.7% and some kind of suicidality by 39.6% of the total sample. Logistic regression results showed that in the first step, suicidality was twice as likely in poly-victims as in the other respondents (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.12–3.90, p = .014). In the second step, the six resilience domains (self, family, peers, school, community and educators) were added. The self-domain emerged as statistically significant; it was associated with a lower probability of the occurrence of suicidality (OR = 0.32, 95% CI 0.14–0.70, p = .004) and explained significant added variance in suicidality over and above the measures of poly-victimization. In depth analysis of the subtypes that make up the self-domain found emotional insight to be statistically significant (OR = 0.82, 95% CI 0.73–0.92, p = .001). The findings highlight the importance of self-resources as a key intervention objective in adolescents with suicidal behaviors and poly-victimization. •Suicidal behaviors are common among youth attended at child and adolescent services.•Resilience factors related with the individual domain provided the most protection against suicidal behaviors.•Poly-victims were more likely to report suicidal behaviors (ideation suicide/self-harm behavior).