Background. Based on Komnas Perempuan's Annual Notes launched on March 7, 2018, it was found that there were 348,446 cases of violence against women handled in 2017. Violence that occurred in the private sphere had the highest number of cases. Meanwhile, the most perpetrators of sexual violence are boyfriends (1,528). These data showed that violence has begun since dating. Therefore, it is important to understand factors that can both support and hinder dating violence survivor’s recovery. Previous research found that adverse childhood experience and attachment are related with partner’s abuse. On the other hand, experiencing traumatic event such as dating violence can have positive outcome, namely post traumatic growth. This descriptive research aims to explore correlations among adverse childhood experience, anxiety attachment, avoidance attachment, and post-traumatic growth among female dating violence survivors.

The Methods. Participants are 319 females, 20-36 years old, most of them are 20 to 24 years old (53.4%), recruited online via researchers’ and community’s social media (such as @helpnona, @cintasetara). Participants reported dating violence history, 44.5% reported verbal violence, 41.7% reported physical violence, and 13.8% reported psychological violence. Most of participants experience violence from previous partner (83.4%), 16.3% experience violence from current partner, and 0.3% experience violence from both previous and current partner. Anxious and avoidant attachment are measured by Experiences in Relationships Revised Questionnaire (ECR-R). Anxious attachment dimension consists of 18 items (alpha = 0.905), avoidant attachment dimension consists of 18 items (alpha = 0.912) Adverse Childhood Experience is measured by ACE calculator (10 items, alpha = 0.654) and Post Traumatic Growth is measured by PTG-SF (10 items, alpha = 0.889).  Most participants have at least one ACE score (69.3%) and top five most endorsed ACE item are verbal abuse (38%), emotional neglect (37%), physical abuse (22.6%), sexual abuse (21.90%) and parent divorce (16.6%). Total score of each measurement are analyzed with spearman correlation.

Results. Spearman correlation analysis showed that there is significant correlation between ACE score and anxiety attachment (r = .136, p = .015), and between anxiety and avoidance attachment (r = .280, p = .000). However, there are no correlation between ACE, anxiety, avoidance attachment and PTG.

Conclusions. This result showed that adverse childhood experience can leads to higher feelings of being rejected in intimate relationship. Moreover, one’s post traumatic growth does not rely on her childhood experience and attachment style. Despite adverse childhood experience and attachment style, dating violence survivor could redefine core beliefs affected by the trauma and experience growth in terms of personal strength, relationship with others, appreciation of life, spirituality and new possibilities.

Added-Values. Individual with anxious attachment has intense desire for closeness, acceptance and being valued. This is related with their adverse childhood experience such as verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse and neglect. Therefore, it is important to address trauma related to ACE in young adult female who are dating violence survivor. Helping survivor deal with adverse childhood experience could help them redefine core belief and could leads to post traumatic growth. Further research needed to explore intervening variables between ACE and PTG on dating violence survivors.