The current study aimed to untangle the mixed effects of language brokering by examining a contextual factor (i.e., parent-child alienation) and a personal attribute (i.e., resilience) that may relate to adolescents’ feelings during translating (i.e., sense of burden and efficacy) and that may moderate the association between such feelings and adolescent depressive symptoms. Participants included 557 adolescent language brokers (Mage = 12.96) in Mexican-American families. Results showed that adolescents with a strong sense of alienation from parents or low resilience a) experienced more burden or less efficacy in translating, and b) were more susceptible to the detrimental effects of feeling a sense of burden and the beneficial effects of experiencing a sense of efficacy, as measured by depressive symptoms.

Child maltreatment and substance abuse are both international public health priorities. Research shows that child maltreatment increases the risk for substance use and problems. Thus, recognition of this relationship may have important implications for substance demand reduction strategies, including efforts to prevent and treat substance use and related problems. Latin America and the Caribbean is a rich and diverse region of the world with a large range of social and cultural influences. To date, relatively little work has addressed the link between child maltreatment and substance use in the region. A working group constituted by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in June, 2010 identified this area as a priority area for a multinational research partnership. This paper summarizes existing information on drug use and child maltreatment in six participating countries, Colombia, El Int

Panamá, país de tránsito para productores y consumidores de drogas, generando economía emergente, cultura de violencia y maltrato en la familia y comunidad, siendo niños y adolescentes vulnerables al uso y abuso de drogas por exposición prolongada al maltrato. Se determina independencia o relación entre uso y abuso de droga con el maltrato durante la niñez y la adolescencia en estudiantes en una universidad en la ciudad de Panamá. Se aplicó el método cuantitativo, diseño transeccional, correlacional, muestreo estratificado, muestra de 377 estudiantes de 12 facultades por afijación proporcional. Instrumento aplicado: "Cuestionario Uso de Drogas y Experiencias Adversas de la niñez". La prueba chi-cuadrado, test de independencia, comprobó no independencia entre uso y abuso de drogas posterior al maltrato como abuso sexual, con p-valor asociado 0,021, al 95% nivel de confianza, con significancia de p< de 0,05; determinantes para consumo posterior: madre maltratada, separación o divorcio de padres, pares consumidores.