From Inquest:
Many criminal justice questions about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and violence begin too late in a person’s life cycle by focusing on whether and how abuse and neglect from one’s biological family leads to adolescent perpetration of violence. We need to expand the lens to questioning the systems that place children at risk for abuse and neglect. Without this perspective, it is easy to overlook the fact that most of the factors that increase the likelihood that abused and neglected children will develop violent behavior patterns as adolescents are the same factors that increase the likelihood that parents will abuse and neglect their children. The search for direct pathways from experiencing abuse to perpetuating violence also runs contrary to research showing that experiencing neglect appears to be as much of a pathway to adolescent violence as experiencing abuse, suggesting that the pathways are complex and contextual. The intergenerational transmission of trauma and violence is determined by the accumulation of risk factors across one’s life, coupled with a lack of protective factors. This accumulation of exposure to violence and other traumatic experiences has an exponential relationship with the likelihood of poor developmental outcomes: The sum of trauma is greater than the individual parts.
The effects of exposure to violent, traumatic, and adverse life experiences are also not independent from each other. For example, the effect of exposure to chronic housing and food insecurity and chronic community violence are particularly damaging for the emotional and behavioral development of children who are also growing up in homes with “impaired caregiving systems.” Especially for children, trauma occurs when high levels of toxic stress are experienced “in the absence of the buffering protection of a supportive adult relationship.” Supportive caregivers are pivotal in determining whether potentially traumatic experiences will instead be tolerable.
The inconvenient truth about preventing adolescent violence is that children who experience abuse and neglect early in their childhood are significantly more likely to experience subsequent victimization and trauma throughout their life. Some children’s developmental trajectories are repeatedly negatively affected by needing to recover from traumatic life experiences, while other children’s developmental trajectories are advantaged by having to cope with only a limited number of traumatic events that are discrete from their otherwise developmentally supportive environment. Black, Indigenous, and Latinx children have a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing chronic trauma without coping supports, and white children have a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing a limited number of traumatic events coupled with coping supports. The risk and protective factors embedded in the systems in which children live are the greatest early opportunities of both prevention before violent behaviors emerge and intervention at the earliest sign of violent behaviors. Formal and informal social policies are large determinants of who gets access to what resources and the extent to which there is a network of preventative social supports. Continue reading >>>
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