Question

Evaluate the impact of exposure to societal violence on the developmental process during middle childhood. In 500 words.

Answer 1

Research indicates that inside virtually every dangerously violent youth is an untreated traumatized child, a child with experiences of violent victimization, and that the there is substantial cross-generational continuity in violence within families. Research by psychiatrists Perry et al. (1995) and van der Kolk (1996) has illuminated the neurological processes that translate early trauma into later dangerous behavior through brain development and neurochemistry. Dodge et al. (1997) have documented the adaptive processes that link the experience of violence as a young child to the development of a pattern of aggressive antisocial behavior as an elementary school-age child. Their research reveals that the problems comes when abused children develop four particular psychological adaptations (hypersensitivity to negative social cues, obliviousness to positive social cues, a readily accessible repertoire of aggressive behavior, and a belief that aggression is a successful strategy in social relations). Such children are seven times more likely than abused children who do not develop these patterns to end upon diagnosed with ‘conduct disorder’ (chronic aggressive and antisocial behavior). Abused children who do not develop these patterns are no more likely that children in general to develop conduct disorder. Child abuse and community violence are rampant in the lives of kids who become violent youth. This is one of the most important effects of violence on children.

Multiple interviews with boys involved in lethal violence (Garbarino 1999) highlights the importance of geographic concentrations of violence that create ‘war zone’ like settings for children. These are the social settings in which the rates of child victimization is highest (with child maltreatment rates many times higher than in other neighborhoods—Garbarino et al. 1992) and from which most lethal youth violence comes (Snyder and Sickmund 1999). A survey of sixth to 10th graders in New Haven, Connecticut, revealed that 40 percent had witnessed at least one incident of violent crime within the previous 12 months (Marans and Cohen 1993). In three high risk neighborhoods in Chicago, 17 percent of the elementary school age children had witnessed domestic violence, 31 percent had seen someone shot, and, 84 percent had seen someone beat up (Bell and Jenkins 1993). Some 30 percent of the kids living in high crime neighborhoods of major metropolitan areas like Chicago have witnessed a homicide by the time they are 15 years old, and more than 70 percent have witnessed a serious assault. Children adapt to their perception of community safety in many important ways. One is their view of the future. A Harris poll of sixth to 12th graders in 1992 revealed that 35 percent worried they would not live to old age because they would be shot (Harris et al. 1994). When children understand that adults cannot protect them they are left with what can be called juvenile vigilantism, the impulse to protect themselves, to take up weapons and relationships that substitute for adult protection. This is evident in comments from children and youth such as ‘If I join a gang I’m 50 percent safe. If I don’t join a gang I’m zero percent safe’ (Garbarino 1999). The key to understanding the effects of living in a violent neighborhood is the recognition that these children do not simply face a single threat to development, a solitary risk factor. Rather, they face multiple risk factors, a fact of overarching importance in light of research by Sameroff et al. (1987) documenting the cumulative effect of risk factors. In Sameroff’s study, while the presence of one or two risk factors was generally manageable for children, the presence of three or more risk factors was associated with significant developmental impairment. Tolan (1996) examined this phenomenon in detail in a study in a Chicago-based study in which he asked the question, ‘What percent of kids are resilient if we measure resilience as neither requiring mental health intervention or remedial education?’ When he asked that question of data from boys growing up in the most afflicted violent neighborhoods of Chicago, living in abusive and impoverished families, contending with minority status in a racist society, and looked at this kids over a two-year period, the answer was zero percent. None of the children by age 15 were resilient in Tolan’s terms. This testifies to the effects of violence when they occur within a larger context of social and psychological risk accumulation. The relentless pressure imposed on kids who come from that nexus of community violence, family disruption, and personal experience of trauma is uniformly overwhelming.