Violence in Children

Understanding and Helping Those Who Harm

Rosemary Campher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429923692
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book increases the reader's understanding of violent children and the value and vicissitudes of their psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It explores various aspects of violence and the attendant emotional, psychological, biological, and social features in children.

Chapter One
Early life trauma and the psychogenesis and prevention of violence

Peter Fonagy

Violence is extreme aggression, perhaps distinguished by the implicit intent to cause injury or death. Young offenders (under 20) account for more than half of violent crimes in the UK. Statistics on the onset of serious and violent delinquency show us that about half of persistent juvenile offenders are “active” by ages 12–13 and only a couple of years later over 80% of those who will be offenders have begun to commit serious delinquency. Prevalence peaks between ages 17 and 18, but most serious delinquent offenders have started their offending careers much earlier.

Adolescents possess both the means (physical strength, cognitive competence), the opportunity (greater freedom from supervision and more access to resources), and the motive (they feel pressured to perform at school, in terms of a career, in sexual relationships). This undoubtedly explains why adolescence is the phase when individuals are most likely to resort to violent behaviour. The Dunedin Study was a detailed longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1,037 young people followed from ages 3 to 26 (Moffitt, Caspi, Harrington, & Milne, 2002). This showed that most adolescents will commit some delinquent act, but most of these are minor infractions. Only a small proportion of these (around 6%) are the persistent offenders who account for the majority of violent acts. Tracing the development of these young people’s aggression has been a major challenge to the field.

This chapter considers the development of violence with particular reference to family factors in violence such as the quality of parent–child attachment. Taking a developmental approach to violence, we attempt to establish a link between the maltreatment of children in an attachment context and the risk of violence via the child’s capacity to envision mental states in the other. We attempt to bring evidence from epidemiology and neuroscience to bear on this link. We finally consider studies of prevention of violence likely to enhance attachment and mentalizing.

The risk of violence

Over the last decades we have learnt that the risk factors associated with antisocial behaviour in general and violence in particular are evident from relatively early childhood. The findings from reviews (Farrington, 2003; Loeber, Green, & Lahey, 2003; Rutter, Giller, & Hagell, 1998) and from some of the best-known longitudinal studies, including the Cambridge Study (Farrington, 1995), the Pittsburgh studies (Loeber, Stouthamer-Loeber, et al., 2002), and the Dunedin Study (Moffitt et al., 2002) have been fairly consistent. Repeatedly reported personality and temperament individual risk factors include: (1) uncontrolled temperament observed at age 3 years leading to adult aggression (e.g. Caspi, 2000), (2) impulsive traits at age 8–10 associated with adult offending (e.g. Farrington, 1995), (3) hyperactive traits at age 13 linked to adult violence (e.g. Klinteberg, Andersson, Magnusson, & Stattin, 1993), (4) callous traits at age 7–12 predicting antisocial personality disorder in maturity (e.g. Loeber, Burke, & Lahey, 2002), and (5) low IQ and poor academic achievement predicting being arrested and charged (Moffitt, 1993). The risk of an adult antisocial personality disorder diagnosis has been shown to be increased by a range of childhood psychiatric conditions: (1) major depression at age 14 (e.g. Kasen et al., 2001), (2) oppositional defiant disorder diagnosed age 7–12 (e.g. Loeber, Burke, & Lahey, 2002), (3) conduct disorder diagnosed age 9–16 (e.g. Harrington, Fudge, Rutter, Pickles, & Hill, 1991), and substance abuse observed age 7–12 (e.g. Loeber, Burke, & Lahey, 2002). Particular features of parenting and parents have also been good predictors of later offending and violence including: (1) antisocial diagnosis and/or behaviour in the parent when the child is age 8–10 (e.g. Smith & Farrington, 2004), (2) poor supervision of 8-year-olds (e.g. Farrington, 1995), (3) abuse when the child is under age 12 (e.g. Widom, 1989), and (3) early or late exposure to domestic violence, which appears to predict not just violence but also violence to the individual’s own child (e.g. Moffitt & Caspi, 2003). In addition, of course, wider social factors have also been shown to play a part, including obvious risk factors such as association in adolescence with a deviant peer group (e.g. Lipsey & Derzon, 1998) and being in a high-delinquency school (e.g. Farrington, 1995).

Knowledge of risk factors on its own is only of limited value. Risk factors that clearly have causal significance and are open to modification as part of prevention are of greatest practical relevance. Unmodifiable risk factors (e.g. gender) or modifiable risk factors that antedate the problem of violence but are not part of a causal process such as peer delinquency are of limited value. For example, peer delinquency may be as much a consequence of a delinquent and violent predisposition as its cause (Farrington, Loeber, Yin, & Anderson, 2002). Broadly speaking, the greater the number of risk domains that are entailed in the history of a particular case, the higher the risk of violent antisocial behaviour (Loeber, Stouthamer-Loeber, et al., 2002). Violence is the end product of a chain of events over the course of a child’s development, where risks accumulate and reinforce each other (Maughan & Rutter, 2001). So, for example, low IQ will place a child at increased risk of experiencing problems at school, which in turn can create major problem behaviours that lead to exclusion, and failing to graduate can lead to employment problems that in turn increase the risk of persistent antisocial behaviour. This is the argument for ensuring that violence-prevention programmes must simultaneously target multiple risk factors. There is further valuable epidemiological information to be gained from understanding why certain factors appear to moderate the impact of risk factors. These characteristics, usually termed protective factors (Garmezy & Masten, 1994), appear to interrupt the causal chain of risk. For example, in the case of risk factors for violence, we know that characteristics such as shyness and inhibition, intelligence, a close relationship with at least one adult, good school or sporting achievements, and non-antisocial peers can positively moderate the impact of risk factors (Losel & Bender, 2003).

The developmental approach to violence

Developmental approaches to violence share the basic assumption that correlates of violent behaviour contribute to the developmental process that permits the emergence of violence. A range of family factors are implicated in the risk process of violence. These include inadequate monitoring or supervision, abuse and neglect by parents, exposure to family violence (intragenerational transmission of abuse), parental drug or alcohol abuse (particularly maternal), problems in attachment to parents or caregivers, absent fathers, family disruption, and harsh or erratic discipline. The prevalence of violent delinquency peaks at around the age of 17 or 18, but more than 50% of persistent juvenile offenders are already “active” by the age of 12 or 13. Most adolescents will commit some delinquent act, but the vast majority of these are minor infractions; only around 6% of adolescents who are persistent offenders account for the majority of violent acts (Moffitt et al., 2002). Tracing the development of the aggression of these young people is clearly the key to prevention.

The little-known brilliant developmentalist who was also Piaget’s statistician, A. R. Jonckheere, was fond of cautioning the unwary that most developmental trends tended to disappear once foot size was included in a statistical model. The same applies to violence. Recent epidemiological data has clarified that if children are followed from school entry to the end of adolescence, the frequency with which they are likely to resort to physical aggression, as reported by parents, teachers, peers, or themselves, decreases with age (foot size) (Tremblay, 2000; Tremblay, Japel, & Perusse, 1999). While physical aggression (violence) decreases, indirect aggression (same intent but no “harm” done) increases, particularly for girls. It seems that physical aggression peaks around perhaps the second year of life, but then in different individuals shows distinct developmental trajectories.

It may seem surprising, but until very recently there has been a dearth of statistical techniques for identifying the typical trajectories. The highly influential proposal of Terrie Moffitt (Moffitt et al., 2002) differentiated between life-course persistent offenders, whose antisocial behaviour begins in childhood only to worsen thereafter, versus adolescence-limited offenders, whose antisocial behaviour begins in adolescence and who desist in young adulthood. Very recent methodological advances have now enabled researchers to move beyond the “ad hoc” categorization procedures for studying developmental trajectories to statistical approaches that allow us empirically to identify clusters of individuals who share common pathways. The first study to apply this technique looked at teachers’ observations of aggression in over 1, 000 boys and girls in Montreal, rated annually between the ages of 6 and 15, and identified four typical trajectories (Nagin & Tremblay, 2001): 17 percent were never aggressive; 4% showed high physical aggression from 6–15 years; 28% started with high levels of aggression and became less and less physically aggressive; and the largest group had relatively low aggression, which nevertheless decreased with maturity. The group whose level of aggression stayed high were more likely to have teenage mothers and mothers with low education.

A further study from Pittsburgh of developmental trajectories of 284 low-income boys from 2 to 8 years yielded similar clusters, with 14% always low, 6% always high, 38% high but decreasing, and 43% moderate and decreasing, in parental reports of violence (Shaw, Gilliom, Ingoldsby, & Nagin, 2002). Children who failed to show a decrease in their aggression did not differ in their IQ, maternal age or education but had shown more fearlessness at age 2 and had had more rejecting mothers compared to the group who were also initially highly aggressive but whose aggression declined over the six years of the study. Maternal depression also played a role. Children who followed the chronic or the initially high then gradually declining trajectories both had mothers with a high level of depression. Thus, children who do not desist from violence are more likely to have been fearless at age 2 and to have had teenage mothers with low education who are more rejecting and to have high levels of depression.

While in the original Montreal study there was no suggestion of a significant group of children who showed physical aggression in adolescence having successfully inhibited physical aggression throughout childhood, in a more recent report looking at impulsivity rather than physical violence, and with a larger sample, a group of boys were identified whose impulsivity became marked after age 9 years continuing to rise to age 12 (Cote, Tremblay, Nagin, Zoccolillo, & Vitaro, 2002). Furthermore, a self-report study exploring Moffitt’s hypothesis of delinquency trajectories into adulthood found an adolescence-limited group of delinquents (33%), a persistent group of delinquents who remained delinquent through to young adulthood (7%), and a further group whose delinquency increased from age 12 steadily to age 31 (13%) (White, Bates, & Buyske, 2001). Moffitt’s own report of the follow-up at age 26 of the Dunedin cohort (Moffitt et al., 2002) succeeded in differentiating the early-onset life-course persistent from the adolescent-onset groups but disappointingly found that violent offences remained significantly elevated both in terms of self-report and convictions among the so-called adolescence-limited offenders.

These initial findings have been more or less entirely confirmed by reanalysis of six sets of longitudinal data (Broidy et al., 2003). Data from six sites and three countries examined the developmental course of physical aggression in childhood and analysed its linkage to violent and non-violent offending outcomes in adolescence: (1) the Montreal sample of 1,161 boys, recruited at age 6, assessed annually from ages 10 to 17 years; (2) the Quebec provincial sample of about 1,000, including both girls and boys who had yearly assessments from 6 to 12 years interviewed at age 15; (3) the Christchurch Health and Development Study (New Zealand), which was a birth cohort of 1,265 children (635 boys and 630 girls) assessed at birth, at 4 months, annually from age 1 to age 16, and at age 18; (4) the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (New Zealand) of 535 boys and 502 girls, assessed since the children were 3 years old, with the latest assessment at age 26; (5) the Pittsburgh Youth Study of 1,517 boys, who initially were in Grades 1, 4, or 7, regularly followed up over 12 years; and (6) the Child Development Project, which is a multi-site US longitudinal study of 585 families (52% boys), assessed on a yearly basis children, parents, and teachers. The simultaneous analysis of the six samples by Broidy et al. (2003) led the authors to conclude that there appears to be a continuity in problem behaviour from childhood to adolescence and that such continuity is especially acute when early problem behaviour takes the form of physical aggression. Chronic physical aggression during the elementary-school years seems specifically to increase the risk for continued physical violence as well as other non-violent forms of delinquency during adolescence. This was true, however, only for boys, because the results indicate no clear linkage between childhood physical aggression and adolescent offending among female samples.

Violence is unlearned, not learned

The new data from the clustering of developmental trajectories has brought a shift of emphasis to the developmental understanding of violence. Historically, models of aggression have tended to focus on how human aggression is acquired through learning, rehearsal, and reinforcement of aggression-related knowledge structures (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). Yet aggression appears to be there as a problem from early childhood, arguably from toddlerhood and perhaps from birth. It is the failure of normal developmental processes to deal with something that is naturally occurring that violence ultimately signals.

At this juncture we should perhaps acknowledge Freud (1920g, 1930a) and classical psychoanalytic views that have consistently suggested, in line with modern developmental data, that social experience is there to tame a destructiveness that is inherent in humanity. Psychoanalysts expect to find violence in all individuals since it is a fundamental destructive urge, or, in Freud’s words, an “independent aggressive instinct” (Freud, 1930a). The word “independent” is crucial, showing aggression to be much more than a secondary phenomenon only coming into being as a result of external pressures: “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness” (p. 111). Biological predisposition and social influence do not create destructiveness, but, rather, compromise the social processes that normally serve to regulate and tame it. Not that aggression always shows the failure of some system. We shall argue that environment can spectacularly fail in providing the infant with the wherewithal to come to regulate, pacify, or tame his destructive potential. Violence may be the individual’s attempt to tackle a damaging environment and as such, can be seen as a sign of life, as Winnicott (1958) called it, a sign of our struggles to carry on as living beings under intolerable conditions. The innate aggression theory must take proper account of the existence of positive, survival-oriented aggression and also of aggression that is a genuine protest against very considerable hardships in life.

Thus, it appears that violence ultimately signals the failure of normal developmental processes to deal with something that naturally occurs. Biological predisposition and social influence do not create destructiveness but, rather, compromise the social processes that normally serve to regulate and “tame” it. The key concerns of prevention are the individual, behavioural, family, and wider societal characteristics of the boys who do not desist from aggression during childhood.

The quality of early relationships and violence: the attachment theory framework

Attachment and self-regulation

Conceiving of the development of violence as a failure of the normal developmental process allows us to reconsider what we know about risk. The longitudinal data suggest that the socialization of natural aggression occurs through developing self-control. Self-control requires attentional mechanisms and symbolization (Posner & Rothbart, 2000). Self-control and symbolization depend on the mother–child relationship (Belsky & Fearon, 2002). The attachment relationship is therefore quite likely to be a key component of the socialization of natural aggression. We can therefore expect a poorly functioning attachment system to increase the risk of violence.

Among the important evolutionary purposes of attachment is the socialization of natural aggression through developing self-control through the efficient exercise of attentional mechanisms and symbolization (Fonagy, 2003a). Given that the attachment system is driven by the infant’s anxiety (seeking a secure base to obtain safety), a formulation that places attachment processes at the centre of mastering aggression is consistent with fearlessness as a predictor of the failure to tame the aggressiveness of early childhood. Fearlessness compromises the normal functioning of the attachment system. If the infant is “fearless” the attachment system is bound to be dysfunctional. The attachment system is driven by the infant’s anxiety (seeking a secure base to obtain safety). Fearless infants will not seek contact with the primary caregiver and therefore will not acquire the control mechanisms there to “tame” the aggressiveness of early childhood. A recent study of 310 low-income boys followed from 1.5 to 6 years examined the relationship of attachment and the child’s capacity to self-regulate anger in a frustration task (Gilliom, Shaw, Beck, Schonberg, & Lukon, 2002). The boys classified as secure in their attachment at the age of 1.5 years were more likely to disengage from frustrating stimuli and to ask when and how obstacles would be removed. Positive maternal controls also helped children learn to shift attention to less frustrating aspects of the environment because this strategy had been modelled in dyadic interaction. Rejecting mothers failed to model distraction used to reduce frustration, and in addition they modelled anger as a primary affective response to challenging situations and a means of influencing others.

A similar line of developmental findings has emerged from the exceptionally elegant studies of Grazyna Kochanska (Kochanska, Gross, Lin, & Nichols, 2002). In laboratory testing repeated annually between 1.5 and 4.5 years, she led children to believe that they had damaged a valuable toy. The child’s emotional reaction was coded for signs of guilt. Again, fearlessness signalled a likely absence of guilt, but negative mothering—in particular, maternal power assertion—appeared to undermine the development of children’s guilt. Importantly, power assertion at 22 months predicted less guilt at 33 months, implying that the mother’s use of positive influence—the lesser use of threat, pressure, negative comments, or anger—increased the likelihood of the child manifesting appropriate guilt, which is likely to be another self-limiting influence on aggression.

Mentalization

It has been suggested that our progress from non-human primate to Homo sapiens rests in our capacity to presume and understand the subjective experience of our conspecifics (Tomasello, 1999), what my colleagues and I have called mentalization (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002). Mentalization is the capacity to interpret the behaviour of others (and oneself) as explicable in terms of m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• SERIES FOREWORD
• EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• Introduction: the therapeutic work and theoretical framework
• CHAPTER ONE Early life trauma and the psychogenesis and prevention of violence
• CHAPTER TWO Violence in children
• CHAPTER THREE The kick of life
• CHAPTER FOUR Violence and babies
• CHAPTER FIVE Non-retaliation: surviving a violent 5-year-old
• CHAPTER SIX A little boy left alone
• CHAPTER SEVEN Neutralizing terror
• CHAPTER EIGHT Finding abused children's voices: junior-school living nightmares
• REFERENCES
• INDEX