Are children who suffer abuse destined to become adults who live a life of crime and violence, and someday abuse their own children? Thirty years ago, many people—experts and laypeople alike—believed that the answer to this bleak question was yes. But research was scarce.
Since then, a three-decade longitudinal study led by Cathy Spatz Widom, PhD, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has shown that the truth is considerably more complicated.
Widom has followed a cohort of more than 900 people who were victims of child abuse in the 1960s and 1970s, identified through court records from that time. Early on, she found that although child abuse increased the risk of adult crime and violence, most abused children did not grow up to become criminals. More recently, she's also explored whether those children grew up to become abusers themselves.
In 2016, Widom was honored for her work with the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, which recognizes outstanding achievements in criminological research. She spoke to the Monitor about her findings and their implications.
What are some of the key findings from your research?
In our first paperopens in new window, [published in Science in 1989], we found that the vast majority of maltreated children did not go on to become delinquents or adult criminals or violent offenders—which was a surprise to everybody at the time. That was an archival study based on arrest records [comparing the arrest records of children who had been abused with a control group].
So, then we had to ask, what has happened to these people? Are they dead, are they in institutions, are they drug addicts? Or are they fine? That was the impetus for my first wave of interviews—in-person interviews looking at psychiatric outcomes, depression, PTSD, alcohol and basic functioning across multiple domains.
There have been four waves of interviews since then, and typically what I have done is to think about what is an important public health question that comes from the results of each previous wave of this study, and that has really directed each next wave's major questions.
The most recent waveopens in new window looked at the intergenerational transmission of violence. What did you find?
We started out with the assumption that physical abuse in a person's history would lead to them becoming a perpetrator of abuse against their own children or someone else's children. That was the prevailing assumption up until recently.
But there hadn't been a comprehensive assessment of the question. And it's a very challenging question to answer because official reports only represent a small portion of child-maltreatment cases, and self-reports have biases as well.
So, we looked at three sources of information: child protection service agency records, parents' self-reports on whether they had engaged in abusive behaviors, and their children's self-reports on whether they had been abused or neglected. By using all three sources of information, we hoped to be able to come up with a more solid answer.
What we found was really surprising: There was an increase in risk for parents who had histories of abuse and neglect to have children who were maltreated—but it was the neglected parents and the sexually abused parents, not the physically abused parents [whose children were most at risk]. That was pretty consistent across the sources of information.
Any theories as to why?
One possibility is because of all of the attention to physical abuse and punishment over the years. Maybe the incidence of such abuse has gone down because people are spontaneously breaking the cycle of violence.
But you would also think that there's been a lot of attention to sexual abuse, so if that were the case, you would think that those parents might be sensitive to these issues, too. It's all really complicated … and we still don't know enough about it.
We also found that there's more surveillance [by authorities], and therefore presumably more detection of abuse in families where one parent has a history of abuse and neglect. In one analysis, we looked at parents who said they were abusing a child. But only a certain fraction of those people had come to the attention of Child Protective Services. And the same thing with the analysis of the children. Among children who said they were being abused and neglected, the ones who had parents who had these histories of abuse were 2.5 times more likely [to be reported to CPS].
How have these findings shaped policy?
The research has influenced the way police act when they go into homes and find [neglected or abused] children there. For example, the New York City police department mentioned the research when it instituted new procedures for police response and follow-up in cases involving suspected child abuse and neglect in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The study has also influenced how public funds can be used to help abused and neglected children. I testified before Congress on behalf of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 2002, which allowed state block grant money—which normally goes to the prevention of delinquency—to have a broader definition of what is considered prevention of delinquency. So some of that block grant money can now be used to provide services to abused and neglected kids, which hasn't been done before.
