The Neurodevelopmental Impact of Violence in Childhood

Introduction We humans are the most complex and puzzling of living creatures. We can create, nurture, protect, educate and enrich. Yet we also degrade, humiliate, enslave, hate, destroy and kill. A man can tenderly hold his newborn and moments later beat the baby's mother. Violence permeates our history. In all societies and in each culture, past and present, violence has played a role in shaping our sociocultural evolution. While no society has been able to break free from violence, there is tremendous variation in the type and degree of violence across cultures and time. In some cultures, random street violence has been suppressed with oppressive institutional violence, in others, inter-familial violence is rare but intra-familial violence – violence to wives and children – is rampant. Today, in the United States, despite remarkable advances in technology, social justice, and education, violence continues to be a permeating and pervasive element of American society. We are bathed in violent images. Violence fascinates and repulses us. Whether journalist, producer, politician or scholar, we consider, comment on and analyze violence. We have academic conferences, Congressional hearings, special documentaries-we issue opinions, create task forces, start programs, blame guns, blame Hollywood, blame parents. Yet no simple solutions emerge. We continue to be shocked, enraged and confused by the horrors of violence in our homes, schools and streets. 3 How can we truly begin to understand the heterogeneity and complexity of the violence that surrounds us – random violence and institutionalized violence, the violence in behaviors, the violence in ideas, the violence in words? Can we ever understand the detached adolescent killing his classmates in school, mothers killing their infants, husbands killing wives, children and themselves? Can we understand random bombing of civilians in the name of God? Can we understand systematic or institutionalized rape, torture, slavery, and genocide? Violence and its associated factors are complex and multidimensional. The present chapter will consider only one of many perspectives from which to examine violence: the impact of violence and fear on the development of the child. More specifically, violence-related neurodevelopmental changes and functional consequences of these alterations in the brain will be reviewed. This view is presented with the hope that some of devastating cost of violence to the individual child, family, community and society can be illustrated from a neurodevelopmental perspective. Childhood is a dangerous time. For infants and children, survival is dependent upon adults, most typically, the …