The Intergenerational Transmission of Childhood Exposure to Violence: Behavioural and Biological Mechanisms

Importance The intergenerational transmission of childhood exposure to violence has powerful clinical and social consequences, consolidating social adversity and psychopathology in future generations. The 2007 Policy Briefing by the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, “Preventing child maltreatment in Europe: a public health approach” (Briefing), recognizes that “there is an association between maltreatment in childhood and the risk of later ... becoming a perpetrator of violence or other antisocial behaviour as a teenager or adult”. The report also highlights that the costs are both overt (for example, medical care for victims, treatment of offenders and legal costs for social care) and less obvious (for example, criminal justice and prosecution costs, specialist education and mental health provision). In Europe, only the United Kingdom has calculated the total economic burden, estimated to be £735 million in 1996 (Briefing). There is no doubt that an enormous amount of work and resources are going into prevention strategies and public health approaches: however, it is surprising that very little research has been conducted in humans to try to understand why childhood maltreatment is passed from one generation to the next, and what are the biological and molecular mechanisms underlying this intergenerational effect. With the recent document on the “Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health” (Collins et al., 2011) underscoring the need for research that uses a life-course approach, and indicating the identification of “modifiable social and biological risk factors across the life course” as one of the grand challenges to be addressed urgently, this issue is also extremely timely.