DR. MAUREEN SAMMS-VAUGHAN, chairperson, Early Childhood Commission/development consultant and behavioural paediatrician:
VIOLENCE AND aggression in adulthood ... starts with a child who is difficult, then progresses to a child with conduct problems, then risk taking behaviour and then anti-social criminal and violent behaviour. This has been found across different countries.
Probably the most striking bit of research was done in the United Kingdom when they followed 400 men from birth to 48 years and they found that the most important factors leading to violence and criminality in these adults were factors that started in the first eight years of life. These factors are:
A daring and risk-taking child before the age of eight years;
Family dysfunction particularly the absence of a mother;
Poor school performance, under-achievement and
Exposure to violence (via a parent convicted of a violent offence).
When we looked at the adult men (U.K. study) and we looked at children 11 to 12, the factors were strikingly similar. Exposure to violence was the major one. Our (studies) were the children's own experiences - children who had witnessed shooting and children who had been victims of stabbing, robbery and sexual assault.
There was family dysfunction manifested by children being moved from one caregiver to another and multiple parenting; poor school achievement and a risk-taking adolescent.
... We now know that at birth you have channels that connect the brain cells and neurons ... If you expose a child to violence, you are in a different channel, and if you expose a child to love and care and affection you are in a separate channel. Children exposed to aggression and violence get wired in their brains for aggression and violence.
NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES
When you are talking here about interventions that must deal with caring for children in those first few years of life, the emotional development of the brain has a critical window period. If you don't do it right in the first few years, you can correct it later on but it is going to take therapy. But if we wire the brains right from the start, then we develop children who have different responses to violence.
A Jamaican child starts off with, as soon as they are able to walk, being told how bad and rude they are because parents do not understand the developmental stages of a child. Then they get exposed to corporal punishment ... Then the children get their exposure to domestic violence. Then... they get exposed to the high level of community violence ... We imprint on them this continuous package of violence ... clearly we will have to address this at the root level. We really have to be caring about parents ...
Apart from educating parents, we also have to make sure that parental mental health is good. A stressed parent cannot care for a child appropriately, and a depressed or anxious parent, or stressed from any other factors, including their own exposure to violence, will react differently to a child. We also address the level of exposure children have to community violence.
