Violence: A preventable disease

Jess Stevenson looks at the link between child abuse and violent crime.

Nearly nine months on and the parents of three-year-old Tiffany Wright have just been convicted of manslaughter. Suffering from bronchial pneumonia - a direct result of malnutrition, Tiffany was found dead in a beetle-infested room two days after her mother had last checked on her. Tests had shown she had not eaten anything for 20 hours or more, and entirely neglected she weighed just one and a half stone.

Wave

In today’s world it’s hard to believe that such horrific child abuse is still happening, but this is precisely why George Hosking set up the Worldwide Alternatives to Violence [WAVE] twelve years ago. In an unwavering voice, he explains how a horrendous case of child abuse in London motivated him to set up the international charity that aims to address the root cause of violence.

“Two children were murdered by their parents, when I read about them, I realised that being murdered was the best thing that ever happened to them. Something snapped inside me at that point and I said I can’t live in a world where things like this happen to children and I do nothing about it,” he says.

Since then WAVE has been campaigning to raise awareness of the root cause of violence whilst aiming to find and promote global best practice in addressing these root causes. In a climate of rising violence, anti-social behaviour and knife crime the importance of WAVE’s message is not lost: violence is a disease that is preventable.

A new kind of brain

Source: Perry and Pollard 1997

In an interview with The Independent, Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the youth charity Kids Company, pin-pointed the issue: “social and emotional deprivation is creating a new kind of brain,” she said. Far from the view that violent offenders are genetically predisposed to violence, the view now is that rather than being innate, a propensity to violence is laid down by pathways created in the brain by early life experience.

“The infant brain in the first 18 months in particular, but in fact the whole three years is very much influenced by the experience of the children in that period,” explains Hosking. “The brains become hard wired by the experience they undergo. If that experience is one of trauma, deprivation, abuse and so in, then that creates a different size of brain, a different structure of brain and a different chemistry of brain from one which is brought up in a healthy environment.”

Managing stress

According to Dr Suzanne Zeedyk from the School of Psychology, Dundee University, the flexibility of infant’s brains means that human babies are born with the expectation of having stress managed for them. She says stress for a baby is not just abuse, aggression, and neglect but basic survival: being hungry, cold, wet, scared and being left to cry on their own. Too much of the stress hormone cortisol and a babies brain will put the brakes on relaxation, their immune system, and brain growth. A well cared for healthy baby on the other hand will be able to develop the social part of their brain through a loving bond with its parents and so become able to feel empathy with others.

“One of the greatest single inhibitors to violent behaviour is empathy,” says Hosking. “When people have empathy it’s very very difficult for them to be violent, and if they are violent it’s very difficult to continue to be violent, because they actually feel the pain of their victim. People who perpetrate violence on a regular basis or in a serious way, typically have no feeling of empathy for their victims,” he comments, adding: “One of the key things we found was that propensity to be violent is largely installed in children by the age of three. I don’t believe they are born with it.”

Children at risk

According to the NSPCC, one child is killed by their parents every ten days. Around 30 thousand children were on the child protection register when it existed, but Hosking estimates that there are probably between one and three million children in the UK suffering from adverse life experiences, which include abuse, neglect, living in a home with domestic violence, an alcoholic or drug addict. Writing in The Times on June 2, Batmanghelidjh, echoed this statement. She argued that around 553,000 children a year are referred to child protection services, but there is only capacity for 30,700 children to have a social worker allocated to help protect them. “The abandoned child waits to deliver his revenge for the danger we expose him to,” she said.

While it is uncertain how high the level of violence is in the UK today, according to the WAVE report current levels of violence are still massively higher than they were 50 years ago, with serious crime tripling between 1991 and 2004.

But according to WAVE, government spending has focused on the consequences of violence rather than prevention.

Violent offenders

As a criminologist Hosking works with violent offenders . While he has only worked with around ten, none of those he helped cure has re-offended with a violent offence. Most had suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – the result of early child abuse. His treatment is clearly very effective but costly compared to other cognitive behaviour programmes used by the prison services.

Phil Crooks, assistant chief probation officer for Lancashire, recently completed a review of the accredited behaviour programmes in the North West of England, but found that the amount of offenders who completed the programmes was down by 50 percent. For those that do get through the programmes he says the evidence appears to be that they stand a much better chance of reducing violent behaviour. However Crooks also mentions that in reality many people in prison will not get access to the programmes unless they are in the right place or are serving a long enough period of time. He highlights a case when four years ago, police in the US cracked an internet child pornography ring leading to the arrest of many people in the UK .

“The courts were awash with people. We had put together very significant packages of intervention that would involve sex offender treatment programmes, three year community orders and so on, and many courts decided that these cases needed custodial sentences of between six and twelve months.

“They had been punished but they had no treatment whatsoever. Something of a frustration really because it doesn’t change behaviour apart from a few who will be scared they’ll get caught again.” He adds: “I’ve never been negative about my job but turning people around at the age of 20 or 30 is significantly harder than turning people around when they are 15 or 16. By the time we get them behaviour is intrinsic to who they are.”

The way forward

Hosking is keen to emphasize blaming parents gets us nowhere. “Most parents who don’t do as much as they could do for their children, are doing their best, they either don’t know what to do, or they are limited by the impact on themselves of their own difficult upbringing. What we need to do now is provide them with adequate levels of support and that requires a paradigm shift in how the government thinks about early years for children,” he says.

While the steps WAVE has taken to promote awareness has made many civil servants, senior police officers and government ministers sit up and take notice, Hosking feels they have a long way to go, despite the implementation of the Roots of Empathy programme [which fosters empathy in school children] in the Isle of Man and the approval of 30 pilot studies of the Nurse Family Partnership which will be rolled out across the UK.

“The government have been very good at listening to our message, but having said that, do I think they could do more? Yes I do, and do they mainly spend money on consequences rather than prevention, yes they do. That is something we want to change,” says Hosking.

“It’s early days, but we want to have a much greater impact, we want to cut child abuse and interpersonal violence. We’re a long way short of what we’re aiming for but we’re happy to feel that we really are beginning to achieve things,” he says positively.

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