Criminal Types

[steepholm]

Remember ASBOs in the Womb? Now comes the scientific justification. According to Joanna Nicholas, interviewed on this morning's Today programme, children from abusive homes are more or less criminals from the time they're born, because they have quite different brains from the rest of us.

The exchange comes 1:56 into the programme:

Joanna Nicholas: What people need to understand is that if a child is born in a house where there is domestic abuse, even before that child's born the make-up of their brain will be completely different from a child where there is---
John Humphrys [interested]: Really?
Joanna Nicholas: Yes, totally different. And how that manifests itself is, as that child grows up it has a lack of what we call victim empathy, so a complete emotional numbness. They have no understanding of the damage they're doing to other people, and when you talk to people who work in youth offending they say exactly this.

Now, Joanna Nicholas is a social worker, not a radio professional (still less a scientist), but this didn't sound like a slip of the tongue to me. If it really is the common belief of people who work in youth offending that all children born in abusive households become sociopaths in utero, then wtf!? Ben Goldacre, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

Oh right, thou art.

Edited: for clarity: 14.42

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

WTF???? I'm sure this bit is true: as that child grows up it has a lack of what we call victim empathy, so a complete emotional numbness. They have no understanding of the damage they're doing to other people

- but surely it's down to environment, not heredity?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

And I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply to every child born into a household where there is abuse, as she suggests!

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I do agree that growing up in an abusive environment fucks you up in a way Philip Larkin probably wasn't thinking of. And since being in any sort of dysfunctional environment can mean that people internalize certain behaviours as normative when they really aren't, I expect that the more abusive the atmosphere, especially where there is physical abuse, the harder it is for people to recognize that their world is not normal. AND, I know people who grew up in 'normal', stable households who are really not all that empathetic, are very self-focused, and are prone to emotional and sometimes physical) abuse, creating dysfunctional relationships all around themselves.

Based entirely on anecdata like this (last time I looked, I was not a criminal, violent or otherwise ...), I would say that it's *mostly* environmental, but that we are also innately the people we are. Dunno if that's genetic, but I do think it's nature.

But then, I think most parents of multiple children know that -- two kids, same environment, more or less, totally different ways of handling things, for example.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I agree with most of that, but this woman seems to be saying that children in abusive households are all born sociopaths, with different brain structures to the rest of humanity. (Caused not by genetics, it seems, but by the environment in utero.) And that this is the common belief of people who work with youth offenders.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I heard her, and yes -- although I thought she also made the point that one of the issues is that, although one can predict which families are going to produce children who grow up to be violent or abusive (i.e., you can look at some families and think, "I hope they never have kids because he's a drunken lout who beats her and her father beat her mother and her mother beat the kids," kind of prediction), social services can't DO anything till there's evidence of an actual problem, by which time it might be too late?

But yes, I agree with your main point and concern about the fact that the people who work with youth offenders have already pretty much given up on them, which just perpetuates the problem.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think it's entirely possible, even likely, that growing up in an abusive household affects brain development -- just as chronic neglect has been proved to do. And I think it's possible that the damage may begin before birth. I can accept that in some cases the damage done may not be fully reversible. What I can't accept is social workers using that as an excuse not to make things better wherever they can. I think & hope Nicolas might have been betrayed into a common error among professionals seeking to explain things to the lay listener -- a sort of hyperbole that results from simplification.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think it's entirely possible, even likely, that growing up in an abusive household affects brain development -- just as chronic neglect has been proved to do. And I think it's possible that the damage may begin before birth.

I don't find this idea implausible, but it's the absoluteness of saying that every child born in that situation will be affected, and that the brain structure will be "completely" and "totally" different from that of other children, which I find shocking. The irony is that the conclusion she drew from this was that we ought not to condemn them, because they are after all only children - but with stigmatizing defences like this, who needs prosecutors?