intergenerational trauma decision making

7 This gaping disproportionality can only be understood through the lens of the intergenerational transmission of the trauma of the racial and ethnic violence on which the United States was founded. In 2016, approximately thirty-seven of every one hundred thousand Black men died from homicide for White men, it was approximately four of every one hundred thousand. 6 An individual or community becomes traumatized when those psychological and emotional wounds persist without adequate coping supports, or they are repeatedly exposed to new traumatic experiences without the time needed to recover from the previous trauma.Įspecially for population health issues like interpersonal violence, racial and ethnic inequality in ecological context cannot be ignored. Stress becomes traumatic when it is accompanied with the loss of physical, psychological, and/or emotional safety in ways that overwhelm an individual’s or community’s ability to cope. 5 Almost everyone experiences at least one potentially traumatic event, and most of those events, instead of being traumatic, spur the development of new competencies. Trauma is not the event itself, but the psychological and emotional wounds that persist after the traumatic event has passed. 4 Essentially, victims of abuse and neglect are at significantly elevated risk for engaging in violent behaviors, but the overwhelming majority do not develop violent patterns of behavior as adolescents.Įvents capable of causing trauma span a wide range of situations including mental, physical, verbal, and sexual abuse exposure to community and domestic violence food and housing insecurity and many other adverse life events. Despite this, research consistently shows that the overwhelming majority of these children do not engage in outward displays of violence: only 20 to 30 percent of abused and neglected children engage in violent behaviors as adolescents. The combination of chronic exposure to traumatic events and limited access to coping supports describes the life contexts of many children growing up in low-income families residing in low-income neighborhoods. There is a meaningful perceptual difference between discussing the behaviors of a violent person and discussing a person who engaged in violent behaviors the former is more likely to be associated with immutable characteristics of a person, and the latter is more likely to be associated with attempts at understanding social and contextual causes of the behavior. 3īecause the focus of this essay is on understanding the development and maintenance of violent behavior patterns for the purpose of identifying points of prevention and intervention, close attention is paid to using person-centered language that does not conflate exhibiting violent behaviors with being a violent person.

It is when the trauma of violence–cultural, economic, and interpersonal violence–in one generation goes unhealed that it is passed down to the next, in one form or another. To advance this framing, throughout this essay, I use the term intergenerational transmission of trauma and violence rather than transmission of violence.

2 From this vantage point, prevention can be conceptualized first as prevention of victimization and second as resilience supports for victims. 1 The importance of shifting our gaze to the long lead-up to violent offending is highlighted by research showing that early experiences of victimization are a stronger predictor of later involvement in violence than is early involvement in violence. This focus underutilizes the wealth of research detailing the host of risk and protective factors that determine the likelihood that any given child growing up with traumatic levels of adversity will become an adolescent with violent patterns of behavior. When it comes to the intergenerational transmission of trauma and violence, the imagination of American policy-makers has largely remained stuck on what to do after victims become victimizers.

Intergenerational trauma decision making