Analysis on how child abuse predisposes a person to commit crimes. why does it exist?

Child maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is a major social problem. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Pp. 12, over a million children are victims of maltreatment annually. Over half a million children suffer serious injuries, and about 1,500 children die, making child maltreatment the leading cause of deaths from injuries in children over a year old. In addition to this appalling immediate toll, child abuse is thought to have many harmful long-term consequences. (Scher Pp. 167)This paper focuses on the effect of child maltreatment on crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of the most socially costly potential outcomes of maltreatment, and because the proposed mechanisms linking maltreatment and crime are relatively well elucidated in the literature. The link between child maltreatment and crime is a staple of the news media. For example, the media noted that John Muhammad, the Washington D.C. sniper, was “regularly and severely beaten as a child by several relatives, including an uncle who beat another child to death…”. Child neglect is also often implicated. Neighbors of a nine-yearold who stabbed her best friend to death were reported to have “angrily blamed the young attacker's absent, alcoholic mother yesterday for the Memorial Day tragedy”. Yet there is little hard evidence available about the effects of child maltreatment on crime, and there is criticism of the extent to which a “cycle of violence” has been substantiated in the literature (c.f. Widom, Pp. 79). Several recent studies have examined the long-term consequences of child maltreatment using designs that are more sophisticated than those critiqued by the NRC panel. The first group establishes a cross-sectional relationship between past experiences of maltreatment and other adverse events, and current risky behaviors/outcomes. In addition (ACEs) increase the risk for depressed affect, suicide attempts, multiple sexual partners, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking, and alcoholism. Dube et al. (2003b) provides further evidence about the relationship between ACEs and adult use of illicit drugs, While provocative, these relationships do not necessarily imply that ACE's cause risky behaviors, however. If, for example, poverty is associated with ACE's then the fact that people with ACE's have higher rates of criminal activity could actually reflect a causal relationship between poverty and involvement in crime. Moreover, many ACE studies aggregate maltreatment with other forms of household dysfunction rather than trying to separately identify the effect of maltreatment. Some studies that describe themselves as “longitudinal” also rely on an essentially cross sectional comparison between adults who say they were abused at some point before the study began, and other adults (c.f. Silverman et al. 1996 The first two studies conclude that while some of the observed relationship 7 between maltreatment and negative outcomes is due to shared family background variables, maltreated twins in discordant pairs are more likely than their twins to suffer negative ...