Criminogenic trauma: Social history and the life course.

Abstract

It could have had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As we make decisions and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might have been.-DANIELLE ALLEN 1 S everal decades of psychological theory and research now document the basic proposition that events that occur in childhood and adolescence can profoundly influence and affect adult behavior. Psychologists have long known that children need to be provided with "dependable attachment, protection, guidance, stimulation, nurturance, and ways of coping with adversity" during their early years of growth and development. 2 But we also now know that a very high percentage of persons who violate the law have lacked many of these things in their early lives and have been exposed instead to forms of psychological trauma, including what I explained in the last chapter have been termed "risk factors." Of course, the two facts are not unrelated. We now know that certain risk factors and traumatic experiences can be highly criminogenic, especially when they occur in combination. As I discuss at length in this chapter, there is much evidence that a great many persons who commit crime were exposed to multiple, serious, and chronic criminogenic risks and traumas as children and adolescents, casting grave doubt on the causal emphasis that the crime master narrative places on the