This AVITH in Context webinar focused on the topic of childhood maltreatment and adult aggression was facilitated by Karalyn Davies (Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare).
The webinar featured a panel of researchers, the panel included:
In this session, we heard from researchers from Deakin University, who investigated the links between childhood maltreatment and aggression in adults, and the moderating role of neurocognitive ability and substance use. While this research does not look specifically at young people, some of the findings have obvious implications for our work with younger cohorts.
The point of understanding these links is not about excusing or minimising violence and aggression, it’s about making sure that our service responses have the greatest chance of being effective.
There are a few ways in which childhood maltreatment can make aggression more likely, such as aggression being learned via observing (e.g., through a cycle of violence), inconsistent caregiving which can lead to patterns of antisocial behaviour, and through an extended stress response.
Maltreatment disrupts a young person’s neurobiological development which sees the brain’s priority shift from growth to preservation and survival. This shift can impact upon emotion processing, cognitive control, behavioural regulation and other brain functions. Over time these changes to the brain can contribute to conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), where the brain is hyper-attuned to danger and loses sense of rational control. As such, these impairments that stem from experiences of maltreatment can contribute to the use of aggression.
These impairments that stem from experiences of maltreatment can result in a physiological limitations that lead to reduced capacity to pay attention, difficulties in remembering new information, inability to select appropriate goals, reduced capacity to prioritise and organise activities, challenges in integrating feedback, and difficulties in adapting to new environmental demands by altering behaviour.
The research found that the cumulative impacts of physical maltreatment, high drug use risk, and poor response inhibition increases the risk of aggressive behaviour. Additionally, each of these factors alone also increased the risk of engaging in aggressive behaviour.
Physical maltreatment, high drug use risk and poor response inhibition each increases the risk of aggressive behaviour. When these factors are all at play, the cumulative impact is even greater.
This finding supports the ‘cycle of violence’ theory (if you have been exposed to or experienced violence in childhood, then you have an increased likelihood of engaging in violence across the lifespan).
Poor response inhibition can make it difficult to reduce aggressive behaviour or delaying the reaction in the moment. The inability to inhibit automatic responses may negatively impact on the translation of skills learnt in an intervention to real-world situations in which provocation occurs. As a preventative measure, practitioners could encourage practicing mindfulness and other individualised ways of providing a circuit breaker to slow things down for the young person and increase chance of cognition about the situation.
If practitioners are aware of how maltreatment experiences can predict risk of aggression across the lifespan, they can consider the impact on development and ability for the person to engage with interventions. Interventions might focus on trauma-informed approaches such as trauma-focused CBT, and well as interventions for children to disrupt to the trajectory to aggressive behaviour in adulthood.
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