Hurt people hurt people. Just because that phrase has become a mantra of therapeutic babble doesn’t mean it’s not true. A study to be published soon in the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests we are significantly underestimating how much child abuse and neglect are intergenerational problems, and how much they can affect the likelihood of a family climbing out of poverty.
Led by Duke University economist Jason Baron, the authors use longitudinal data from California. They find that roughly 70-80% of children who have at least one substantiated report of maltreatment from Child Protective Services also have a parent with prior CPS contact.
“Individuals with substantiated childhood maltreatment are significantly more likely to have children with substantiated maltreatment,” they write.
Is this simply because child abuse and neglect are more concentrated among impoverished families and those families are more likely to be “surveilled”? The study designs attempt to tease out the answer.
One important finding is that children who were likely to be physically abused are more likely to have parents who experienced physical abuse, children who experienced sexual abuse are more likely to have parents who were sexually abused, and children who experienced neglect were more likely to have parents who experienced neglect. Also, “individuals who experienced maltreatment from a biological father are more likely to have children who experience maltreatment from a biological father, with similar patterns for biological mother and non-biological fathers.”
The authors conclude that “these patterns are difficult to reconcile with explanations based solely on persistent poverty, general disadvantage, or increased monitoring, which would be expected to raise overall CPS involvement rather than reproduce specific forms of harm and caregiver relationships.”
Another question is whether there is some genetic basis for this intergenerational maltreatment. This question may seem offensive, as if only a eugenicist would ask such a thing. But these days it is common to claim that some people have “intergenerational trauma” — which does not mean that grandparents abused their parents, and their parents abused them, but rather that their “people” experienced historical injustice and as a result the members of that people are more likely to be poor or use drugs or lack education and so forth.
This theory has trickled down to the point where I recently heard from a couple of undergraduates in a seminar I was teaching that Black people have “trauma imprinted on their DNA” because of “slavery and Jim Crow.” (The two could not point me to the specific place on the genetic code of African-Americans, nor could they tell me how this theory applied to, say, Jews who achieved economic success after the Holocaust.)
The genetic explanation for intergenerational abuse does not seem to hold up in this study. The authors “find similar rates of transmission for individuals maltreated by non-biological caregivers, which is inconsistent with a purely genetic explanation.” They conclude that overall the “results point to the transmission of caregiving behaviors and family dynamics shaped by lived experience.”
What does this mean for policies around child maltreatment? For one thing, it means we should be concerned about an over-reliance on kin for foster care placements. Yes, of course, all things being equal, a child should live with his grandmother when the parents are unable or unwilling to care for them. But we cannot overlook the fact that the mother’s problems may stem from abuse or neglect that she experienced at the hands of her own mother.
Unfortunately, more and more states are creating different — that is, lower — standards for licensing kin for foster care in order to meet what are likely unreasonable goals for greater reliance on relatives.
Connecticut recently announced it wanted to place as many as 70% of its foster children with kin. Pennsylvania lawmakers are about to introduce a bill that would create new standards and among the things that are not automatic disqualifiers for granting foster licenses for kin are certain categories of homicide, kidnapping, incest and promoting prostitution of a minor.
Our collective naïveté about who is likely to perpetrate child abuse and neglect is mindboggling. As is our blindness to the massive effects of this scourge of maltreatment on society’s most vulnerable.
In their final analysis, the authors look at the rates of CPS involvement in a community with regard to economic mobility. Not surprisingly, they find a “a strong negative correlation,” that is “neighborhoods with higher per-capita rates of CPS involvement exhibit considerably lower levels of upward income mobility for children born to low-income families.”
Moreover, they note that “neighborhood rates of CPS involvement remain a leading correlate of low upward mobility after accounting for a set of socioeconomic characteristics, including many of the neighborhood factors previously shown to predict mobility,” including labor market conditions, educational test scores and family structure (meaning single-parent households).
Why don’t we recognize the importance of something as obvious as child abuse and neglect in thinking about children’s life outcomes? It’s a disturbing thing to talk about, but it is also a difficult problem to solve. It’s also hard to fix schools or mitigate poverty or shift the labor market, but these things are issues that legislators and community leaders already have ideas about how to solve.
Stopping parents from mistreating their children is more complicated and taking them out of families where mistreatment can’t be stopped is controversial. But keeping children safe may be the most effective way of giving them a promising future.