Study links childhood trauma and adult aggression

Call for trauma-focused treatment of offenders

Children who experience abuse, neglect and family dysfunction have a heightened risk of developing health problems such as obesity, drug addiction, depression and heart disease in adulthood. That common-sense notion is widely accepted, and has been proven in a series of studies funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente. The Kaiser-CDC project has amassed a large database of the life histories and health trajectories of middle-class residents of San Diego, California.

Now, a San Diego psychologist has deployed that project's Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) survey to link these negative childhood experiences with adult aggression and criminality, including domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking and child abuse.

In fact, the correlation is additive, the new study found: The more types of adversities a man underwent in childhood, the higher his likelihood of engaging in criminal aggression as an adult.

Men in the study who were referred to outpatient treatment following convictions for domestic violence, sexual offending, nonsexual child abuse or stalking reported about four times as many adverse childhood events as men in the general population. Men convicted of sex offenses and child abuse were especially likely to report being sexually abused as children.

The link between early damage and later aggression explains why treatment programs that focus primarily on criminal acts are not very effective, say psychologist James Reavis of San Diego, California and his colleagues.

"To reduce criminal behavior one must go back to the past in treatment, as Freud admonished us nearly 100 years ago," wrote Reavis and co-authors Jan Looman, Kristina Franco and Briana Rojas in an article slated for the Spring 2013 issue of The Permanente Journal. "Fortunately, evidence exists in support of both attachment-based interventions designed to normalize brain functioning and in the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment."

Why the link between abuse and aggression?

Cumulative experiences of abuse and neglect disrupt both a child's ability to form secure attachments to others and his ability to regulate his emotions, the researchers posit. Thus, men abused as youngsters tend to either avoid intimacy altogether or are at risk to become violent in intimate relationships, due to a "bleeding out" of their suppressed inner rage.


Not only must treatment of offenders focus on healing their "neurobiological" wounds, the researchers say, but the findings also point to the need for more early childhood interventions to stop child abuse before its victims grow up to victimize others.

Stay tuned: A second article being prepared for publication will explore the link between early adversity and dysregulation in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that modulates stress responses.

The article, "Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Criminality: How Long Must We Live before We Possess Our Own Lives?" can be requested from the first author, psychologist James Reavis of San Diego (HERE). The article includes a copy of the ACE questionnaire, which is potentially useful in forensic cases as a means of quantifying experiences of child abuse and neglect.

Crime after crime: Battered woman’s struggle for justice

Debbie Peagler was 15 when she met and fell in love with a charming young man named Oliver Wilson. Unfortunately for her, Wilson was a pimp and drug dealer who ferociously abused her over the next six years. He beat her with a bullwhip, prostituted her, forced her to perform oral sex in front of his friends, put hot ashes on her hands and made her eat his feces, according to witnesses. When she said she would leave, he threatened to kill her.

On May 27, 1982, she asked him to drive her to a park. Waiting in ambush were two friends of her mother, neighborhood gang members who killed him. The prosecution maintained that Peagler hired the men. Peagler claimed she never discussed killing Wilson.

Threatened with the death penalty, Peagler pled guilty to first-degree murder and went to prison. And there she would have remained for the rest of her life, if not for a little serendipity.

After California enacted a law in 2000 to ensure fair trials for battered women who killed their abusers, the California Habeas Project selected Peagler as someone who might be eligible for relief. A local law firm, Bingham McCutchen, agreed to take the case pro bono. Two rookie land-use attorneys, Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa, began collecting new evidence to substantiate Peagler’s abuse.

Peagler’s story had deep personal meaning for Safran. As a 9-year-old boy, he helplessly cried through the night as an abusive boyfriend pummeled his mother. Eventually, he and his mother escaped, and he learned to channel his simmering rage into legal advocacy.

Over the course of several years, the attorneys found long-lost witnesses, learned of allegedly perjured evidence, and got new statements from the men who had killed Wilson.

For her part, Peagley was a model prisoner. She had spent her decades behind bars tutoring illiterate women, leading a gospel choir, earning two college degrees, and participating in a battered women’s support group.

Eventually, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office agreed that Peagley should have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, which at the time carried a sentence of only two to six years. Prosecutors signed a statement agreeing to Peagley’s immediate release from prison.

But that happy ending was not to be. After a political backlash in his office, the district attorney reneged on the deal, and Peagley’s petition for release was denied. Meanwhile, the case took on a new urgency when Peagley was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Costa and Safran continued to petition for Peagley’s release on numerous grounds: Her guilty plea was coerced, false evidence was introduced against her, and the original prosecution would have differed had there been expert testimony on battering.

Although the courts failed her, she was finally paroled from prison in August 2009, thanks in part to an international grassroots campaign. She currently lives in Carson, CA.

Sadly, Bay Area private investigator Bobby Buechler, who gathered exculpatory evidence and was involved in the crusade to free Peagley (and whom I happened to know), died unexpectedly shortly before her release.

Filmmaker Yoav Potash spent five years filming the story as it unfolded, both in and out of prison. CRIME AFTER CRIME is the award-winning documentary of this dramatic saga. The film is currently playing around the United States; check HERE for more information and to find a venue near you.

 
Hat tip: Martin

Is Good Lives only for sex offenders?

A reader asked:

How applicable is the Good Lives Model (book review HERE) to working with people who have transgressed in ways other than sex offending?

Answer:

The theory was not developed for sex offenders in particular. It is being adopted for use with sex offenders under the premise that their patterns of desistance from crime are similar to those of other criminal offenders. Many types of rehabilitation programs are turning to the Good Lives Model and other positive psychology approaches. By way of illustration, here is a testimonial from a Canadian psychologist who uses it with men who have engaged in family violence:

We have been using the Good Lives Model (GLM) in a family violence program for men who batter for the past year. The framework allows us to maintain all the traditional processes one might typically see in an offender program. It also supports the use of a variety of strategies pulled from narrative therapy, solution focused therapy, zen psychology, biofeedback, cognitive behavioural, learning theory, etc. while maintaining a cohesive theoretical perspective.

The GLM approach supports a stronger focus on offender engagement. We find that the men are more able to see what their role is in therapy. We have been conducting exit interview with clients as they complete the program. It is interesting to hear how the values embedded in the program are translated into their narratives. I rarely heard this kind of ownership of change from men when we were teaching a relapse prevention-style group.

I found that shifting to the GLM from a purely cognitive-behavioral, relapse prevention, risk-needs-responsivity approach allowed me to align my understanding of what constitutes good therapy from the effective counselling literature (i.e., the therapeutic engagement of the client). At times I have found the strict manualized approaches to treatment to be more "psycho-educational" than therapeutic.

Our population is largely non-convicted, self-referred men where drop out rates are typically very high. People are finishing this program. Our outcome measures suggest clients experience an increase in self-monitoring, emotional self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility, with reductions in perceived levels of anger and aggression.

I did relapse-prevention sex offender programming for many years and continue to integrate those materials and strategies into the current curriculum. We just get to add a lot more and have the theoretical underpinning to back up our efforts.

Thanks to Ann Marie Dewhurst, Ph.D. of Edmonton for giving me permission to post this example of the Good Lives Model in action.

Domestic violence risk training in Oregon

On October 15, Northwest Forensic Institute is presenting the latest in its series of high-quality forensic continuing education programs. It features Tonia Nicholls, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and co-author of several violence risk assessment and prevention guides. Dr. Nicholls has provided dozens of violence risk trainings around the world. This one is titled, "An introduction to domestic violence risk assessment: Evidence to inform your practice."

Despite our preoccupation with 'stranger danger' (e.g., child abductions, stranger-rapes) it is a well-established fact that we are more likely to be assaulted or killed by a family member than by anyone else. Violence in families is so common as to be considered ubiquitous. Canadian and American data reveal similar rates of violence against women: around 1 in 5 women have ever experienced intimate partner violence and 2 to 4 percent of women suffered severe violence in the past year. The lifetime incidence rate for any form of domestic violence is approximately 19 percent. The lifetime incidence for severe or injurious domestic violence is about 8 percent.

Accurate risk assessments with perpetrators of intimate partner abuse are important for a variety of diverse reasons. A proper assessment should lead to informed safety planning for the victim(s) and case management for the perpetrator. Good risk evaluations can help to ensure the appropriate division of scarce resources to those individuals and families in greatest need and prevent the disruption of intact families who might actually suffer unnecessarily as a result of intrusive interventions. The information gleaned from a good evaluation can also be essential for assisting victims and their advocates in relevant civil (e.g., divorce or custody disputes) and criminal proceedings.

The training is co-sponsored by the Portland State University and will earn mental health professionals 6 hours of CE credits; accreditation for 6 hours of CLE for attorneys is pending. The fee is $175 for professionals and $75 for students. For more information and to register, visit the Institute's WEBSITE or call (503) 413-0685.

Fictional confession proves man's undoing

Sensational case mesmerizes Poland

"The perfect crime" is how the Polish media dubbed the unsolved case.

The hog-tied body was found floating in a remote inlet of the Oder River in 2000. Before death, Dariusz Janiszewski was tortured and starved, suggesting he was killed by someone who bore him enmity.

But who would have killed the happily married, good looking, and well liked young advertising executive, an amateur guitarist who enjoyed Led Zeppelin and wore his blond hair long and flowing? Police were unable to locate any suspects, and the case went cold.

Perhaps, as in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, the killer could still hear the beating of the dead man's heart. Or maybe his overconfidence did him in. Maybe it was neither guilt nor overconfidence, but simply the temerity of Jacek Wroblewski (dubbed "Jack Sparrow" by his colleagues), the new detective assigned to the cold case.

Sifting through the case file three years later, the detective decided to trace the whereabouts of the dead man's cell phone. He found that a few days after Janiszewski’s death, "ChrisB[7]" had sold the phone on an Internet auction site. ChrisB[7], as it turned out, was Krystian Bala, a postmodernist intellectual featured in the documentary "Young Money" about Poland's nouveau capitalist class.

That link would not have been enough to convict. But Bala had written a creepy novel called "Amok" that contained startling similarities to the killing. The novel’s protagonist, a postmodernist intellectual named Chris, kills his lover and then sells the murder weapon on the Internet.

Detective Wroblewski pored over Bala's sleazy tract for clues until he had it practically memorized, even hiring a psychologist to analyze the author's personality. Further digging unearthed a direct but hidden connection between Bala and his victim: Janiszewski and Bala's wife had a brief extramarital affair some months before the murder.

Was it guilt, revelry, or a desire for attention that drove Bala to write about his crime?

Gisli Gudjonsson, the internationally known confessions expert and forensic psychologist whom I've previously blogged about, says it is rare for people to be able to keep a horrendous crime totally secret. People, even the most depraved, are social animals.

And Bala, by all accounts, was overconfident. Two psychologists who evaluated him after his arrest reported that he had a high IQ, extreme narcissism, and sadistic tendencies. A lethal combination for his victim and a dangerous one for him, too, in that his constant need to demonstrate his superiority led to anonymous boasts to police and the Polish media of his "perfect crime."

Bala's reported psychological makeup is similar to what psychologist Del Paulhus likes to call the "Dark Triad," a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Using rather circular reasoning, author Marilee Strong argues in her new book Erased (which I review here) that the triad explains a specific type of cold-blooded, premeditated wife killer, Scott Peterson being the exemplar. (Hans Reiser, currently on trial in Oakland, is potentially another example; I plan to say more about him after the jury verdict.) I say circular, because applying the labels of narcissist, psychopath, and Machiavellian provides little in the way of explanation, nor are these theoretical constructs independent of each other.

Another way to look at these types of killings is to see them as a blending of instrumental and expressive motivations. Instrumental violence is theorized to underlie more rational, goal-oriented killings, such as the murder of a rape or a robbery victim in order to eliminate a witness, or killings that occur during warfare or organized crime disputes. Expressive violence is driven by emotion and is typically impulsive and unplanned.

Bala's motive was jealous rage, but his cunning and intelligence enabled him to harness his rage in order to plot and execute a more chilling murder. (Check out the recent San Francisco killing of Leonard Hoskins for what could turn out to be a similar blending of instrumental and expressive violence.)

But even more essential to these types of killings than cold-blooded cunning is a chilling level of entitlement. These types of killers, mainly relatively privileged white men, seem to believe that they have the unalienable right to permanently dispose of others who become inconvenient to them. One of the few nonwhite wife killers in Strong's book, for example, is a star football player; as catalogued in recent books on sexual violence in competitive sports, these cultural icons take entitlement to a whole higher plane.

What proved Bala's undoing was his arrogant horn tooting. Amok, described as "a pulp-fiction orgy of bestiality, pornographic Oedipal complexes and indiscriminate sexual violence," went on to become a star witness against him at his trial last year. Simultaneously, the book surged from obscurity to bestseller status as the Polish public lapped up every detail in the most sensational trial in the nation's history.

Although Bala was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, his conviction has been overturned and a retrial is expected to get underway soon.

For a lengthy essay on the Bala case, see David Grann's "Letter from Poland" in the New Yorker. News coverage is here and here; literary commentary is here. BBC has an interesting article here on cases of voluntary confession. Photo credit: valobstruction's "SUV parked in a loading zone" (Creative Commons license).

Daryl Atkins, Lindsey Lohan, and the Cuckoo's Nest

This week has seen lots of interesting forensic news. A few highlights, with links:

Daryl Atkins' sentence commuted

On Thursday, more than five years after Daryl Atkins made legal history with a U.S. Supreme Court ban on executions of the mentally retarded, a judge commuted his death sentence to life in prison.

The reprieve came for reasons that few would have guessed during the ever twisting, nearly 12-year course of the case, which had focused largely on Atkins's mental limitations. Instead, it resulted from an allegation that prosecutors suppressed evidence prior to Atkins's murder trial in 1998.

The Washington Post has the story.

Cuckoo’s Nest still crazy

Most people know Oregon State Hospital only for the movie that it was based on, 1975's award-winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest."

Well, it looks like Nurse Ratched never retired. A U.S. Justice Department report issued Wednesday cites numerous horror stories, including patient-on-patient assaults, outbreaks of infectious diseases, and a patient being held in seclusion without treatment for a year.

State officials said things have improved since the 2006 investigation, and that conditions at the crumbling, century-old psychiatric hospital are a symptom of years of neglect and underfunding of the entire public mental health system.

The Oregonian has the story. Also online are the federal report and a Pulitzer prize-winning series from the Oregonian, "Oregon’s Forgotten Hospital."

Better news from the other side of the country -
No more "hole" for mentally ill prisoners

On Tuesday, New York's legislature approved a landmark law to remove severely mentally ill prisoners from solitary confinement in prison and place them in secure treatment facilities.

Prisons will also be required to conduct periodic mental health assessments of all prisoners in segregated or special housing units known as SHUs, where they are typically locked up for 23 to 24 hours a day.

New York has had more prisoners in segregated units for disciplinary purposes than any state. Confinement in tiny cells for 23 to 24 hours a day is known to seriously worsen psychiatric illnesses, which are suffered by large numbers of prisoners. (See my online essay on segregation psychosis for more on this topic.)

The governor is expected to sign the law, paving the way for construction of the new residential mental health units.

Newsday and the Poughkeepsie Journal have more.

Online registry for domestic violence?

In another example of the potentially endless expansion of symbolic laws, a California lawmaker has introduced a bill to develop an online database of domestic violence offenders, modeled after the popular sex offender databases.

Although the San Jose Mercury News is reporting this as the first such law proposed in the United States, I blogged last June about a similar effort in Pennsylvania.

Whatever state gets to it first, it's just another misguided, tough-on-crime attempt to get votes, in my opinion. Why?

First, it is costly and likely to divert funds from existing domestic violence programs that are already facing cutbacks. (This week's Boston Globe, for example, reports that women are waiting weeks for scarce beds in battered women's shelters, forcing them to return to their abusers and face greater danger.)

Second, as mentioned by a spokeswoman for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, a victims' advocacy group, women who have been wrongfully convicted of assaulting their abusers will likely find their names on the registry, creating further victimization.

Third, and most important in my opinion, is that these registries do more harm than good. They don't stop crime. All they do is stigmatize. The more they expand, the harder it is for people to get jobs, find housing, and be rehabilitated. And the number of candidate pools is endless: Drug offenders. Drunk drivers. Terrorists. Antiwar protesters. Traffic light violators.

The Mercury News has the story.

But what about Lindsey Lohan?

Oh yes, since I've been doing the celebrity blog thing lately, reporting on the Britney Spears-Phillip McGraw controversy, I must not neglect the innovative sentence handed down on Thursday to Ms. Lohan.

The L.A. courts have a program to show drivers the real-life consequences of drinking and driving. So as part of her sentence for misdemeanor drunk driving the 21-year-old actress must work at a morgue and a hospital emergency room for a couple of days each. I think it's a great idea. And maybe it will give her fodder for new acting roles. I'm rooting for her to get past all of this mess and get on with her promising career.

The Associated Press has the story.

Crusade for abused women in prison

California has a "unique law" intended to assist domestic violence victims in prison. Under the law, a woman who killed her abusive partner and who was convicted before 1992 is entitled to petition for a new trial if she did not have an expert witness on battering.

The law was enacted in 2002. The problem is, many women in prison did not hear about it. Then, a young lawyer named Olivia Wang began a crusade. Her Habeas Project has grown into a statewide coalition that is celebrating victory in the freeing of Joyce Walker, who spent 16 years in prison for killing her horrifically abusive husband.

The story is featured on page 1 of Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

The Habeas Project has helped win freedom for 19 domestic violence survivors serving life sentences in California.

Anti-Gay Crimes Widespread, Research Finds

Nearly four in 10 gay men and about one in eight lesbians and bisexuals in the United States have been the target of violence or a property crime because of their sexual orientation.

That is according to the most comprehensive study to date, with a randomly selected, nationally representative sample of 662 adults. Previous studies have relied on samples that were smaller or not representative of the U.S. population.

The study is by Gregory Herek, a widely respected scholar on antigay violence and a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis. It will be published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

About one-fifth of the survey respondents reported being the victim of violence or a property crime because of their sexual orientation. Almost half said they had been verbally abused because of their sexual orientation, 23 percent reported being threatened with violence, 12.5 percent reported having objects thrown at them, and 11 percent reported housing or job discrimination.

"These data highlight the continuing need for criminal justice programs to prevent and deter anti-gay crimes, as well as the need for victim services that will help to alleviate the physical, economic, social andpsychological consequences of such crimes," Herek said in a press release from UC Davis.

Visit Dr. Herek's blog for more details on the study.

First sex offenders, now domestic violence offenders, next -- ?

Despite mounting evidence that sex offender registries do more harm than good, legislators are now proposing to expand the concept to domestic violence offenders.

A bill introduced into the Pennsylvania legislature would create a Megan’s law-style database of people convicted of domestic violence. If the law passes, such offenders would have their photos and addresses posted online for all to see.

Like convicted sex offenders, domestic violence offenders would also have to notified police within 10 days of moving. In a new wrinkle, they would have to mail a form to the police every 90 days to confirm their address of residency.

If the law passes, it could open the floodgates for politicians who have found that meaningless tough-on-crime laws get votes. Who knows what costly and ineffective registries will follow. Registries for drug offenders? Drunk drivers? Antiwar protesters?

Battered Women's Syndrome gaining acceptance

The Battered Women’s Syndrome is gaining acceptance from judges and jurors, according to an article in the May 21 issue of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

The controversial defense combines elements of self-defense and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to explain why some women ultimately kill an abusive partner.

In jurisdictions where the defense is allowed, defendants can present jurors with specific instances of prior victimization to show self-defense or the lack of criminal intent necessary for certain convictions. The defense also enables attorneys to answer the question that is often paramount in jurors’ minds: Why didn't the woman simply leave?

The 2000 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision of Commonwealth v. Pike described the syndrome as a mental state common to women who are abused over an extended period. "Numbed by a dread of imminent aggression, these women are unable to think clearly about the means of escape from this abusive family existence," the decision states.

The defense can pose a major obstacle to prosecution by engendering sympathy for the defendant, according to the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly article.

The full article, authored by David E. Frank, is available at the journal’s website, http://www.masslaw.com/feature.cfm.