Judges’ Journal 2014 Domestic Violence - Impact on Children - Neuroscience
In 2000, the National Judicial Education Program (NJEP) added a ground-breaking unit on the neurobiology of trauma to our curriculum on adult victim sexual violence. Judges and others have found this neuroscience unit extremely helpful in understanding phenomena such as why the way in which traumatic memories are recorded and recalled prevents victims of traumatic events such as rape from producing the sequential, never-forget-a-detail narrative of the assault that most people expect.
We are now at a comparable knowledge-development point with respect to understanding the impact of domestic violence on children. This has been a subject of judicial concern and commentary for decades. Now, with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging, neuroscientists have produced scores of studies documenting on a neuronal level the profoundly negative impact of exposure to domestic violence on children, and how children can recover when exposure to the violence is eliminated and they are secure in the care of their non-abusing, primary caregiver parent
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. . … Some stress is normal and healthy for brain development. Chil- dren need to learn to deal with everyday stress. But in an unpredictable, tension- filled, violent environment where the stress is inescapable, it becomes toxic, unleash- ing a storm of neurochemicals that result in “embedded stress.”12 Children learn to become fearful through this “fear condi- tioning,” which is strongly connected to anxiety disorders across the lifespan.
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Dr. Perry explains that living in an alarm state has critical implications for children’s ability to learn:
When a child is in a persisting state of low-level fear that results from exposure to violence, the primary areas of the brain that are process- ing information are different from those in a child from a safe environ- ment. The calm child may sit in the same classroom next to the child in an alarm state, both hearing the same lecture by the teacher. Even if they have identical IQs, the child that is calm can focus on the words of the teacher and, using neocortex, engage in abstract cognition. The child in an alarm state will be less efficient at processing and storing the verbal information the teacher is providing.14
The resulting failure to learn has con- sequences across the lifespan..
More: Judges’ Journal 2014 Domestic Violence - Impact on Children - Neuroscience
Abstract -New England Journal of Medicine: Silent Victims — An Epidemic of Childhood Exposure to Domestic Violence