Adverse Childhood Experiences, Commitment Offense, and Race/Ethnicity: Are the Effects Crime-, Race-, and Ethnicity-Specific?

Abstract

Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an array of health, psychiatric, and behavioral problems including antisocial behavior. Criminologists have recently utilized adverse childhood experiences as an organizing research framework and shown that adverse childhood experiences are associated with delinquency, violence, and more chronic/severe criminal careers. However, much less is known about adverse childhood experiences vis-à-vis specific forms of crime and whether the effects vary across race and ethnicity. Using a sample of 2520 male confined juvenile delinquents, the current study used epidemiological tables of odds (both unadjusted and adjusted for onset, total adjudications, and total out of home placements) to evaluate the significance of the number of adverse childhood experiences on commitment for homicide, sexual assault, and serious persons/property offending. The effects of adverse childhood experiences vary considerably across racial and ethnic groups and across offense types. Adverse childhood experiences are strongly and positively associated with sexual offending, but negatively associated with homicide and serious person/property offending. Differential effects of adverse childhood experiences were also seen among African Americans, Hispanics, and whites. Suggestions for future research to clarify the mechanisms by which adverse childhood experiences manifest in specific forms of criminal behavior are offered.

Does family communication moderate the association between adverse childhood experiences and emotional and behavioural problems?

“…Emotional and behavioural problems (EBP) were measured using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), which includes 25 items on psychological attributes [32], of which we used the 20 problem items. Response categories were: not true (0), somewhat true (1), certainly true (2). Detailed information about compute of emotional (internalizing) and behavioural (externalizing) problems could be found in our previously published paper [1,33].…”

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) in outpatients with anxiety and depressive disorders and their association with psychiatric and somatic comorbidity and revictimization. Cross-sectional observational study

“…Given that offending and victimization are often two sides of the same coin in terms of the behavioural repertoire of the individual (Craig et al, 2017;Wolff and Baglivio, 2017), this is interesting subject for further research. Given the previous finding that the effects of ACE vary across racial and ethnic groups, this should be taken into account (DeLisi et al, 2017).…”

All Unhappy Childhoods Are Unhappy in Their Own Way—Differential Impact of Dimensions of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adult Mental Health and Health Behavior

“…Starting with the seminal study by Felitti et al ( 1 ), adverse childhood events have been the focus of a multitude of studies which have associated them with outcomes in adulthood as diverse as panic attacks, obesity, number of bone fractures and delinquency ( 1 – 5 ). The majority of these previous studies can be broadly grouped into two lines of research.…”