Research has found a significant link between childhood abuse and neglect and crime in adulthood. But a recent University of Washington study finds that link all but disappears when accounting for other life factors.
“We find that children who were involved in child welfare services are at high risk of adult crimes, but once we accounted for childhood socioeconomic status and later marital status and education, many of those effects went away,” said co-author Todd Herrenkohl, an investigator at the Social Development Research Group, part of the UW’s School of Social Work.
“So the causal relationship isn’t necessarily there in our data.”
In other words, child abuse and neglect don’t always set up children for a life of crime.
[For more of this story, written by Doree Armstrong, go to http://www.washington.edu/news...path-to-adult-crime/]
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