About 65 people attended a forum on nurturing children who have experienced domestic violence Oct. 11 at University College at Rockland.
The event, titled Getting Through to the Other Side: Nurturing and Guiding Children of Domestic Violence, included presentations from Steve Rowe, president and CEO of Maine Community Foundation and a former Maine Attorney General and Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives; and Sue Mackey Andrews, co-founder and co-facilitator of the Maine Resilience Building Network, an educational, training, and outreach organization.
Rowe’s presentation focused on how domestic violence and parental neglect affect brain development in young children and contribute significantly to the likelihood that they, too, will become domestic abusers in adulthood. Rowe discussed the concept of toxic stress — prolonged, elevated stress levels that he said can cause shrinkage of the parts of the brain that contribute to learning, memory, and thinking, while inflaming those parts associated with sadness, fear, and anger.
[For more of this story, written by Dan Otis Smith, go to http://knox.villagesoup.com/p/...trauma-abuse/1586007]
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