Understanding the Antecedents and Maintenance of the Sub-Cultural of Violence

Over the last week or so, dialogue on the Patch has been going hot and heavy after Bob McBride posted an article addressing the increase in gun violence within the inner cities. He maintained that one of most important causes of the development and continuation of the violent sub-culture was due to the acceptance of rap and hip-hop, which glorifies and romanticizes the street life. Many important points were put forward and one of the most important was the documentation that the gun violence is most prominent in the African American communities, rates of somewhere around 7:1. The traditional explanation for this situation has been attributed to living in an impoverished community. However, as was pointed our, that can’t be the independent variable since other impoverished communities, that experience equal deprivations, don’t have the levels of violence that plague the primarily African American communities. After the debate subsided, I remembered some studies I had looked over last year concerning PTSD in children.

The National Center for PTSD, a center for research and information, a unit of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, is the leading agency in the study and treatment of PTSD. It all grew out of the high incidence rates of PTSD in military combat veterans. As more and more information was gained; research was directed at other groups, including abused children. A child and teen growing up in a violent community is subjected to probably the greatest source of childhood trauma. In fact, some estimates put the PTSD rate at 30% for children of violent communities, greater than the rate for returning combat veterans.

According to the National Center for PTSD;

“Child protection services in the U.S. get around three million reports each year. This involves 5.5 million children. Of the reported cases, there is proof of abuse in about 30%. From these cases, we have an idea how often different types of abuse occur:
65% neglect
18% physical abuse
10% sexual abuse
7% psychological (mental) abuse
Also, three to ten million children witness family violence each year. Around 40% to 60% of those cases involve child physical abuse. (Note: It is thought that two-thirds of child abuse cases are not reported.)”
From other studies we know the rates of child abuse are much greater in impoverished areas of the inner cities. That is not to say that other groups and communities don’t also have high rates of abuse, found in mostly economic deprived groups. In any case, these areas have a higher rate of abuse in comparison to the more affluent communities. One of the legacies of child abuse is that many of those abused as children become abusers themselves. Violence leads to more violence resulting in a vicious cycle of violence and suffering. That same violence results in conditions sufficient to create an atmosphere conducive to the development of PTSD. My primary thesis is that continued exposure to violence and the subsequent PTSD is the foundation for the conditions leading to the sub-culture of violence. This supposition is now being confirmed by study after study.
Many years ago, I sat on the governing board of a private treatment program that dealt with hard core addicts; we also had a pilot research project that treated women who were not only addicts but also prostitutes. The research showed that 50% of all women who go into prostitution were also sexually abused as children. Also, research done on chronic addicts and inmate populations, child abuse and trauma was also prevalent among the inmate populations as well as hard core addicts. When this research was performed, we, as yet, didn’t have the data to understand what we were seeing was actually PTSD. From my own experience, working with different dysfunctional populations, certain dysfunctions run consistently in families and can be traced back for generations. Various research also confirms this and it has been found to be especially true in the case of child abuse.
PTSD doesn’t manifest itself in the same manner in children and teens as it does in adults. For example: It is quite common for PTSD to manifest with the same symptoms as hyper activity disorder. Since the symptoms mimic each other, it is only reasonable to assume that many of the ADHD diagnosis are in actuality manifestations of childhood PTSD and therefore misplaced. Also the presence of childhood PTSD manifests itself in the lower performance on standardized test scores, resulting in more children labeled as special needs and requiring programs to address those needs. The presence of PTSD in large populations of inner city children would also contribute to the high failure rate in schools attempting to make headway in the education of the most vulnerable children. The more children that fail to complete their public education, the higher the rate of those individuals who will find themselves involved in the underground economy, inadequate parents, unstable families and contributing to the increasing prison populations.
One of the questions that is continuously raised is why isn’t child protection services more effective in the prevention, identification and treatment of child abuse. These agencies, who have been assigned the oversight of child abuse prevention and intervention, are based on some questionable assumptions. First of all, legislatures who have drafted the laws have little or no understanding of the problems of child abuse. More often than not they assume child abuse is a moral issue and not as a result of something else, like the culture of poverty, sub-culture of violence and the overwhelming presence of childhood, teen and adult PTSD. The programs mandated by state legislatures fall way short of breaking into the culture of child abuse, which continuously feeds the sub-culture of violence.

Mainstream society is negligent in fully grasping the magnitude of the child abuse problem and the resultant social costs. The direction of our focus has been on the problem of impoverishment and income inequality and not on the issues of cultural socialization and assimilation. Granted, we must make every effort to assure that no one goes hungry, has clothes to wear, a roof over their head, access to education and affordable healthcare; but just as important is to break the cycle of child abuse and the resultant PTSD. Until we commit to doing that, the sub-culture of violence will continue, infecting each new generation with the same plaguing dysfunction and ever growing social costs.