Child Abuse Changes the Brain
When children have been exposed to family violence, their brains become increasingly "tuned" for processing possible sources of threat, a new study reports. The findings, reported in the Dec. 6 issue of Current Biology, reveal the same pattern of brain activity in these children as seen previously in soldiers exposed to combat.
This sheds new information on the Shaken Baby Syndrome in infants and all the way through childhood. The changes don't reflect damage to the brain. Rather, the patterns represent the brain's way of adapting to a challenging or dangerous environment. Still, those shifts may come at the cost of increased vulnerability to later stress.
Violence against women in a family also has serious consequences for the children's growth, health, and survival. There are several possible explanations for why violence against a mother can affect her children's health. During pregnancy the fetus grows less, and after birth the mother's mental health is crucial both for her emotional contact with the children and for her ability to care for the children. What's more, women who have been subjected to violence often have weaker social networks and often lack economic resources to seek medical care for their children, for example. This means that the children's health is dependent on the economic resources and the protection that the environment can offer.
