The impact of childhood adversity on violent crime in adolescence and early adulthood

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Even though rates of overall crime have gone down in the UK over the last two decades, levels of serious violence in the past four years indicate a reversal of this trend. As a result, tackling serious violence has become a UK Government priority. One of the main ways to prevent youth involvement in violence is to identify and limit its early causes.It is well-known that individuals who have had traumatic or stressful experiences during childhood (referred to as adverse childhood experiences or childhood adversity) - such as being a victim of child abuse or having a parent who suffers from a mental illness - are more likely to engage in violence during adolescence and early adulthood. However, it is not clear which adverse experiences contribute most to violence nor whether they have a greater or lesser impact if experienced at different ages. The aim of our project is to answer these questions.We will address several research questions about the relationship between childhood adversity and serious violence during adolescence and early adulthood. We will consider a wide range of adversities including (but not restricted to) abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual), bullying, bereavement, and parental substance abuse, mental illness, and criminality. The choice of adversities to include in our analyses will be informed in part by the Ambassadors for Vulnerable Children and Young People on our steering group (these are young people who have experience of adversity in childhood, and who are employed by local authorities as ambassadors). We will identify whether any of these adversities have a particularly large impact on the risk of being involved in violent crime as a teenager or a young adult. Another goal is to determine whether there are critical periods during childhood where exposure to adversity - either in general or to one or more specific adversities - puts a child at particularly high risk. We also plan to investigate what role school attainment and attendance, mental health, and risk-taking behaviours (such as taking drugs) play in the relationship between childhood adversity and violence.To fulfil the goals of our project, we will use data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a world-leading data resource that has recorded extremely detailed information on the health, development and family circumstances of approximately 14,500 families living in the Bristol area since the early 1990s. Data collection started during pregnancy and has continued year on year ever since. The richness of this data resource makes it possible to answer questions that previous studies have been unable to address. We will link ALSPAC to data provided by Avon and Somerset police to generate the richest data set on violence and childhood adversity ever created in the UK, further enhancing this unique resource and enabling other researchers to investigate the causes and consequences of offending in new ways.Our findings will shed light on how and when we can best intervene with children (or families) at risk of violence. Addressing these key questions has the potential to help reduce rates of violent crime and to provide a better understanding of how childhood experience contributes to violence that will benefit perpetrators and their families, victims, practitioners, policy makers and the general public.