Childhood experiences of domestic violence and adult outcomes. Where are we now: challenges, debates and interventions?

The impetus for this chapter was a longitudinal study with adult women who had been convicted of an offence and were serving community orders. The research focus was social exclusion, exploring the potential of nature-based work to enhance connectedness. However, as the participants narrated their stories the depressing regularity with which their childhood experiences of domestic violence (DV) were referenced prompted significant reflection on my part. I had already been aware from the criminal justice literature that the rate of childhood adversity in the female “offender” population was high. The body of evidence pointed to an accumulation of disadvantage across a lifetime as opposed to individual pathology or specific deficits (Moffit & Caspi, 2001). Maltreatment and victimisation in their pre-offending lives reportedly serving as the catalyst (Postmus, Severson, Berry, & Yoo, 2009; Severson, Berry, & Postmus, 2007). The evidence suggested that these disadvantages interacted in complex and mutually reinforcing ways (Levitas et al., 2007), ways that served to seriously restrict the women’s opportunities to desist from crime (Moffit & Caspi, 2001; Weaver & McNeill, 2010; McNeill, Farrall, Lightowler, & Maruna, 2012).