World News Korner

Study finds that child abuse damages the development of grey matter in the brain.

Courtesy of Raw Story:

A recent study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that child abuse contributes to a reduction in the volume of grey matter in the brains of its victims.

According to Lena Lim, Joaquim Radua, and Katya Rubia, child abuse — or “childhood maltreatment,” as it is called in their study — leads to lifetime-long alteration in brain structure.

“Childhood maltreatment,” they write, “acts as a severe stressor that produces a cascade of physiological and neurobiological changes that lead to enduring alterations in brain structure.”

Using an imaging method that allows them to compare differences in brain anatomy between groups of individuals called “signed differential mapping,” the researchers studied structures of 331 individuals with a history of child abuse, and 362 without.

They discovered that individuals who had suffered abuse had reduced brain matter in areas of the brain related to the cognitive process of decision-making.

The most salient reduction in grey matter volume among victims of child abuse occurred in the ventrolateral prefrontal and limbic-temporal regions — areas of the brain linked to cognitive control.

I have no difficulty at all believing these findings.

I have worked with emotionally disturbed and cognitively impaired children for years, and one thing that is universal to all of the cases is abuse and some form of neglect.

I also suffered some fairly life altering abuse when I was a child.

Considering that I am fairly high functioning I am not sure how much brain matter was beaten out of me, but it certainly fucked up my ability trust or interact with people for quite a number of years.

Trust me when I tell you that no matter how extreme the behaviors might be, using violence as a behavior modification tool only creates far more problems than it appears to solve.

I have worked with kids who called me every name in the book, spit at me, pulled my hair, and even threatened to kill my whole family. In the end the techniques I utilized brought them out of crisis and put them on the path toward becoming contributing members of society.

Hell more than one of them now works with troubled kids themselves.

If you want to create loving children then love them.

If you want to create future guests of a Federal penal institution then by all means beat them into compliance.

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