Birth and the origin of violence

1. Violence is a mental health problem, perhaps the most serious mental health problem facing society today.

2. Violence is learned, typically in the family circle. Domestic violence is the breeding place for social violence.

3. Many experts believe that the "bonding/attachment" of babies and parents in the period before and around birth will have life-long importance. Fifteen percent of U.S. children may enter life without such an attachment, feel no intimate, safe, and loving connection with anyone, posing high risk of violent behavior.

4. Psychological tests of 14 juviniles on death row in U.S. prisons revealed major neurological impairments, psychotic disorders, and low I.Q. scores--profound handicaps which often reflect lack of nourishment and love during prenatal development.

5. For 60% of boys born in the United States today, hospital birth still ends with a violent act: circumcision. A urologist estimates that 90% of the men who are walking the streets today had this painful initiation shortly after birth. For them, sex and violence are linked.

6. About 30,000 children currently await adoption. Adoption, when it is the last in a series of traumatic experiences perhaps includidng fetal alcohol poisoning, malnutrition, rejection, and birth complications, can lead to antisocial behavior, especially in boys.

7. Certain birth complications, when accompanied by severe parental rejection/separation in the first year, strongly influence criminal behavior in later life.

8. Infant monkeys, reared in isolation from mothers, develop structural, neurochemical, and neuroelectrical abnormalities which mediate depression, hyperactivity, self-mutilation, and pathologic violence. Human infants, similarly deprived for brief periods following birth, also show these behaviors.

9. For the first time in history, violent sexual assaults are being committed by boys younger than ten years of age. More than 128 were convicted of rape in 1993.