Childhood is political!

This text (slightly updated version) is the English translation of:

Fuchs, Sven (2021). Die Kindheit ist politisch! Kindesmisshandlung und -vernachlässigung. Interdisziplinäre Fachzeitschrift für Prävention und Intervention (DGfPI), Jahrgang 24, Heft 1, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, S. 80-85.

Abstract: Do childhood experiences have consequences? If this question is put into relation to politics and society or even to collective things such as war, extremism, terrorism or social developments towards dictatorial regimes, then quite a few people would respond, “No, childhood has nothing to do with it!” People answer in this direct way quite promptly, but most of the time they don’t engage or really get involved to talk about these connections. I will use among other things biographies to show that childhood is indeed political and that childhood experiences itself can have political consequences.

Please imagine, dear reader, that you are a psychotherapist. In the following, I present five individual cases, anonymized at first. You will learn the real names of the “patients” afterwards. Patients come to your practice, we imagine, because of a range of mental and health conditions (addictions, mood disorders, sleep disorders, suicidal thoughts, self-loathing, etc.). In the course of anamnesis and therapy, their childhood backgrounds become clear, which I will present briefly: 

Case A: A was the first surviving child after two miscarriages; at the age of five he almost died of smallpox; after an accident suffered in childhood, his left arm was also injured and remained crippled; the father was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children; A’s father beat him almost every day (after one assault the child had blood in his urine for days); one day the father even tried to strangle A’s mother; when A was 11 or 12 years old, his parents separated; the father later became a vagrant; A’s mother also abused her son and she forced him into training to become a priest; A spent five years of his adolescence in a seminary which was characterized by rituals of submission to authority, humiliation by the clergy, powerlessness and punishment.

Case B: The mother had originally wanted to abort the fetus; during pregnancy, she already perceived the fetus as a difficult child who was restless and kicked her; for the infant, the mother did only what was necessary and was uncaring; early separation of parents; single mother was overwhelmed early on and asked the authorities for help; as a two-year-old, B was therefore accommodated in out-of-home care at the weekends for some time; the mother neglected and beat her son + emotional abuse; the mother behaved in a “sexualized” manner toward her son; the mother told her son she wished he were dead; the mother probably suffered from borderline personality disorder; three-week inpatient admission to a psychiatric facility as a four-year-old (along with his single mother); psychiatric team was extremely concerned after the assessment and demanded that the mother and son be separated; the father then attempted to gain custody, but failed. 

Case C and D: This is about two brothers; the father was physically violent towards the children and died early of cancer; the now single mother neglected the children, who also grew up in poverty and appeared neglected; finally, the mother became seriously ill, she asked the authorities for help, whereupon the two sons were placed in a children’s home; however, the home chosen by the authorities was very far away, which meant that neither the mother nor the other siblings could visit the brothers, they could only phone them; a few month after being placed in the home, the mother died, presumably of a drug overdose. 

Case E: E was rejected as a fetus, his mother tried to abort him, but this failed; E lost his father early and went to live with an uncle who regularly beat him and called him the “son of a cur”; the uncle was considered an argumentative and moody person and an obstinate admirer of Adolf Hitler; the uncle was eventually imprisoned for his veneration of the Nazis and E had to go back and live with his mother who had found a new husband in the meantime; he was not welcomed; the new stepfather was also brutal and beat E; in the family home there was neither running water nor electricity, and humans and animals lived together under one roof; at night, the family slept crowded together on the dirt floor to keep each other warm; since E was fatherless and an outsider, he was also teased mercilessly by the other children in the village and often beaten up.

Case F: War childhood (including escape from Jena from the Red Army), orphan: The father died when F was five, the mother died when she was 14, severe conflict and marital crisis in the parental home after mother's affair, then suicidal moods of the mother; abandonment by the mother on several occasions (children's home + relatives); the first time, F’s mother passed her to the children’s home at the age of six for about half a year (later, F wrote the screenplay for the German film “Bambule”, which depicted the hardship and attempted resistance of female adolescents in institutions); the mother had fallen in love with a fellow female student and seems to have devoted herself entirely to this relationship and her university education; after the mother's death, the whole world died for her, F later said; the mother's girlfriend became a foster mother but neglected the adolescent.  

Please remember that you are still imagining that you “are” a psychotherapist. Do you see a connection between these childhoods and the patients’ suffering and mental state, or do you rule it out? I can imagine that you recognize a connection and you are also quite right with regard to the general research situation.

Internationally, since the pioneering work of Dr. Vincent Felitti in the late 1990s, research into so-called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has expanded tremendously. ACEs typically include stress factors such as sexual, physical and emotional abuse; neglect; parental separation; witnessing domestic violence; growing up with mentally ill or addicted family members; and witnessing the incarceration of family members. 789 professional articles that focused on various consequences of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were published between 1998 and 2018 (Struck et al. 2021). In addition, a full 38,411 English-language professional articles thematically related to child maltreatment emerged between the years 2000 and 2018 (Tran et al. 2018). The large meta-study by Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor (2016) is worth highlighting: 111 studies were evaluated. The studies evaluated included data for a total of 160,927 children. 99 % of studies found harmful effects of physical violence against children and no positive effects. 17 negative effects were recorded, including, for example, aggression, antisocial behavior, mental health problems, low self-esteem, lower cognitive ability, lower internalized morals, alcohol and drug abuse, and approval of corporal punishment against children. 

Analysis of ACEs (review and meta-analysis; 253,719 respondents from 37 international studies) has found that adults who were exposed to four or more ACEs were seven to eight times more likely to be involved in interpersonal violence (violence victimization or perpetration), and 30 times more likely to attempt suicide than adults with no ACE exposure (Hughes et al. 2017). 

Adverse Childhood Experiences were also found to a strikingly high extent in the particular population of (violent) offenders (Baglivio et al. 2021, Cannon et al. 2016, Dermody et al. 2020, Graf et al. 2021, Messina & Grella 2006, Reavis et al. 2013). In one study, particularly young murderers (N = 25, mean age = 14.7) were also found to have clearly destructive childhood backgrounds: dysfunctional family (96 %), emotionally abused at home (83 %), physically abused (55 %), sexually abused (10 %); in addition, 52 % of these children/murderers had suicidal thoughts (Myers et al. 1995).

Meanwhile, the costs associated with adverse childhood experiences are also coming into focus. A 2019 study, funded by WHO, calculates the annual cost due to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to be US$ 581 billion in Europe and US$ 748 billion in North America (Bellis et al. 2019). “How Much More Data Do We Need? Making the Case for Investing in Our Children” is the title of a recent specialist article that makes the case that the consequences of child maltreatment are finally extensively researched and that it is time to invest heavily in children (Berger et al. 2021). 

I believe that you are a good “psychotherapist” if you recognize the connections and do long-term trauma therapy with your above-mentioned patients. However, my experience is that these relationships are often faded out or even denied when it comes to the political realm, when it comes to dictatorial/authoritarian forms of government, extremism, terrorism, war and hostile/destructive politics. All these things are most rarely associated with adverse childhood experiences. 

But now we come to the resolution (sources for each of the childhoods discussed above are in parentheses): Patient A is the mass murderer and dictator Josef Stalin (Fuchs 2019), patient B is the Norwegian right-wing terrorist and mass murderer Anders Breivik (Borchgrevink 2013, Fuchs 2019), patients C and D are the Islamist terrorists Chérif and Saïd Kouachi (Fuchs 2019, Smith 2019) who carried out the attack on the editorial office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. Patient E is the Iraqi mass murderer and dictator Saddam Hussein (Fuchs 2019) and patient F is Red Army Faction (RAF) founding member and German far-left terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (Fuchs 2019).  

I could imagine that your assessment of these personalities might now change somewhat. There is a danger, you may think, that the actions of these people would be excused if we relate them to correspondingly destructive childhoods. There is an equal danger of losing sight of the victims of the perpetrators when we focus on the victim that these perpetrators once were. An essential thought may also be that most people abused and traumatized as children do not become mass murderers and terrorists (however, I assume that you as a “psychotherapist” would not hold against your “patients” that, after all, many other people with similar childhood backgrounds do not have an addiction problem or suicidal thoughts, just a thought). The influences that must come together for a person to become a perpetrator, even a mass murderer, are undoubtedly always complex and not just dependent on childhood. And yes, certainly the step to commit the crime is also a decision of the respective perpetrator and these people have to answer for this, no matter what their childhood was like. We do not have to excuse their actions, but we should understand so that prevention can take effect. 

The much more essential and central question for me is: Would these personalities have become this kind of perpetrator if they had experienced a largely loving and violence-free childhood? Or also: with the horrors of childhood remaining the same, would they have become these perpetrators if they had received help, support, positive compensatory experiences and psychotherapy early on? 

In 2019, I published my book, “Die Kindheit ist politisch!“ (Childhood is Political!”) (Fuchs 2019; the book was reviewed in English by Peter Petschauer (2020) ). In it, I showed that the countries and regions (e.g. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Palestine, Cambodia, El Salvador, but also the USA) that strike us as “problem children” in terms of world politics (or that represent this in a shorter historical retrospect) and that represent severe political conflicts, social imbalances, war, terror and/or recruitment regions for terrorists, at the same time show an enormously high level of violence against children in various forms and, in addition, often other stress factors for children. I have conducted extensive studies and case analyses/biographies on extremists/terrorists (e.g. Andreas Baader, Zacarias Moussaoui, Osama Bin Laden), (violent) criminals, dictators (e.g. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Slobodan Milosevic, Josip Broz Tito, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Noriega, Fidel Castro), belligerent politicians (e.g. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Wladimir Putin) NS perpetrators (including Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hans Frank, Rudolf Höß, Adolf Eichmann) and soldiers. The conclusions from all my research come to a head in the title of the book. What all of the named personalities have in common is that their childhoods were often anything but free of violence, loving and happy. In the overall picture, it becomes clear that the above-mentioned case studies are not isolated cases or outliers. 

After the book was published, I also compiled all the studies/individual papers I could find in which right-wing perpetrators of violence / right-wing extremists had been interviewed about their childhoods. To date, I have found a total of 37 papers for which a minimum of one and a maximum of 115 right-wing personalities were interviewed. It turns out that right-wing perpetrators of violence or right-wing extremists usually had a very destructive childhood. I refer here to my abstract, which can be viewed online (Fuchs 2021). In my opinion, the empirical data is almost overwhelming and it is surprising that child protection as an essential branch of prevention of extremism has not been / is not widely discussed. 

One of these works is presented here as an example. 91 (70 male, 21 female) former US extremists / racists (from Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, neo-Nazi, racist skinheads groups) were interviewed. Results regarding ACE values (experiences before the age of 18): 48 % experienced physical abuse in the home, 46 % experienced emotional neglect in the home, 46 % experienced emotional abuse in the home, 23 % experienced sexual abuse in the home, 15 % experienced physical neglect in the home; 68 % experienced parent abandonment, 66 % reported parental substance abuse, 47 % witnessed domestic violence, 47 % reported parent/caregiver mental illness, and 32 % reported parent incarceration (Windisch et al. 2020). 

I advocate that we look at the possible political consequences of childhood without blinkers and that the prevention of child abuse or ACEs is also communicated as the prevention of violence, terrorism and extremism.  If this view succeeds across society as a whole, then this would subsequently necessitate one thing above all: more worldwide child protection.  

I would like to add my favorite quote (from the former director of the Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and expert in psychotraumatology Prof. Peter Riedesser): “The more children here and around the world are neglected, beaten, humiliated and slide into hopelessness and hatred, the higher the destructive potential in our own country and worldwide. Against this background, child protection has become a question of survival. Worldwide child protection is the ideal way to prevent not only mental suffering, but also crime, militarism and terrorism. It ensures democracy and peaceful cultural and economic exchange. It takes all of our creativity and determination to make this happen. If we all wanted this in a unique act of solidarity, we would also have the knowledge and the means” (Riedesser 2002, p. 32). 

Bibliography

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Bellis, M. A., Hughes, K., Ford, K., Rodriguez, G. R., Sethi, D. & Passmore, J. (2019). Life course health consequences and associated annual costs of adverse childhood experiences across Europe and North America: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet Public Health. 4: e517–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(19)30145-8. 

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