The effects of gender violence on the development of children.

Interview with the Vitaliza center team on the impact of gender violence on children.

The sons and daughters of families in which there is gender violence are also victims of these destructive dynamics. In fact, the experiences they live through in their homes affect their neurobiological development.and the mark of psychological trauma is imprinted on their brains.

For this reason, we interviewed the neuropsychologist we interviewed the neuropsychologist Javier Elcarte and the psychologist Cristina Cortésfrom the Vitaliza psychology center, to learn about this harmful phenomenon that links gender violence and child abuse.

Interview with Vitaliza: childhood trauma due to gender violence and its impact on the brain.

Javier Elcarte is a psychologist specialized in psychotherapy and neuropsychology, and Director of the Vitaliza Psychology Center, located in Pamplona. Cristina Cortés is a psychologist specialized in child and adolescent therapy and perinatal psychology. In these lines we ask them about the relationship between the exposure of children to gender violence in their families and the impact this has on their neurobiological development.

We often talk about gender violence as if its effects did not go beyond the impact that the aggressor has on the direct victim. What does it mean for a son or daughter of this relationship to experience these attacks at the time they occur?

J.E.: In its 2010 report, the UN includes in its definition of child maltreatment the assumptions of physical or psychological abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence, exposure to intimate partner violence, and commercial or other types of exploitation. We therefore agree with the United Nations that gender violence is a form of child abuse.

In the same sense, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated in 1998 that witnessing domestic violence can be as traumatic as being a victim of physical and sexual abuse, given that the patterns of alterations in children exposed to violence are superimposable.

Exposure to violence in the family nucleus during childhood breaks the perception of security in the attachment figures and the emotional contagion of both the aggressor and the victim is experienced.

What are the most common psychological sequelae that gender-based violence can leave in young people?

C.C.: In the absence of a theoretical model on the impact of gender violence on the brain development and personality of the child, we assume that this impact is no different from that of a child exposed to abuse or any other type of abuse or violence.

In an interesting study, Berman compares the impact on children exposed to gender violence with children exposed to war conflicts. Some of the conclusions are very significant.

Among those exposed to war violence there was a "before", happy and normal, interrupted by war. Those exposed to gender violence did not know the "before". They had grown up in an atmosphere of terror, they did not know security.

The former presented an optimistic story, they felt fortunate to have survived. In the latter, the story was a compendium of pain, sadness and shame. For many, the best moments of their lives were spent in the shelter homes.

For the former, the enemy was clearly defined. While minors exposed to gender violence presented an enormous ambivalence with respect to the abuser. There is a generalized distrust in relationships.

Moreover, in the former the Pain was shared and public, and in the latter the pain was "silenced", lived in isolation, due to the impossibility of sharing the pain with anyone.

Is this psychological impact reflected only in the emotions and behavior of the children, or does it also physically alter the development of their brain?

J.E.: A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne led by Professor Carmen Sandi has demonstrated a correlation between psychological trauma and specific changes in the brain, in turn linked to aggressive behavior, showing that people exposed to trauma in childhood not only suffer psychologically, but also suffer brain alterations.

Teicher states that early chronic trauma appears to affect neurodevelopment if it occurs during the critical formative period when the brain is physically sculpted by experience, leaving an indelible mark on its structure and functionality.

Several studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have confirmed the existence of an association between early maltreatment and a reduction in the size of the adult hippocampus. The amygdala may also be smaller.

In the 1990s, J. Douglas Bremner et al. found that the left hippocampus of abused patients with posttraumatic stress disorder was, on average, 12% smaller than the hippocampus of healthy control subjects, although the right hippocampus was of normal size. Similar results were found by Murray B. Stein of the University of San Diego, California, and Martin Driessen of Gilead Hospital, Bielefeld, Germany.

On the other hand, Teicher, Andersen and Gield found that in adults who had been abused or neglected, the medial parts of the corpus callosum were significantly smaller than those of the control group. These results were confirmed by research conducted with primates by Mara M. Sanchez of Emory.

Reduction in the area or integrity of the corpus callosum is the most consistent neurobiological finding in children and adults with a history of exposure to childhood maltreatment, abuse or trauma.

What can psychologists contribute when dealing in psychotherapy with these cases of children marked by violence in dysfunctional families?

C.C.: The first thing we have to guarantee is safety. If the child is not safe and protected, no intervention can be considered. The vulnerable members of the family must be protected from the aggressor.

Intervention must be approached in a systemic way. We must intervene with the mother, help her to recover and to trust in her ability to adequately care for her children. To bring her out of a state of helplessness and help her regain her functionality so that her children can feel secure in her.

Security in her ability to handle life and protect them. This is the prelude to any intervention.

Regarding the techniques used to intervene in the trauma of these minors affected by violence in the family, which are the most commonly used?

J.E.: Developmental trauma, that produced by the lack of synchronicity in basic attachment relationships, leads to a chronic lack of regulation of the brain, mind and body. These children develop in a state of hyper or hypo arousal and do not have the capacity to inhibit themselves to irrelevant stimuli, they move in a state of constant alertness.

If the learning of emotional regulation does not take place in the early stages of childhood, as Van der Kolk says, there is little chance that later experience can incorporate the neuroplasticity necessary to overcome the decisive periods of development.

Therapies such as biofeedback and neurofeedback make it possible to train the regulation of the nervous system. As Sebern Fisher explains in his book on trauma and neurofeedback: neurofeedback broadens the brain threshold and facilitates the strengthening of resilience to stress.

A higher level of regulation will allow us to calm activation states more easily and will allow us to combine this regulation with specific therapies for working with trauma, focused on the bodily experience and the imprint left by these experiences in the body. In this way we can approach with greater guarantees the conscious desensitization to the discomfort produced by traumatic events.

In our psychology center Vitaliza we combine bio and neurofeedback on the one hand and mindfulness on the other hand as regulation tools that allow us a more effective processing of trauma through EMDR intervention.

How does the process of improvement of children take place? Does it take many years to recover a certain level of wellbeing?

C.C.: If growth and development have occurred in a devastating environment, trauma has a cumulative effect. Both self-perceptions of oneself and perceptions of others are negative and no one is trusted.

The evolutionary sequence of normative development is altered and everything is permeated by this physiological dysregulation.

This involves and requires years of intervention, demanding a proper therapeutic bond, a lot of patience and a lot of skill on the part of the therapist.

What legal and administrative changes should be made beyond the field of psychotherapy to make it easier for these children to maintain a good quality of life?

C.C.: Unfortunately, on many occasions, the social, judicial and even therapeutic protection system can contribute to retraumatization.

When custody with the abuser is allowed and maintained, when the children's testimonies are not taken into account and it is considered that there is insufficient evidence to delimit such contacts, the victim's insecurity persists over time.

Thus, the basic security that is lacking, the underlying insecurity increases and many of these children live their lives in an automaton-like manner without hope in anything or anyone.

The feeling of lack of protection is the only thing that persists. We must listen, protect the child above the adult. Never forget their rights.