Abusers, criminals and victims
Early on a sunny morning in April, behind the picturesque nineteenth-century church of St Peter’s on the ‘lawn’ near the high street in a small seaside town in East Devon, a small crowd was gathered silently in the graveyard. A few of her relatives and the local clergy looked on nervously as the local police and coroner’s office supervised the exhumation of a body buried in a coffin 22 years before. The priest gave a brief blessing as the coffin reached the surface and was placed in the county coroner’s van to be taken for DNA tests, before being buried again in a few days’ time.
Binny Day was a troubled lady. Her third marriage had just failed and her husband had walked out on her and her three kids. She walked to the cliffs in the quiet seaside town of Budleigh Salterton and jumped. Her twisted body was found a few hours later on the beach 200 feet below by a walker. She left no suicide note. She was only 27 years old and one of twelve siblings. She was pretty and generally well liked in the town.
Only 22 years later did the true reasons for her unhappiness emerge. Her father, William Dance, had served a prison sentence in the 1960s for child sex offences, but was released home after only nine months. Binny had killed herself on the anniversary of his death a few years before.
Her older brother Tommy, who was well known locally, initially for his charity work for childhood leukaemia, was now behind bars for 21 years after admitting raping and abusing multiple young local girls over 30 years. He was only caught after one of his victims watched a similar story on the TV soap EastEnders and decided to go to the local police. She said after the trial: ‘He turned out to be an evil, manipulative liar. He took away my teenage years, my virginity and also something inside me. It has brought some closure to the last twenty-three years and I hope that he rots in prison.’
The police now suspect that Binny’s suicide was the result of being a long-standing victim of sexual abuse and repeated rape by her father and more recently her brother. They are currently investigating if she or any of her children were born out of abuse or incest. However, the story doesn’t stop there. Last year her 22-year-old son Carl (who was only five years old when she died) was told by the judge sentencing him that he was ‘manipulative, devious and dangerous to young boys’. He admitted 42 offences, including grooming two young boys, and is in jail for a second time after previous assaults and being found with indecent pictures of kids. The police suspect more incidents and accomplices, and Binny’s two brothers Maurice and Colin are on trial in Devon for past sex offences. With three generations of sex abuse in a small community the locals are in a state of shock and collective guilt. One neighbour said: ‘People in Budleigh now know they are being watched.’
What can this horrific story of three generations of abuse and abusers tell us about ourselves and the human variation in deviant behaviour? Sexual abuse is sadly not as uncommon as you might believe. Studies suggest that depending on how sexual abuse is defined, between 5 and 25 per cent of girls and 5 and 15 per cent of boys will have experienced some form of sexual abuse,1 usually before the age of 11.2 On average only about 1 in 10 cases of abuse gets reported to officials, and even professionals fail to report it. Most sexual abuse is actually committed by friends or family and only 10 per cent comes from strangers. Most abusers are men, but in some US studies 5–10 per cent of abusers are women, although these cases are usually milder.3
Nor is sexual abuse a modern phenomenon, even though it might appear to be more common today because of the media and greater openness. Records from the Byzantine Empire (AD 324 to 1453) show that despite strict penalties of cutting off noses and capital punishment, abuse was very common. The legal age in Byzantine times for marriage for girls was 12, but often they were married before this and their birthdates altered. There are numerous records of systematic rape and abuse of these girls by their ‘husbands’ from the age of five in all social classes.4 The practice is still common and under-reported in many Muslim countries where the victim is likely to be penalised for reporting it.
Although it seems extraordinary, the Budleigh Salterton story supports research in this field showing that abuse does run in families. Studies have shown that at least 25 to 79 per cent of abusers have themselves been abused,5 so a 1996 US report concluded that: ‘while the evidence for child abuse being itself a cause of later adult offending was inconclusive, it was certainly a strong risk factor.’ These uncomfortable facts pose a number of salient questions. If we had unluckily been born into one of these families, would we have been abusers ourselves? Did the abusers or victims have any free will? Why didn’t the abused women escape or help the other children?
How do we explain three generations of abusers? Is this just a case of ‘evil’ genes being passed down? Or the direct influence of non-empathetic, violent, abusive parents? Could it just be the result of a harmful environment, bad peer group and education and lack of local social support? Although abuse is generally more common in poorer, less educated families, the latter explanation seems unlikely in this case, as the area is relatively affluent and part of a close-knit community with good schooling. These abusers and victims were not hermits and lived in a cul-de-sac with many neighbours. Studies have not shown any major causal environmental risk factors other than poverty and poor education. Having a poor local environment can clearly make things worse, but overall has only a minor indirect causal role.
So if we can’t blame the environment, are genes the main explanation? Most complex behaviour traits are influenced by hundreds or thousands of genes, so as the genes of the parents are mixed every time a baby is produced, if the father’s genes for example were mainly to blame this would normally tend to get diluted out in each generation. Yet the grandchild Carl seemed to be just as cruel and evil as his grandfather. There is some evidence that male abusers will select meek female partners who are more likely to be compatible with their personalities, either being easily manipulated towards their ideas or perhaps genetically having a similar lack of feeling for the emotions of others (empathy). If both parents have a lack of empathy, these genes could continue to be passed on and could be one reason why the bad genes don’t get diluted quickly across generations. The combination of a sexually aggressive father and a mother lacking in empathy and with a victim mentality can make a deadly parental cocktail.
If genetic susceptibility is to blame, how might this work? The theory deserves some more thought. Twin studies mainly focusing on school have shown a strong general genetic susceptibility (over 60–70 per cent heritability) both to being a bully and also to being a victim, and a proportion of kids (2.5 per cent) are actually both.6 Some of the susceptibility genes for being a bully, oddly, are also those that predispose to being a victim, not only of physical bullying but also of sexual abuse.7 However, the idea that victims are in some way genetically pre-programmed is not something we as individuals or as societies like to admit or discuss. This is neither totally surprising nor illogical: personality must underlie these traits, and we have seen that all personality traits have a clear genetic influence. Twin studies have found that being an abuse victim is only weakly heritable, with a stronger effect for physical abuse.8
So genes can’t explain being a sexual victim, but abuse can affect children – sometimes in quite different ways.
Betty was the first-born and larger at birth, but from when she can remember also the quieter, more sensitive and introvert twin. Juliet always took the lead, and was the more extrovert. Betty feels she has always needed her twin more than her twin needed her. Childhood was miserable for both of them – their parents always shouting and fighting, their father often violent towards their mother. They lived in a small council house in Birmingham with an older brother and sister. They were very frightened by their father, who had been in the navy and now worked long hours as a train driver. He, after drinking, would sometimes demand to see them individually. He would sometimes kiss and fondle them and their older sister and would hit them if they ran away.
Betty explained: ‘Our mother was cold, antisocial, and never offered sympathy, support or emotion, and other older family members were not much better. She told us she had tried to abort us before we were born. She was often very depressed and had no friends.’ Their brother was always ill and often in pain and cried at night, but the parents never got up and the twins had to comfort him. Both their parents came from unhappy homes, having left their homes themselves at 14.
The twins were very bright, and although the parents wanted them to leave school at 14 their teachers persuaded them (by providing generous bursaries) to let their daughters stay on at school. Betty and Juliet both worked incredibly hard and studied together, urging each other on, often till dawn. They realised early on that education and university was their escape route from the family. Both did so well that they were accepted into Oxford University, into the same college, to study Classics. Juliet always did slightly better. After university they both became lawyers in different firms.
Juliet was much more successful and made good money with international companies. She eventually married another lawyer and could afford to have nannies and send their four children to private boarding school, and they had a number of holiday homes around the world. Betty had married a head waiter she met on holiday while still at university and also had four kids, but she gave up work early to look after them. Money is still very tight and she is back in full-time work supporting the family.
Looking back, they have rather different attitudes. Both have suffered depression, but at different times. Juliet now says: ‘Although my sister doesn’t believe me, I really don’t remember any of the bad things in my childhood, it’s all a bit of a blur.’ Possibly this is a form of amnesia common in child abuse. ‘Just after my final exams at Oxford I broke down, I don’t remember much but was told I was sobbing uncontrollably for days and had a severe bout of depression. This lasted a year, where I was offered support with counsellors, antidepressants and eventually a friendly GP.’ She got back on her feet and into a good job and never looked back.
After an incredibly successful career, Juliet in her early fifties has enough money to retire. She has decided to help others and after a spell working in the charitable sector become a psychotherapist. Although she is reluctant to discuss her past, she realises that she needs to. Betty in contrast was always more open about her experiences and has always suffered emotionally, as well as being generally more susceptible to illnesses than her sister. She has various bowel disorders, as well as the muscular pain syndrome called fibromyalgia, which is often associated with childhood abuse. Betty herself doesn’t now think psychotherapy or counselling helps. Although both twins successfully escaped from their family environment and have brought up eight apparently normal children, Juliet still sees Betty as the weak one and Betty sees Juliet as the non-empathetic one. They never discuss their upbringing together, which causes tensions, and as a consequence they now rarely see each other.
Although the twins showed different responses to their abusive childhood, life would probably have worked out much worse for them both if they had left school at 14, got pregnant early and picked abusive non-empathetic husbands as their mother did. Instead, although clearly both affected by their early years, they were protected by their school teachers and the major social and cultural cushion of their university. The story reiterates how even minute differences in emotional reactions to the same trauma between identical clones can lead to large changes in life-courses.9
There is a very clear correlation between having abusive parents and later childhood and adult behavioural problems and depression.10 The common effects of child sexual abuse include depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and a propensity to further episodes of victimisation in adulthood. As we have seen before, a correlation doesn’t always mean a cause, but there is strong evidence that abuse-exposed twins have a consistently higher risk for psychological disorders than their non-exposed twins.11
So do all abused children (and we are talking up to a fifth of the population according to some estimates) have problems in adult life? That was certainly the prevailing view of psychotherapists. However, a summary meta-analysis of 59 US college surveys and seven population-based studies by Drs Rind and Tromovitch from Philadelphia in 1997 emphatically and controversially disagreed.12 They thought the totally negative and inevitable aspects of damage from abuse had been based on non-representative cases and markedly overestimated in the past. On the basis of the general population and college surveys, they said that child sexual abuse does not always cause harm and reported that 33 per cent of women and 60 per cent of men said they had been unaffected by it. Strangely, a minority of college students actually reported such encounters (presumably fondling by a family member) as positive experiences, and the extent of psychological damage depended on whether or not the child described the encounter as ‘consensual’.
This paper generated a wave of protest and showed the professional hazards for researchers in this area. The study was criticised for flawed methodology and selective use of the data, as well as for being ‘morally wrong’.13 The authors responded robustly to the methodological criticisms, but their voices were drowned out. Whether or not it was accurate or morally wrong, the study result was unwanted. The Catholic Church, Dr Laura (the most popular US radio talk host) and the far right anti-homosexual lobby were up in arms, and even the US Congress condemned the study for its conclusions. They claimed it provided ammunition for paedophile organisations to justify their activities.14 Yet, a recent re-analysis of the data 12 years later showed similar findings to the original.15 Despite the criticisms and the problems of defining abuse (which confuses legal and scientific definitions), there remains a very wide variety of responses, and a group of victims who are clearly less affected than others.
The different reaction of the twins in our case-study is interesting. Betty never tried to blank out the experience and never had any amnesia or denial, while Juliet, after a brief breakdown early on, decided consciously or subconsciously to forget the past. You could argue that Juliet’s avoidance reaction was in retrospect the most successful strategy. Or it could be argued that her early breakdown was helpful to her, although she believed the few counselling sessions she had were unhelpful. This goes against the advice of therapists who urge victims to talk about their experiences early and openly. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is the mainstay of treatment and has been shown in many studies and meta-analyses to be overall effective compared with no treatment. This established view has been questioned recently. Up to 50 per cent of victims don’t respond to CBT treatment and usually give up. Presumably for them, this treatment doesn’t work and in some cases may actually be harmful.16
Recent studies of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, where rates of newly diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) are very high at over 20 per cent, show that those who never talked about their experiences initially actually did better than those who were openly encouraged to do so. This may relate to the compensation system which in the US pays out $5 billion annually to victims. Clearly this is a disincentive to improvement, but also it is hard to separate PTSD from normal trauma that can improve naturally. Other surveys with stricter criteria show lower rates of PTSD of only around 4 per cent, suggesting a large overestimate of diagnosed victims. These studies are not popular.17 Authors receive hate mail and death threats. In our modern Western culture sadly it has become very difficult to report openly that estimates of any statistics of disability, obesity, cancer, sexual group or harm of any kind are lower than previously believed.
According to Professor Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist from King’s College Hospital, many diagnosed soldiers now report symptoms such as flashbacks, which are actually a new medical phenomenon, never reported in the past. It was unknown after the First World War and some commentators suspect that it could be due to watching TV and Hollywood films which depict flashbacks. Other studies (using a scenario of having been lost in a shopping mall as a toddler) have shown how false traumatic memories of childhood can easily be implanted into many people. The susceptible people then actually refuse to believe it even when told the truth.18
This shows just how hard it is to separate real from fabricated subconscious traumatic memories,19 whatever the cause.20 It also explains why Juliet’s false memories still cause some doubts despite what her sister told her happened.21 No one is trying to suggest that victims are not genuine or that abuse or the horror of war is wrong. It’s just that we need to keep an open mind on perceptions and accept that some people can deal with traumas very well and others cannot, and that some can create false memories more easily than others.
Grand Rapids, Michigan. A 21-year-old Art and Design student had been meeting friends downtown on a cold windy day in November when she returned to the deserted car lot to drive home, much later than she had intended. The multi-storey car lot was very quiet on a Monday evening, but she was not alone. As she opened her car door, from nowhere a heavy blow hit her neck, thumped her head against the roof of the car and stunned her. A large powerful hand was put against her mouth to stop her screaming. She struggled and was punched in the face and then pushed over the bonnet of the car and sexually assaulted. An hour later she went to a local hospital and bravely reported the assault to police and underwent a sexual assault examination. The doctors swabbed her vagina and sent the sperm found there to a state crime laboratory. She told police: ‘It all happened so fast and it was dark.’ She had no time to properly identify her rapist, other than as a large African-American male.
With no fingerprints at the scene and the victim unable to give detectives a description of her attacker, the only chance was a genetic match in the DNA database. Unfortunately no match was found, and her case became yet another unsolved rape. But five years later, the police got lucky. The state crime lab matched the DNA to that of Jerome Cooper, a 36-year-old African-American ex-college track coach, who had been in prison some years later on an unrelated conviction. Like all defendants facing criminal charges in Michigan, Cooper had to submit a DNA sample for the state database. The match seemed to solve the case until they found out he had an identical twin brother, Tyrone, who also had no alibi for that night. Photos of them show that Tyrone is larger and taller than his twin, but otherwise has the same aggressive facial features and thin Mexican-style moustache. They also had other and nastier traits in common. Tyrone and Jerome Cooper both already had a criminal record for sexually assaulting neighbours – a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old girl.
Their mother Carrie doesn’t believe either of her sons raped the woman, though she can’t explain the DNA evidence. She told the local paper: ‘My sons are not rapists, and they are good boys. I brought them up in church.’ She says her sons were falsely convicted previously. ‘I’ve had so many compliments about how respectful my boys are, even from the prison system,’ she said. Three of her sons have been convicted of sexual assault, she said. Four of her seven sons are now in prison.
So the Cooper family, like the Devon family, seem to have inherited some bad genes that according to their mother couldn’t be tempered sufficiently by their church upbringing, although other studies have shown that religion is usually a beneficial factor, protecting somewhat against crime and alcohol addiction.22 Carrie Cooper wonders if a relative in years past got away with rape and if God has chosen to punish this generation of her family. ‘Things will be visited upon my kids,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a curse upon my kids. I pray to God to lift that. I’m going to leave it in the hands of the Lord.’
The Lord may yet have to have the last word. The DNA sample implicates both twins, but cannot yet identify which one with enough precision to meet the tough standards in the US courts. O. J. Simpson was acquitted of murder – and he didn’t even have a twin. CSI-style genetic research and technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the field of crime. They are used for two different purposes: first, much as in the context of health and disease, genetic research designs have been used to learn about the genetic factors underlying certain traits, such as aggression, violent behaviour and criminality. In contrast to health research, genetic crime research has been very controversial. Critics oppose what they see as the biologisation of crime; by this they mean the danger of people regarding crime and deviant behaviour as something that is written indelibly into our genes. This genetic determinism of criminality is certainly unfounded, but – as for almost all traits – genetic factors do play a role.
Genetic technologies do however also have an important part in another context, which you will probably know from television series such as CSI or Cold Case. As most people (besides identical sets of twins or triplets) have unique DNA, genetic profiling has become a key tool in criminal identification. When biological traces are left on crime scenes, investigators can have those traces analysed. The emerging profile shows what particular genetic characteristics the originator of the trace has at a number of places on the genome. When two such profiles are identical (called a match), chances are high that they originate from the same person. Genetic profiles do not, for the moment, tell us anything about a person’s genetic disease predisposition or any other traits; they are exclusively used to see whether people have identical genetic make-ups to link them or exclude them from certain crimes.23
The police in many countries have problems with twins. Last year I was approached by the New Zealand forensic service. A 16-year-old girl had gone to the police. She said she had met a boy in a bar and had gone home with him. He had turned aggressive and violent and refused to let her leave and then hit her repeatedly and in a cruel and calculated way raped her. The police traced the boy from her description. The boy, who was just 18, was arrested. It seemed a straightforward case – until he said he had an identical twin brother who was also in the bar that night. Both twins said they had got drunk and couldn’t remember what happened. The police didn’t believe their story, as they both had records of violence and petty crime, and wanted to prove this forensically. They had collected a semen sample after the police examination.
The DNA that is easily extracted from the semen and then matched to the blood of the suspect is usually enough evidence to convict a rapist even without identification. Even in identical twins, fingerprints which are very similar are not completely identical and can be distinguished by experts in court. However the DNA from sperm, just like every other cell in the body, carries the exact same classic DNA signature (sequence) in one identical twin as another. The police used current forensic methods which haven’t changed for 25 years and compared the two samples, using 13 highly variable genetic markers (called the CODIS system), with the national database. The results were completely identical. They couldn’t prove which twin the sample came from and were going to drop the case. I explained that they could separate them if they really wanted to. They could find subtle epigenetic methylation differences in the DNA, or possibly they might differ in some rare gene mutations. We are now working on identifying these differences. Unfortunately both these methods are still considered experimental, and would get ripped apart in court. So male identical twins with criminal predispositions are potentially getting away with it – for the moment at least.
On being caught red-handed, many criminals plead insanity, but what about blaming your genes for diminished responsibility? Would that be a legitimate defence? It may sound crazy but a few have tried it. The last to do so was Tony Mobley.
His victim was kneeling and begging for his life when he pulled the trigger. He was convicted for cold-bloodedly murdering 24-year-old John Collins with a shot to the back of the head. His victim was a quiet man who had the misfortune to have been managing a Domino’s Pizza store at the wrong time. Molby had been on a crime spree of at least six armed robberies in the preceding weeks. He showed no remorse and told his guard: ‘If that fat son-of-a-bitch had not started crying, I would never have shot him.’ He jokingly told another guard that he was ‘going to apply for the night manager’s job at Domino’s because he knew they needed one’.
After several trials and mistrials the 26-year-old Mobley was eventually sentenced to execution and kept on death row in Jackson, Georgia for 13 years. Mobley had a very troubled background and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, other anxiety disorders and organic brain damage. He went through ten different residential placements. He had been out of control since the age of 11, and a series of special schools and psychologists had not altered him.
Tony Mobley did not come from great family stock. His grandfather was violent and abusive. His great-uncle went to jail for murder, one cousin beat up his wife with a gun, and another let his friends rape his two daughters. His great-grandmother was also violent and beat up her daughter-in-law. His eventual attorney argued against the death sentence on the basis of mitigating circumstances, namely that he probably carried a genetic mutation in his serotonin gene or an extra Y chromosome. Both defects had been associated in genetic studies with aggression, violence and criminality.24 He wanted the court to allow this to be tested for and used as evidence. The Supreme Court did not agree. He was killed by the state of Georgia by lethal injection with an audience of onlookers, family, victims and journalists behind a glass screen in 2005.
This example shows that genes, while sometimes an explanation of causal factors, are not a good defence in court. They are seen as immutable and so in contrast to the commonly used mitigating circumstance of a broken home and absent father the defence is rarely used.
‘There is no legal defence to his crime,’ said Daniel Summer, Mobley’s attorney at the time. ‘There is only the mitigating factor of his family history. His actions may not have been a product of totally free will.’ Murder, rape, robbery, suicide, ‘you name it’, the Mobley family has had it, he said. Sumner used the deadly combination of the wrong genes plus the wrong environment to explain Mobley’s psychopathic behaviour.
Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert in autism at Cambridge (and cousin to Sasha, the inventor of Borat), has recently advanced his theory that rather than regarding these male offenders as evil psychopaths with vaguely defined personality disorders, we should label them as having zero empathy.25 These are people on the extreme end of normality who cannot relate to their victims or feel remorse. Even the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned and raped his daughter for years, apparently had little idea of the harm he was doing until he listened to ten hours of her testimony at this trial.
There is good evidence that empathy – the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes – although a typical human trait, does have a wide range in humans. These empathy differences between us show moderate genetic influences of 30–70 per cent. Up to 70 per cent of borderline personality disorder cases, who are often very low in empathy scores themselves, report having been sexually abused.26 A high percentage of child abusers and adult rapists also show low levels of empathy,27 so there is a close overlap between lack of empathy and being both a victim and perpetrator of abuse.28
So what are the overall genetic influences on criminality? Many twin, adoption and family studies have shown a strong heritable component. One study of 16,000 US military twins showed a 15 per cent concordance in dishonourable discharge for identical twins compared with only 2 per cent in non-identicals.29 Other large Swedish studies of 1,400 pairs and their parents show heritabilities for aggressive behaviour and psychopathic personality of over 60 per cent.30 Studies of several thousand Vietnam-era twin recruits showed that previous childhood antisocial behaviour was strongly influenced both by genes but also by family environment, whose effects largely disappeared when they were older.31 In Denmark, where they can legally track twins and their criminal records centrally, the same pattern of genes and diminishing family influence was seen.32 The largest estimate for family influence on childhood antisocial behaviour was 16 per cent.33
Of course we have not yet looked at the greatest known genetic risk factor for criminality – one that carries a 15–20-fold risk. There is a 50-50 chance that you will be a carrier. It is called the Y chromosome and determines if you will be a male.
The unique Dunedin Study was ideal for looking at how genes and environment interact in male criminality. They ignored females for this study, as their risk was too low, and followed over 400 males over 26 years in New Zealand to look at predictors of criminal behaviour. The focus of their research was a gene that creates an enzyme called monoamine oxidase-A (MAOA), which ‘mops up’ extra amounts of neurotransmitters in the brain that are known to influence aggression. Boys who also suffered from physical, psychological or sexual abuse as children were nine times more likely to engage in criminal activity if they also had low levels of the MAOA gene than if they had a normal amount. The presence of the gene variant on its own had only a modest effect (increases of 50 per cent) on children in normal non-abusive families.
Other studies since confirm these results, albeit with less dramatic effects. Most also show that alcohol abuse (which is also partly genetically controlled) is another major risk factor.34 So a combination of susceptible genes and an abusive childhood is a recipe for disaster, and to date only a handful of genes – a fraction of those likely to be involved – have been explored in this way.
All these studies of antisocial behaviour, criminality or empathy disorders, while confirming a strong genetic influence, also strangely show that the agreement between identical twins is usually only about 35 per cent. This means that over half to two-thirds of identical twins, despite being in the same environment, don’t become psychopaths, violent criminals or rapists like their brothers. While some twins may have alone experienced a trauma such as being abused that their co-twin did not, in many pairs no obvious difference in major trauma can be seen.
What is going on inside the brains of these people? Clear MRI brain-scan changes can be seen in abuse victims as well as psychopaths and those lacking empathy. Brain regions most affected are all in the empathy circuit such as the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.35 In a recent study from the Institute of Psychiatry in London, adolescent twins, some with early psychopathic traits, were scanned.36 The researchers found that the more grey matter you had in empathy-associated regions the more likely you were to have antisocial or psychopathic traits. Excess grey matter was moderately heritable and is believed to be a sign of brain immaturity, and those affected twins with more grey matter were in essence empathetically more immature than their co-twins. But what was the mechanism for these changes? How could genes such as those influencing empathy, which provide the susceptibility in both twins, have been changed? Could epigenetics be responsible in the twins, or even in the parents? The animal studies again provide clues.
The Montreal rodent studies we discussed in the last chapter show us that maltreatment in the first week of life causes certain genes to be switched off epigenetically.37 The glucocorticoid receptor gene controlling the stress response is the best example, where a methyl group is attached and so the gene cannot be expressed. This leads to a cascade of changes in many other genes related to emotion and stress, and can last a lifetime.
It was thought that any epigenetic marks during life would get completely erased to prevent them being passed on to offspring. However this is not the case. This methylated gene will be present in the sperm or egg of the child, and then usually passed on to the next generation when they reproduce. This means that maltreated pups (or humans), when they become parents, because of their abnormal methylation often fail to bond with their own children because their empathy or bonding genes are not working normally. This leads to an increasing cycle of dysfunctional parenting or abuse. As well as passing on the bad traumatic experience itself, the long-term genetic susceptibility is there in the families, plus the shorter-term epigenetic changes. This combination produces a nasty cocktail leading to potential multiple generations of antisocial behaviour or abuse.
Recent studies in humans have backed up the rodent experiments and shown that at the extreme end, suicide victims who had reported abuse were more likely to have epigenetic changes in crucial hippocampus areas of their brains compared with non-abused suicides.38 It appears that as well as the glucocorticoid receptor gene controlling stress, the genes controlling dopamine, serotonin and the cuddle hormone – oxytocin – levels in the brain are being switched off epigenetically in these families39 and passed on from one generation to the next – if they survive long enough to reproduce.40
Bruce Perry has pioneered the use of MRI scans in badly abused or neglected children. He and others believe that the brain is like an underused muscle that can, with emotional support and mental stimulation, regain much of its potential (if not left too long). Similar brain scans can now accurately diagnose a paedophile.41 If he is correct, it might also be possible for criminals and abusers to regain some empathy.
So should we be less fatalistic about families like Binny’s, the Coopers or the Mobleys? The traditional view is that if genes are largely responsible nothing much can be done. However, although antisocial or criminal behaviour is heritable and more likely to also occur in twins or siblings of a criminal, it certainly isn’t inevitable.42 In fact the majority of co-twins are socially normal and would be wrongly labelled as likely criminals. These provide hope. The animal and some early human studies show us that these post-traumatic epigenetic changes in the brain are in part reversible.43 This can be achieved by early fostering with a cuddly mum or by using conventional drugs that block the hormones oxytocin or dopamine or certain epigenetic drugs called HDAC inhibitors (like TSA) or methyl donors – drugs or foods that can deliver methyl groups and change the gene function.44
The widely held view that ‘genes = fatalism’ has since the war so pervaded our minds and precluded public debate that it has become practically a taboo topic. Even comprehensive reviews by recent official and inter-governmental groups,45 or other influential department of health reports advising that intervention programmes focus on social and economic factors,46 strangely don’t mention the ‘G’ word even once in hundreds of pages. Despite the evident contradictions of optimal parental advice and the current evidence that genes are the main known cause of childhood problems, there is a major political drive to intervene. The strategy is to provide parental advice in high-risk failing families to prevent dysfunctional and antisocial kids. Intervention programmes like the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) – the most rigorously tested programme of its kind – are making a huge political impact in the US and around the world.
David Olds, a paediatrician in Colorado, started this charitable programme in the 1970s targeting young (often unmarried) poor mothers at high risk. Trained nurses would visit mothers at least twice a month and observe and offer advice. They then conducted randomised controlled trials comparing them with normal services over the next 15 years in Elmira, New York, and in Memphis and Denver to see the effect. The results were spectacular. NFP-trained mothers had fewer unintended pregnancies. They were four times less likely to abuse or neglect their children, or to misuse alcohol or drugs, and were less likely to need welfare support or be unemployed. The nurse-visited children had 50 per cent lower arrests, 80 per cent fewer convictions, significantly lower use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and less promiscuous sexual activity, than the control group. The benefits extended for up to 15 years after the programme ended.47 President Obama endorsed the programme and recently committed $8.6 billion over ten years to the development and refinement of the Federal programme across the USA from 2010.
Many other programmes in other countries are being commissioned, costing millions now with the hope of eventually saving billions in 20 years’ time when the children have grown up. Independent reviews and government reports of all the different intervention studies worldwide have been generally supportive.48 They all show they are most cost-effective for the high-risk groups. However, the experts examining the studies still have some problems. They cannot yet say which type of intervention works best, or at what time point or duration, suggesting that the exact mechanism is still unclear.49
What is clear is that if it is the parenting skills that are being changed directly, this contradicts the evidence from the genetic studies showing little influence of parenting. Remember that the studies showed less than 5 per cent reversible environmental influence for personality, and at the most 16 per cent for antisocial behaviour. Some of the scheme’s success undoubtedly comes from improving the social and economic factors of these mothers and their ability to overcome these problems.50
But the experts also believe that changing the understanding of the parent towards the individual child’s needs (and presumably their genes) can help. Perhaps the key is altering and reversing the destructive one-to-one bond between mother and child. When this bond or interaction goes wrong it leads to dangerous alterations in gene methylation that modify their genes affecting emotion and behaviour. Thus, intervening by reducing maternal stress or other simple measures (like epigenetic drugs) may alter or soften the epigenetic signals that might otherwise remain permanent, preventing transmission to the next generation and continuing the vicious cycle.
A new theory recently summarised and tested in US adolescents by Jay Belsky and Kevin Beaver has suggested that genes could be acting in ways we hadn’t anticipated. They found that some children are just genetically programmed to react in an extreme way (either good or bad reactors) depending on circumstance. Others, by contrast, can be totally resistant to change whatever the positive or negative environment. Kids with certain forms of the (usual suspect) neurotransmitter genes influencing dopamine and serotonin were more likely to react strongly in one direction or another than those with other forms.51
Belsky and Beaver proposed reconceptualising such genes as ‘plasticity genes’ rather than vulnerability genes. This means that if the worst kids that responded most negatively and became delinquents are then put in an ideal environment, they might actually rise above passive kids in terms of social skills and IQ. This is clearly a big hope of the intervention programmes, but we will have to wait and see if reality matches the idea.
Epigenetic signals are hard to detect in traditional genetic and epidemiological studies, which explains why it has taken us so long to discover them. Why we have evolved to have these epigenetic mechanisms make us so unpredictable is intriguing, but our development as infants and children points clearly to prioritising individuality and being different to our brothers and sisters. This phenomenon might also explain why twin and adoption studies show negligible effects of common environments on kids, because each individual (even identical twins) can react so differently to them.
Plasticity explains why coming up with any perfect parenting plan is unlikely to work for all kids, and it is proving hard to pin down the best interventions for failing families. It also explains why some kids are relatively immune to their dreadful experiences. Nevertheless, putting society’s resources into trying to alter the bad behaviour and therefore modify the genes of the small group of the most high-risk families could just produce the dramatic results that we need.