Widom, Cathy Spatz: The Cycle of Violence

The Primary Research

In 1992, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, Widom sought to examine whether violence begets violence. That is, Widom looked to answer the question “How likely is it that today's abused and neglected children will become tomorrow's violent offenders?” (1992, p. 1). Widom refers to the cycle of violence as the idea that individuals who are exposed to violence through abuse in childhood will be predisposed to violence as adults.

Widom's research technique, the prospective cohorts design, provided a major advance to literature examining the link between child abuse and criminal behavior. This is because it identified a sample of abused and neglected children and longitudinally followed them to adulthood. It was considered prospective (as opposed to retrospective) because it began with the independent variable of interest (in this case child abuse) and followed subjects in order to examine long-term consequences (in this case criminal behavior). Doing so allowed Widom to use child abuse to predict the likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior as a juvenile and adult.

Widom's technique is also considered rigorous for two other reasons. First, she used a large “treatment” sample of youth who were abused and neglected as well as a comparison or “control” group of youths who were not abused and neglected. Widom was thus able to examine differences in criminal behavior between a large group of 908 youths who were abused and neglected to a group of 667 youths who were not. Second, Widom's method of selecting the comparison group worked to control for other measures that would likely produce a spurious relationship. That is, Widom selected youths for the comparison group who were similar in terms of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and jurisdiction. Doing this ensured that one of these factors did not artificially cause the appearance of a relationship between child abuse and criminal behavior.

The sample of abused subjects was taken from official court records of youths in a Midwestern jurisdiction whose parental figures were charged with abuse and neglect before the youths were age 11 (for a review of the methods, see Widom, 1992). The comparison sample consisted of youths taken from the same jurisdiction who were of similar age, sex, race, and socioeconomic status. The court documents of the abused and neglected sample were reviewed, and each incident of abuse and neglect was categorized into either physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect. The outcome variable for the analysis was arrest for criminal behavior. Local, state, and federal background checks were used to gather information regarding the number and types of arrests for the treatment and comparison subjects. Widom also conducted a second phase of the study in which the subjects were located and interviewed as adults. This was used to provide insight into other social consequences of abuse.

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