Is Exposure to Violence a Persistent Risk Factor for Offending across the Life Course? Examining the Contemporaneous, Acute, Enduring, and Long-term Consequences of Exposure to Violence on Property Crime, Violent Offending, and Substance Use

• DOI: 10.1177/0022427818785207
• Author: Gregory M. Zimmerman,Chelsea Farrell
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Is Exposure to

Violence a Persistent

Risk Factor for

Offending across the

Life Course? Examining

the Contemporaneous,

Acute, Enduring, and

Long-term Consequences

of Exposure to Violence

on Property Crime,

Violent Offending,

and Substance Use

Chelsea Farrell

1

and Gregory M. Zimmerman

1

Abstract

Objectives: To examine the contemporaneous (cross-sectional), acute

(1 year), enduring (5–7 years), and long-term (12–13 years) effects of expo-

sure to violence on offending behaviors. Methods: We analyze four waves of

1

School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gregory M. Zimmerman,School of Criminology and Criminal Justice,Northeastern University,

417 Churchill Hall,360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115,USA.

Email: g.zimmerman@neu.edu

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

2018, Vol. 55(6) 728-765

ªThe Author(s) 2018

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022427818785207

journals.sagepub.com/home/jrc

data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health

(N¼7,706). Exposure to violence captures direct (interpersonal victimiza-

tion and violent threats) and indirect (witnessing violence) experiences with

violence. Outcome measures include property crime, violent offending, and

substance use. A series of logistic regression models examine the acute,

enduring, and long-term effects of exposure to violence on the offending

outcomes at each study wave, controlling for exposure to violence, lagged

dependent variables, and baseline covariates at all previous waves. Results:

The effects of exposure to violence on violent offending persist over time,

with effects attenuating over time. However, exposure to violence only has

contemporaneous and acute effects on property crime and drug use.

Conclusions: Long-term effects of exposure to violence on violent offending

are not an artifact of confounding with more recent experiences with

violence. Both distal and proximate effects of exposure to violence should

be addressed in order to adequately disrupt the overlap between exposure

to violence and violent offending.

Keywords

exposure to violence, offending, victim-offender overlap

Exposure to violence is a particularly consequential aspect of youths’ real-

ity. The concept of exposure to violence is multidimensional, referring

broadly to: (1) direct interpersonal victimization and threatened physical

harm or (2) the indirect witnessing of (or hearing about) violence (Buka

et al. 2001; Eitle and Turner 2002; Jonson-Reid 1998; Richters and Marti-

nez 1993). Exposure to violence may occur in the home, school, peer group,

or broader community; and it includes experiencing and witnessing violent

events ranging from less serious, more prevalent acts (e.g., fighting) to more

serious, less prevalent acts (e.g., sexual victimization and shootings; Fagan,

Wright, and Pinchevsky 2014; Finkelhor et al. 2009).

Research has documented the high prevalence of both direct and indirect

exposure to violence (Buka et al. 2001; Fagan et al. 2014; Richters and

Martinez 1993). By recent estimates, over 60 percent of children under the

age of 17 are exposed to violence, either directly or indirectly, each year in

the United States (Finkelhor et al. 2009). According to the National Survey

of Children’s Exposure to Violence (Finkelhor et al. 2013), approximately

26.4 percent of youths aged 10 to 13 years and 42.6 percent of youths aged

14 to 17 years witnessed violence in the family or in the community in

Farrell and Zimmerman 729

2010; and 46.5 percent and 39.5 percent of youths aged 10 to 13 years and

14 to 17 years, respectively, were physically assaulted in the past year. The

high prevalence of exposure to violence prompted the Attorney General’s

National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence—an interagency and

interdisciplinary collaborative of researchers and practitioners in the United

States—to deem exposure to violence a “national epidemic” (Listenbee and

Torre 2012:28).

The high prevalence of exposure to violence is particularl y alarming

given evidence of its severe consequences. Exposure to violence has been

associated with: negative emotionality, including anger, loss of confidence,

and fear (Posick 2014); mental health issues, such as anxiety, post-traumatic

stress disorder, and depression (Borowsky et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1999;

Buka et al. 2001; Cuevas et al. 2010); negative biological responses, such as

impaired cognitive functioning, increased heart rate, sleep disturbance, and

stunted pubertal development (Fowler et al. 2009; Mohammad et al. 2015;

Perkins and Graham-Bermann 2012); and adverse beha vioral outcomes,

including substance use, suicidal behavior, aggression, and crime (Brezina

et al. 2004; Cleary 2000; Nofziger and Kurtz 2005; Pinchevsky, Wright, and

Fagan 2013; Zimmerman, Farrell, and Posick 2017). Both victimization and

witnessing violence are documented correlates of a wide range of maladap-

tive internalized and externalized outcomes (Buka et al. 2001; Eitle and

Turner 2002; Fagan et al. 2014).

Exposure to Violence as a Cause of Subsequent

Offending

Of particular import to the current study is the widely documented relation-

ship between exposure to violence and offending, a phenomenon commonly

referred to as the victim-offender overlap (Fagan et al. 2014; Farrell and

Zimmerman 2017; Jennings, Piquero, and Reingle 2012; Muftic´, Finn, and

Marsh 2015; Tomsich et al. 2017). In a review of 37 studies that examine

the victim-offender overlap, Jennings and colleagues (2012) found that 84

percent demonstrated a significant association between victimization and

offending. Studies indicate that victims and offenders share similar demo-

graphic characteristics (e.g., young, unmarried males; Lauritsen, Sampson,

and Laub 1991); that victims frequently report prior contact with the crim-

inal justice system; and that offenders often report prior victimization

experiences (Widom 1989). Scholars have thus ar gued that victims and

offenders are often the same persons (Hindelang 1976; Wolfgang 1957).

730 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 55(6)