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The author suggests that, before reading this article, you go to YouTube, com and watch First Impressions: Exposure to Violence and a Child's Developing Brain (15 minutes) featuring Dr. Bruce Perry, senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston, Texas,1 and Dr. Linda Chamberlain, founding director, Alaska Family Violence Prevention Project,2 available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=brVOYtNMmKk.3
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an article titled "Silent Victims-An Epidemic of Childhood Exposure to Domestic Violence." It called on healthcare providers to understand the prevalence and neurobiological consequences of children's exposure to domestic violence and take action to mitigate it.
Childhood IPV [Intimate Partner Violence] exposure has been repeatedly linked to higher rates of myriad physical health problems in children. Altered neuroendocrine stress response may be one important mechanism accounting for this correlation. Highly stressful environmental exposure, such as exposure to IPV, causes children to repeatedly mount the "fight or flight" reaction. Although this response may be adaptive in the short term, repeated activation . . . results in pathologic changes in multiple systems over time; some experts refer to this effect as the biologic embedding of stress.4
The First Imirressions: Exposure to Violence and a Child's Developing Brain video starts with Dr. Perry explaining that contrary to what was long believed, neuroscience shows that the brains of babies and young children are sponges that soak up and are shaped by everything in their environment, including the harm of exposure to domestic violence. Dr. Linda Chamberlain, founding director of the Alaska Family Violence Prevention Project,-explains the evolution of her understanding that even babies and young children are impacted by exposure to domestic violence and how that impact is experienced and expressed by children of different ages. "The Enduring Effects of Abuse and Related Adverse Experiences in Childhood: A Convergence of Evidence from Neurobiology and Epidemiology" is an article by neuroscientists, pediatricians, physicians, and public health experts who assessed the findings of the long-running Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study in the context of the new knowledge from neuroscience. The ACE questionnaire includes questions about childhood exposure to domestic violence and adult perpetration. After reviewing the more than 17,000 responses from the mostly white, welleducated sample, they wrote:
[T|he detrimental effects of traumatic stress on developing neural...