Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

6: The Childhood Nexus

= 6 = The Childhood Nexus In the neighborhood I grew up in, it was nothing to see a woman dragged, knocked down, stomped and beat . . . So many women, including my mother—they stood there and they took it . . . So I took on that generational trait. You were just supposed to take it. —Eliza Eliza’s quote above alludes to a “cycle of violence,” like that supported by the work of Catherine S. Widom (see Widom 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1992). Indeed, one of the well-documented risk factors for violence in adulthood is childhood abuse and victimization. In this chapter, we discuss this seemingly straightforward relationship, but we also contextualize the early victimization of the women in our study by using results from the qualitative interviews. Examining context provides a more complicated picture of the childhood lives of these women, and challenges linear or simple interpretations of the nexus of factors that constituted their early lived experiences. When we compared the reports of childhood happiness with the women ’s recollection of negative childhood events (e.g., violence), not surprisingly , we found that women who had experienced any of the negative childhood events (ranging from adults’ yelling at each other to severe child abuse) were much more likely to report an unhappy or very unhappy childhood. Shaping Young Lives In large part due to feminist criminologists (see Arnold 1990; Belknap and Holsinger 1998; Chesney-Lind and Rodriguez 1983; Gilfus 1992), gender has emerged as an important variable when studying the relevance of child- The Childhood Nexus 89 hood victimization to violence against or perpetrated by women in adulthood (Arnold 1990; Brett 1993; Chesney-Lind and Rodriguez 1983; Gilfus 1992; Silbert and Pines 1981). Considering gender problematizes a simple, formulaic relationship between child and adult victimization. ChesneyLind and Pasko note that “unlike boys, girls’ victimization and their response to that victimization is speci>cally shaped by their status as young women” (2004, 27). Widom, who promotes the “cycle of violence” theory, >nds in her more recent work that while “it is clear that childhood victimization has pervasive consequences for criminal behavior and violence . . . patterns of increased risk di=ered for males and females” (2000, 9). The ways that gender a=ects victimization, particularly in terms of sexual abuse, were outlined in chapter 1. One salient point was that research that focuses on the gendered nature of victimization >nds the rates of sexual abuse experienced by girls to be higher than those of boys. Our examination of childhood experiences begins by considering the di=erent types of negative events experienced by the women in our study. Our quantitative >ndings indicate that large proportions of women in our survey experienced negative childhood events, including psychological and physical aggression. About 60 percent said they experienced childhood violence, with about half of all the women classifying violence in their childhoods as severe. It is also apparent that family instability was comTable 6.1 Childhood experiences among homeless women (N = 737) Childhood psychological aggression 66.7% Minor childhood violence 49.8% Severe childhood violence 49.8% Any childhood violence 59.4% Parents ever married 75.3% Parents ever divorced, separated, or widowed 64.5% mean number of times parents divorced (standard deviation) 1.55 (2.05) Adults yelled at each other 62.2% Adults hit each other 39.7% Very unhappy childhood 14.2% Unhappy childhood 9.9% So-so childhood 30.7% Happy childhood 26.4% Very happy childhood 18.8% 90 HARD LIVES, MEAN STREETS mon, as the majority of women reported changes in parental marital status that included divorce. In addition, approximately two-thirds of the women witnessed their parents yelling at each other, and another 40 percent saw physical violence in the home. In addition to the childhood physical violence , many women were also child victims of sexual violence. Nearly one in three women in our quantitative survey reported vaginal rape victimization before they were eighteen years old. Clearly, violence was relatively common in the lives of these women. Nonetheless, the participants were reluctant to classify their childhoods as unhappy, with the largest percentage of respondents calling their early years “so-so.” Victimization, however, did have an impact. Not surprisingly, childhoods >lled with violence were not remembered as idyllic. In some instances, women who experienced any one of a series of negative events ranging from witnessing parental violence to experiencing severe violence were more than >ve times as likely to remember their childhoods...