Adverse Childhood Experiences Appear to Be Critical in Pathway to Terrorist Violence

There is a complex interrelationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adult attitudes and behaviors related to radicalization and terrorism, said Sean Cleary, Ph.D., M.P.H., a professor of epidemiology at George Washington University’s Milken Institute for Public Health, at APA’s Annual Meeting today.

Cleary and other speakers discussed the findings of a December 2023 study in The Journal of Forensic Sciences they wrote titled “Pathway to Terrorist Behaviors: The Role of Childhood Experiences, Personality Traits, and Ideological Motivations in a Sample of Iraqi Prisoners.” The study showed that the effect of ACEs on violent attitudes and behaviors related to terrorism are mediated by diagnoses of antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder.

“Childhood adversity and conduct disorder merit further longitudinal studies [into their relationship with violence and radicalism],” Cleary said. “The results would have important implications for intervention in persons at high risk for violence.”

Also speaking at the session were co-authors Philip Candilis, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University School of Medicine; Allen Dyer, M.D., Ph.D., emeritus professor of psychiatry at George Washington; and Najat Khalifa, M.D., professor and director of Research at the Queen’s University Department of Psychiatry in Kingston, Ontario.

The speakers emphasized that the pathway to violence is a multifaceted process with no single theory or approach to explain it. Although research has focused on understanding the process in crime, interpersonal violence, and terrorism, there has been a dearth of studies on empirically driven pathways.

The authors defined an empirically driven pathway to violence based on interviews with a sample of 160 Iraqi individuals convicted of terrorism under the Iraqi Terrorism Law. They employed “path analysis” — a statistical method of analyzing the interdependent relationship of multiple variables to a specific outcome acting through multiple possible pathways.

Specifically, they looked at the pathways between and among ACES, conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, religious commitment, political commitment, religion as a guiding principle, attitudes to terrorism, and severity of terrorist acts.

Results showed that ACEs positively impacted the likelihood of a diagnosis of conduct disorder and/or antisocial personality disorder, the prominence of religion as a guiding principle, and attitudes toward terrorism. In turn, antisocial personality disorder positively affected political commitment and terrorism attitudes while religious commitment positively influenced the prioritization of religion in life, which subsequently impacted terrorism attitudes and behavior severity.

In the study, the authors stated that although the analysis did not support a direct path from ACEs to severity of terrorism, it revealed an indirect path from ACEs to conduct disorder to antisocial personality disorder, “which in turn had a significant positive effect on political commitment and attitudes toward terrorism. This had a direct positive effect on the severity of terrorism acts. This is in accord with findings from other studies which suggest that ACEs can influence the development of attitudes and behaviors related to terrorism.”

“Our results support the complex and interdependent nature of childhood and adult experiences on the development of attitudes and the severity of violent behavior,” Cleary said. He and other speakers emphasized the limitations of the model—especially the reliance on self-reported experiences from a relatively small sample of incarcerated men in Iraq that may not generalize to other violent radical groups.

Dyer, commenting on the results, noted that prevention of terrorism has typically focused on factors that are more proximal to terrorist violence—religious and political commitment. “But our data show that earlier developmental factors—especially ACEs, conduct disorder, and antisocial personality disorders—are antecedent to attitudes in adults that may lead to terrorist behaviors.” ■

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