Violence is a mental health problem, perhaps the most serious mental health problem facing society today. Violence is learned, typically in the family circle.
Domestic violence is the breeding place for social violence.
Fifteen percent of U.S. children may enter life without such an attachment, feel no intimate, safe, and loving connection with anyone, posing high risk of violent behavior. For them, sex and violence are linked. About 30,000 children currently await adoption. Adoption, when it is the last in a series of traumatic experiences perhaps includidng fetal alcohol poisoning, malnutrition, rejection, and birth complications, can lead to antisocial behavior, especially in boys. Infant monkeys, reared in isolation from mothers, develop structural, neurochemical, and neuroelectrical abnormalities which mediate depression, hyperactivity, self-mutilation, and pathologic violence.