Being abused as an infant outweighs any primarily genetic trait, such as an anxious temperament, in fostering abusive parenting by female monkeys, says primatologist Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago.” (Science News)
One of the most disturbing givens in human traumatology is the transgenerational transmission of abuse, the frequent observation that children who were abused have a tendency to become abusers as parents. One (conservative) figure cited is 30%. This study shows that, in rhesus monkeys, abuse is similarly transmitted transgenerationally and that it is childrearing rather than constitutional factors that account for it. In an analogue of human adoption studies which are used to distinguish the contributions of nurture from those of inherited biology, even rhesus babies born to nonabusive mothers but reared by abusive ones had a tendency to become abusive mothers themselves, while babies born to abusive mothers but adopted by nonabusive ones never did. I am surprised that there is child abuse among nonhuman species, and even more astounded by the author’s leap to asserting that this means that rhesus child abuse is a good model for human child abuse, especially after going the distance to demonstrate that it is not the genetic constitution (yeah, yeah, we all have heard by now that we share 98% of that with our primate cousins…) but the social environment (surely far less than 98% similar, to say the least!) that shapes this phenomenon. Other primatologists suggest — quite rightly, it seems to me — that ‘monkey models at best provide “food for thought” about how human child abuse occurs.’
