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1. Introduction
In the seminal survey of 9508 adults in the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, Felitti and colleagues [1] introduced the concept of adverse childhood experiences to account for the negative health and behavioral consequences of various forms of childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to household dysfunction. The seminal ACE study and subsequent studies [2,3,4,5] supported the notion that individuals who endured more adverse childhood experiences tended to suffer the most throughout the life course and evinced the greatest number of health problems, maladaptive behaviors, and comorbid psychiatric conditions.
One of the maladaptive behaviors that results from adverse childhood experiences is antisocial behavior. In recent years, criminologists have utilized the adverse childhood experiences conceptual framework to examine associations with delinquency, crime, and serious violence. It has become clear that diverse adverse childhood experiences are fairly pervasive among clinical and correctional samples relative to those in the general population. For example, Baglivio and colleagues [6] examined a sample of more than 60,000 juvenile offenders from the United States and found that delinquents were significantly more likely than those in the general population to have pervasive adverse childhood experiences and significantly less likely to never experience adverse childhood experiences. In other words, clinical samples of youth evince a high preponderance of abusive experiences and deprivation. These findings were consistent with studies of youth residing in detention, correctional, and confinement facilities [7,8,9,10,11] where adverse childhood experiences are endemic.
There is also compelling evidence that adverse childhood experiences are particularly serious risk factors for more pathological forms of offending. For instance, Fox and colleagues [12] reported that each additional adverse childhood experience increased the likelihood of serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offending by 35%. Others have similarly found that adverse childhood experiences were linked to more severe offending trajectories, earlier onset of antisocial conduct, and shorter time to recidivism post-juvenile justice services [13,14]. For instance, Boduszek and colleagues [15] found that male prisoners in Poland who had been exposed to family violence were approximately six times more likely to perpetrate a homicide than offenders who lacked violence exposure. In terms of sexual violence, a host of investigators have found that assorted adverse childhood experiences, particularly childhood sexual abuse victimization, were associated with an increased likelihood of perpetrating sexual...