Cathy Spatz Widom

Cathy Spatz Widom is an American developmental psychologist and criminologist who holds a Distinguished Professorship in the psychology department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, after earning her doctorate at Brandeis University. She is best known for a series of long-running longitudinal studies establishing what she termed the cycle of violence, tracing how children who experience abuse or neglect face an elevated risk of delinquency and adult violent behavior, while stressing that most abused and neglected children do not go on to become violent. Her 1989 paper on the subject won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Behavioral Science Research Prize, and she received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2016.