Category Archives: Child abuse

The crime fighter’s revolution — police in Canadian town use trauma-informed approach

June 5, 2013 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Solutions 4 Comments

crime….but they don’t call it trauma-informed. They call it Community Mobilization.

This is a must-read about a police department in the small Canadian town of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, pop. 35,000, that was dealing with 35,000 calls a year, which was double the number in 2001. The calls were on track to double again in eight years, until the department instituted what they call Community Mobilization, a concept they borrowed from police in Glasgow, Scotland.

Here’s an excerpt from the excellent story by Winnipeg Free Press reporter Randy Turner.

Seated around the table are representatives from every policing and social-services agency in the city: addictions, municipal police and RCMP, mental health, child services, probation, education. The works.

The analyst cites the first “case” — a 13-year-old girl recently reported missing by a guardian and found intoxicated by patrol officers. The girl was returned to her home. She had been truant and recently adopted a “poor attitude.” An investigation revealed the teenager had been a victim of abuse at the hands of a stepfather who had recently moved into the home.

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Nearly 35 million U.S. children have experienced one or more types of childhood trauma

May 13, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Trauma 9 Comments

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Almost half the nation’s children have experienced at least one or more types of serious childhood trauma, according to a new survey on adverse childhood experiences by the National Survey of Children’s Health (NHCS). This translates into an estimated 34,825,978 children nationwide, say the researchers who analyzed the survey data.

Even more concerning, nearly a third of U.S. youth age 12-17 have experienced two or more types of childhood adversity that are likely to affect their physical and mental health as adults. Across the 50 U.S. states, the percentages range from 23 percent for New Jersey to 44.4 percent for Arizona.

The data are clear, says Dr. Christina Bethell: If more prevention, trauma-healing and resiliency training programs aren’t provided for children who have experienced trauma, and if our educational, juvenile

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Believing women and children

May 6, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma 7 Comments

akidYears ago, when I began interviewing people at organizations that are using the results from the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study to change their practices, I talked with a representative of SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). She said a very interesting thing that stuck with me. The ACE Study, which published its first findings in 1998, confirmed what many people had already suspected or who believed “what women were telling us,” she said.

Women addicted to alcohol or other drugs and/or who had mental illness said that their problems originated in abuse they experienced as children.

“Consumers were coming into our system and telling us this,” said the SAMHSA rep. “I don’t know that they were heard.” The rates of trauma

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Trauma past and present, and how to move on from trauma in the future

May 1, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Neurobiology, Solutions 1 Comment

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Here are three articles that might be of interest, from separate parts of the country, but interconnected in the growing awareness of how to understand, treat and prevent trauma. The first story looks at how those who were traumatized passed their trauma on to their children. The second story looks at how children who have experienced adversity aren’t really incurable — people just haven’t figured out how to help them. And the third offers some ways to build resilience.

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The CDC’s ACE Study summarized in 14-minute video from Academy on Violence & Abuse

April 26, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Chronic disease, Neurobiology 4 Comments

The Academy on Violence and Abuse, which educates health care professionals about the often unrecognizable health effects of violence and abuse, produced a four-hour DVD of interviews with the co-founders of the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, released a 14-minute executive summary.

The organization released a three-minute teaser last year. For those unfamiliar with the ACE STudy, this 14-minute puts a little more meat on the bones.

And if you want to know what your ACE score is — as well as how you’re doing on building resilience into your life — go to the survey: Got Your ACE Score? The ACE survey has 10 questions, and the resilience survey has 14.

Of scars and neuroplasticity…a few words from a survivor

April 9, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Neurobiology Leave a comment

01-26-04. digital image #2349The ConsortiumCharles Abel photo.I am a survivor of sexual and physical abuse. The experience changed me. It shapes and informs who I am – how I interact with others and the world around me. Yes, I have grown stronger as a result of these experiences; they are the wellspring of my passion and strength. Scars do that, they remind us of the past and how far we have come. Yes, great healing occurs but, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, the thin line of the break is always evident.

A very wise woman who walked with me through the early days of my healing journey once said when I asked her if the pain would always be so wrenching,

“The times between these moments will be longer. The pain itself will seldom be so strong. The time you are bent over in fear will not last so long. But you will always be a woman who has experienced violence. You may go to a party, someone tells a joke, everyone laughs, and you leave immediately to go home, to bed…not for long but the memory will come up again. The body knows. It is an archive of your history. It cannot be erased but it can be the basis of your body wisdom.”

So when we speak of the neuroplasticity of the brain, do not assume that every trace of the past is vanished. It just does not loom so large; it does not drive our every action, thought or feeling.

I don’t think we forget. We grow strong in the broken (read: wounded) places. And that is not a bad thing. It is a remarkable thing.

Rene Andersen sent this in a message on a list-serv; she said it would be OK to post here. Rene (pronounced “ree-nee”) has been active in leading recovery projects, especially developing peer-to-peer communities, for decades. She says her work “is grounded in the community, centered on the resiliency of the individual, and borne out of personal experience with recovery from abuse and addiction.” I’m doing a story about the trauma-informed care movement, and have interviewed her. 

The (inextricable) Link: Animal abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse

March 26, 2013 By in Child abuse, Solutions Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

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“Over the past 30 years, researchers and professionals in a variety of human services and animal welfare disciplines have established significant correlations between animal abuse, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, elder abuse and other forms of violence. Mistreating animals is no longer seen as an isolated incident that can be ignored: it is often an indicator or predictor crime and a “red flag” warning sign that other family members in the household may not be safe. We call this species-spanning interconnectedness of different forms of violence The Link.”

So states The National Link Coalition, which was created in 2008. “…Over 100 dedicated authorities, advocates and researchers representing a diverse array of animal protection, domestic violence, child maltreatment and elder abuse disciplines came together at a unique Town Meeting and National Summit in Portland, Maine.”  Their “goal was to build greater awareness of how these forms of family and community violence are interconnected…and to build successful programs whereby agencies in these fields can cross-report and cross-train each other for more effective prevention of violence.”

This relatively new field of research has uncovered some grim statistics. PAWS in Washington State outlines some striking

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The secret to fixing school discipline problems? Change the behavior of adults

March 20, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Chronic disease, Community prevention programs, Education, Neurobiology, School discipline, Solutions, Washington State 19 Comments
Higa

Godwin Higa, principal, Cherokee Point Elementary School

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Two kindergarteners at Cherokee Point Elementary School in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood get into a fight on the playground. Their teacher sends them to the principal’s office. 

Instead of suspending or expelling the six-year-olds, as happens in many schools, Principal Godwin Higa ushers them to his side of the desk. He sits down so that he can talk with them eye-to-eye and quietly asks: “What happened?” He points to one of the boys. “You go first.” 

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Rape is not inevitable; 25 years of Prozac; how racism is bad for health

March 13, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Chronic disease 2 Comments

rapeThree posts caught my eye last night. The first was by Jessica Valenti, who writes about feminism, sexuality and social justice for the Nation. She looked at the vitriolic response to political commentator and writer Zerlina Maxwell’s appearance on Fox News’ Hannity. Maxwell made the point that having a gun doesn’t prevent rape. Valenti quoted her as saying: “I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there.”

A headline on TheBlaze.com, a right-wing site, shouted Democratic Strategist’s Shocking Claim: Women Don’t Need Guns for Self-Defense, Just Tell Men “Not to Rape Women” and called her approach “bizarre”. Online comments were, well, what you might expect. Valenti pointed out:

The truth is that focusing on ways women can prevent rape will always backfire. Not only because it’s ineffective—what a woman wears or

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New books of note: ‘Restoring Sanctuary’ and ‘Blind to Betrayal’

March 8, 2013 By in ACE Study, Child abuse, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Solutions Leave a comment

sanctuaryDr. Sandra Bloom, associate professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health and founder of the Sanctuary programs, and Brian Farragher, chief operating officer of ANDRUS, have come out with their long-awaited Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care. ANDRUS provides services for families and children in New York State’s Westchester County, and also operates the Sanctuary Institute.

Restoring Sanctuary is the third in a trilogy. Creating Sanctuary, written by Bloom, focused on the Sanctuary Model of Care itself, and how it evolved. More than 200 organizations have adopted the Sanctuary model. Destroying Sanctuary, written by Bloom and Farragher, showed how organizational trauma is destroying the U.S. health care system. Restoring Sanctuary provides a roadmap for organizations to transform themselves into safe and trauma-informed environments.

Last week in New York City, about 100 people turned out at a book party for Restoring Sanctuary. In a write-up on PelhamPatch.com, Farragher was quoted as saying that Destroying Sanctuary “described the formidable barriers to providing effective mental health and social services to our clients and issued a call for reform and recovery.  This new volume takes that next step.  We see it as a roadmap to recovery for our nation’s human service organizations.”

Another book, Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled, by University of Oregon psychology

blind professor Dr. Jennifer Freyd and clinical psychologist Pamela Birrell, who teaches at the University of Oregon, will be published on Monday. It provides examples of why organizations, agencies, and society as a whole might want to adopt the Sanctuary model.

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