By 
Jeremy Loudenback, ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
When Karina Cabrera first sat down with Angelica,* a 15-year-old enrolled in a juvenile diversion program at Centinela Youth Services (CYS), the case manager remembers the youth’s icy stare and clipped answers.
Just weeks before, Angelica had been hauled in by members of the Los Angeles Police Department after she was caught trying to steal a shirt at Target.
By Courtney Knight, ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
If you have not seen Netflix’s breakout documentary series “Making a Murderer,” there is a good chance every other person you know has.
The series follows the intellectually challenged 16-year-old Brendan Dassey and his uncle as they are ushered through the Wisconsin criminal justice system. Brendan’s intellectual or cognitive disabilities have been mentioned numerous times, but how his age and disability mix with interrogation techniques and self-advocacy within the system have not been explored.
Public outrage occurred over the suggestive, and at times directive, methods police used to obtain Brendan’s confession later used in court.
Brendan, who did not even know the word “inconsistent” when police used it, is reported by the entertainment news site Vulture to have an IQ ranging from 69-73, which in many other states could make him mentally incompetent to stand trial.
This cognitive disability is not to be confused with mental illness, which may impact half of incarcerated adults and can be treated by medication or therapy. Brendan is also just one of almost 400,000 inmates with cognitive disabilities currently imprisoned in the United States.
A December 14, 2015 report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics shows just how “consistent” the incarceration of cognitively disabled individuals is in the United States, identifying that roughly a quarter of detained Americans struggle with a cognitive disability.
By Marie Cohen at Chronicleofsocialchange.org
In my last column, I discussed the new approaches to identify and target high-risk families for special attention in child welfare. Los Angeles and Allegheny County, PA, as well as New Zealand are working on risk assessment algorithms. Rapid Safety Feedback (RSF), which has been implemented in Florida and is being adapted to other states, targets for special attention families with characteristics associated with high risk to children.
by Marie K. Cohen, ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
As The Chronicle of Social Change has been reporting over the past two years, various jurisdictions have been exploring new tools to focus the attention of child welfare systems on the children most at risk of subsequent abuse or neglect. The mainstream media has begun to notice, as demonstrated by CNBC’s recent report on Los Angeles’ contract with software company SAS to develop such a tool for its child welfare system.
These new approaches generally rely on predictive analytics, which means using patterns in data to predict future outcomes. Despite the recent media coverage, there is still some confusion about what is
Jordan Rodriguez with Evan Low, California Assemblymember __________________
By Jeremy Loudenback, ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
Every holiday season, 17-year-old Jordain Rodriguez sends a note to two families she barely knows with a simple wish: She’d like to see her nieces and nephews.
Around the holidays and on each of the children’s birthdays, she writes emails to the two families who adopted her family members, asking for pictures, any recent updates and a chance to talk to them.
Students participating in the mindfulness program at Five Acres School in Altadena, CA. ____________________________________________
By Jeremy Loudenback, ChronicleforSocialChange.org
While meditation has expanded in recent years from a zen-seeker’s path to higher consciousness, to a best practice for hard-charging CEOs, it’s now gaining a foothold at a school in Southern California serving students with serious emotional and behavioral issues.
Administrators at the Five Acres School in Altadena, CA, are testing whether meditation and mindfulness can help students succeed in the classroom. A new mindfulness program implemented there in two semesters over the past year has helped pupils stay in the classroom and minimize emotional outbursts that can derail the learning process, according to administrators.
Students at Five Acres have ended up at the school because of behavioral issues that have led them to be
Dr. Joyce Dorado, director of UCSF’s HEARTS program
by Shane Downing at ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
Last New Year’s Day, when 13-year-old Lee Weathersby III was shot and died in Oakland, CA, nearly 200 of his middle school peers and teachers received therapy.
In the Oakland Unified School District, Sandra Simmons’ job is to help coordinate that therapy on school campuses. As a behavioral health program manager for the district, Simmons oversees crisis response across the district. She has organized behavioral health training and counseling for students, teachers, staff, and administrators for the past five years.
By Daniel Heimpel
at ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
Last year, I took my longstanding class at U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, Journalism for Social Change (J4SC), online.
With the help of edX, a platform for Massive Open Online Classes, or MOOCs, we were able to teach thousands of students from around the globe how to produce solution-based journalism that drives social change.
Well, I am happy to announce that on January 19, the class is being offered again, this time with a broader focus on some of the biggest human rights issues facing the globe.
Esta Soler, CEO of Futures Without Violence
By Jeremy Loudenback, ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
As the sounds of an abusive husband interrogating his partner intensify off-screen, a camera pans up a flight of stairs.
A young boy, maybe 3, sits in knitted pajamas at the top of the staircase, cradling a plastic yellow truck. He listens intently as the sickening cacophony grows, while his parents’ shadows dance off the walls.
Screams and shouts turn to tears and pleading before the sharp crack of a blow reverberates throughout the house.
Though we never the see the punch, the impact is clear. The boy drops the toy truck, and the camera follows the boy’s stunned and searching face as the screen goes black.
This 30-second “There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence” ad first ran in the summer of 1994, part of the first national public service campaign aimed at preventing domestic violence.
For longtime domestic violence advocate Esta Soler, the ad that her organization helped produce represents both a historic achievement in the drive to halt domestic violence and a trenchant reminder of the current struggle to recognize and prevent child trauma.
“That little kid on the stairs tells that story really clearly,” Soler said in a recent interview with The Chronicle of Social Change. “We’ve actually been talking about child trauma and exposure to violence in the home going back to the very beginning of when we started to do this work.”
In 1994, when the arrest of footballer and screen celebrity OJ Simpson drew unprecedented attention toward violence against women, Soler sat ready, armed with well-produced television ads and the stories of victims of domestic violence that would enter the zeitgeist at just the right moment to drive sweeping policy reform.
Serena Clayton
By Serena Clayton at ChronicleOfSocialChange.org
At the Center for Youth Wellness policy convening on childhood adversity in San Diego last Thursday, I kept asking myself if we were having a new conversation or an old conversation, but with different people at the table.
The fact that children who experience adverse events (e.g., domestic violence, or a mentally ill or incarcerated parent) have worse health outcomes hardly seems like news. In public health, we know that environmental, economic and social factors lead to health disparities. In education, we know that poverty is connected to lower achievement, and there is a strong correlation between poverty and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
To address ACEs, new “trauma-informed practices” are moving the focus off of “fixing” individuals to understanding their experiences and building resiliency and safe, supportive environments. All of this sounds a lot like youth development, protective factors and strength-based approaches.
There is no doubt that we are seeing some of the same ideas come back in a new package. But something is different now, and it is the very fact that different people are now at the table—juvenile justice advocates, educators and health care providers. What this demonstrates is that the concept of childhood trauma has succeeded in uniting various sectors in a way that I have not seen before.
ACEs Too High 