Category Archives: Child abuse

The Hague Protocol: Identifying kids at risk by interviewing parents in the ER

September 12, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Solutions 4 Comments

In the summer of 2007, a woman was brought by ambulance to the emergency department of the Medical Center Haaglanden, a hospital that serves an inner city area of The Hague. The woman was drunk and had a severe head injury. Her 8-year-old son was with her.

Hester Diderich, an emergency nurse, and other hospital staff members looked after the boy while they attended to his mother. “We were very nice to him,” Diderich remembers.

After treating the woman’s injuries, they were ready to release her and her son. What happened next led Diderich and her colleagues to realize they needed a better way to protect children and evaluate the risks they face. They created a new process, known as The Hague Protocol, and started a study to evaluate it. The protocol is now in use throughout the Netherlands and is being adopted by other European countries as well.

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England and Wales produce new animation about ACEs & resilience

May 1, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Resilience, Solutions 7 Comments

Here’s a new ACE animation that was posted last week by Dr. Helen Lowey and Prof. Mark A. Bellis at Public Health Wales.

Lowey, consultant in public health, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council in Northwest England, sent this information with the animation:

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are those that directly harm a child; such as physical, verbal and sexual abuse or physical or emotional neglect – as well as those that affect the environment where they grow up; including parental separation, domestic violence, mental illness, alcohol abuse, drug use or incarceration.

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From hell to healing: A survivor’s journey

February 7, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma 9 Comments
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Malcolm Aquinas

It was a sweltering day in the summer of 1987 in Limestone County, Alabama. The air, thick with humidity, sapped what little strength remained from already heat-wearied bodies; the chittering of bush crickets rose as the sun sank.

Following 11 hours of clearing hillside with a sling blade at the Elk River State Park, I let my thoughts wander while resting my right arm on the window frame of my father’s pickup truck, grateful for the air rushing against me. He and my stepmother, Louise, were continuing a disagreement they’d begun some time earlier about the whereabouts of a frying skillet.

The combination of fatigue and stifling heat dulled my usual hypervigilance around my father, so my response to Louise’s seemingly innocent question, “Don’t you remember your Daddy using the skillet last?” was unusually honest and unfiltered.

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Custody in crisis: How family courts put children in danger

December 8, 2016 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma 3 Comments

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Six years ago, in 2010, an appellate court in Tennessee affirmed a family court ruling that had awarded Darryl Sawyer* primary custody of his six-and-a-half-year-old son, Daniel.

The court ruled in favor of Sawyer despite evidence presented by his ex-wife that alleged he had sexually abused their child.

Three years earlier, Daniel returned from a visit with his father with suspicious bruises on his bottom. His mother, Karen Gill, immediately took the three-year-old boy to his pediatrician.

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A memoir about surviving ACEs

October 31, 2016 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, New York, Resilience, Trauma 12 Comments

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I became a professional reader long before I was a writer when I was living in homeless shelters, subsidized housing, and welfare hotels with my mother in New York City.

Most of the middle class and affluent black folks I would come to know in the future would wince and give me a look I couldn’t read when I would tell the story that I outline in my new memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans. All some intolerant, ignorant bigots need is to continue to hear about the dysfunction of black families or the lie that we are all poor (living in inner cities) and broken and hopeless. But unfortunately, in my case, the dysfunction was just part of what I lived through as a kid.

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Parenting’s troubled history: Why changing family patterns is our most important work

October 18, 2016 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Solutions Tags: , , , , 9 Comments

apunish2As we learned from the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study, negative childhood experiences are often kept secret, downplayed, or repressed because of our powerful desire to put such things behind us. Unfortunately, our minds and our brains don’t work that way. Patterns can play out automatically, no matter how hard we try to be original and create our own realities.

Just as it is important to know family medical history (e.g., diabetes or tuberculosis) it is equally important to know about our social inheritance.

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What does trauma-informed mean to foster youth?

September 20, 2016 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Solutions Leave a comment

Alisa 2015 Headshot

Alisa Santucci

By Alisa Santucci

For three decades, I have listened in awe to the brave voices of children, youth and families who have shared, in anguish, their past experiences — experiences that anyone would objectively call “adverse” and ones that can have lasting effects on health and well-being.

The seminal CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study opened my eyes to how pervasive their stories were and how these findings might influence the development of effective interventions and treatment, especially for system-involved young people.

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