Advancing Urban Peace: Preventing Gun Violence and Healing Traumatized Youth

Youth Justice ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 147322542110201
Author(s):  
Jason Corburn ◽  
DeVone Boggan ◽  
Khaalid Muttaqi ◽  
Sam Vaughn ◽  
James Houston ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Violence Reduction ◽  
Reduction Program ◽  
Trauma Informed

This descriptive article highlights the inner-practices of a trauma-informed, healing-centered, urban gun violence reduction program called Advance Peace. We find that the Advance Peace model uses a unique curriculum called the Peacemaker Fellowship, that offers intensive mentorship, caring, and ‘street love’ to youth at the center of gun violence. The Advance Peace approach is one public safety model that may help young people of color heal from the traumas that contribute to gun violence while also reducing gun crime in urban neighborhoods.

Overview and Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-64
Author(s):  
Melvin Delgado
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Young People ◽  
Life Span ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Youth And Young Adults ◽  
Political Spectrum

Gun violence often elicits strong reactions across a wide social-economic-political spectrum and touches all of us either directly or indirectly. Gun violence, as it manifests itself in our urban centers, represents the death of an American dream for countless youth and young adults, primarily young people of color, across the nation’s cities and communities. Simply put, a life span must extend beyond age 18. Living long enough to graduate from high school is a nightmare disguised as a dream. Unfortunately, we mourn his death because we are unable to celebrate his life and the potential future contributions he and others like him will simply not make because their lives were cut short or because their health is compromised due to a bullet. His family, and countless other families, are left to pick up the pieces left behind by gun violence.

scholarly journals Intersectional Organizing and Educational Justice Movements: Strategies for Cross-Movement Solidarities

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Warren ◽  
Andrew R. King ◽  
Bianca Ortiz-Wythe ◽  
Patricio Belloy ◽  
Jose Zapata Calderon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Educational Justice ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
Shared Understandings

This article explores intersectional organizing as a strategy to create solidarity across issues, organizations and communities to build a more united educational justice movement. By intersectional organizing, we mean an organizing strategy that centers the experiences and leadership of people who are affected by multiple forms of oppression. We conducted interviews with ten community organizers who engage parents and young people of color to address the profound inequities in public education. We found that the movement is largely siloed into separate issue-based campaigns, although there are promising examples that connect groups and issues. Organizers believe that intersectional organizing can support greater cross-movement solidarity especially when combined with other processes, including building deep relationships, developing conscious leadership with shared understandings of systemic oppression through political education, and building trust through demonstrated long-term commitments to solidarity in practice. Nevertheless, many warn against an “Oppression Olympics” that creates competition rather than solidarity.

scholarly journals The Limits of Resilience and the Need for Resistance: Articulating the Role of Music Therapy With Young People Within a Shifting Trauma Paradigm

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly Scrine
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Perceived Risk ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Trauma Informed ◽  
Trauma Informed Practice ◽  
A Site

A broad sociocultural perspective defines trauma as the result of an event, a series of events, or a set of circumstances that is experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening, with lasting impacts on an individual’s physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. Contexts and practices that aim to be “trauma-informed” strive to attend to the complex impacts of trauma, integrating knowledge into policies and practices, and providing a sanctuary from harm. However, there is a body of critical and decolonial scholarship that challenges the ways in which “trauma-informed” practice prioritizes individualized interventions, reinscribes colonial power relations through its conceptualizations of safety, and obscures the role of systemic injustices. Within music therapy trauma scholarship, research has thus far pointed to the affordances of music in ameliorating symptoms of trauma, bypassing unavailable cognitive processes, and working from a strengths-based orientation. In critiquing the tendency of the dominant trauma paradigm to assign vulnerability and reinforce the individual’s responsibility to develop resilience through adversity, this conceptual analysis outlines potential alternatives within music therapy. Drawing on a case example from a research project with young people in school, I elucidate the ways in which music therapy can respond to power relations as they occur within and beyond “trauma-informed” spaces. I highlight two overarching potentials for music therapy within a shifting trauma paradigm: (1) as a site in which to reframe perceived risk by fostering young people’s resistance and building their political agency and (2) in challenging the assumption of “safe spaces” and instead moving toward practices of “structuring safety.”

Behaviour: Promoting inclusion using a trauma-informed approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 292-294
Author(s):  
Pooky Knightsmith
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
School Staff ◽  
Challenging Behaviour ◽  
Children And Young People ◽  
Practical Advice ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Trauma Informed ◽  
Trauma Responses

Children and young people who have experienced trauma may exhibit challenging behaviour as a result of learned trauma responses. Pooky Knightsmith provides some practical advice for school staff members on providing a more inclusive trauma-informed approach.

A New Narrative on Gun Violence

2021 ◽  
pp. 30-45
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Public Health Approach ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Gun Policy ◽  
Violence Reduction ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Community Environments

Chapter 3 offers narratives about gun violence; these narratives draw from public health tenets and practice. Contributors sketch a road map to how people with differing philosophies can act together to prevent gun deaths: Michael B. Siegel describes public health principles that can shape thinking about gun policy. Drawing from his experiences in Baltimore, Daniel W. Webster illustrates how gun violence has influenced urban life, examining the implications of aggressive law enforcement. His work with police and community members and his involvement with a gun violence reduction consortium yield strategies for reducing harm. Zeroing in on the community environments in which gun violence occurs, Bernadette Callahan Hohl illustrates how a public health approach can improve safety. Using examples from community-driven projects, she offers evidence that strengthening neighborhoods pays off. The chapter concludes an action agenda.

The Intersectionality of Race and Trauma in Children and Teens Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)

2022 ◽  
pp. 39-64
Author(s):  
Nena Hisle
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Competency ◽  
Students Of Color ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Trauma ◽  
Trauma Informed

Children in America are suffering from an abundance of trauma that many bring to school with them daily. Children, teens, and their families, who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), may have experienced historical racial trauma which is unique to students of color. Professionals working with students of color (SOC) must develop cultural competency around racial trauma in their understanding of trauma informed pedagogy to meet the needs of student populations that are becoming increasingly diverse. The overall purpose of this chapter is to provide professionals working with BIPOC children and teens the necessary skills to meet their needs.

Rethinking mental health provision in the secure estate for children and young people: a framework for integrated care (SECURE STAIRS)

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Taylor ◽  
Lisa Shostak ◽  
Andrew Rogers ◽  
Paul Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Young People ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Care Plans ◽  
Trauma Informed Care ◽  
Assessment And Treatment ◽  
Trauma Informed

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline the challenges to achieving positive outcomes for young people within the secure estate in England, and introduces a psychologically informed framework, SECURE STAIRS (SS), aimed at improving outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The paper argues that there is a need for a fundamental shift in the way care and intervention for young people within the secure estate is delivered. It gives an overview of current challenges and needs and summarises the theoretical concepts and evidence base which can guide practice and form the foundations of the SS framework. Findings The framework recommends that intervention shift from focussing primarily on individual assessment and treatment to a greater emphasis on supporting the work of the wider system of care. Recommendations include promoting trauma-informed care, a focus on the system dynamics within institutions and how these impact on the care young people receive, and on the collaborative development with residential staff and young people of formulation-led care plans that include a focus on issues of sustainability after leaving the secure estate. Practical implications These include the establishment of discrete residential groupings with truly integrated and trauma-informed work across residential, mental health, education and criminal justice agencies. This involves addressing governance issues around shared record keeping, and challenges to sustainability and the accompanying need for local implementation plans for each establishment alongside central support at a strategic level. Originality/value This paper describes a new and innovative way of working within secure settings to ensure children and young people’s needs are better met.

Indigenous Children and Young People in Residential Care: A Systematic Scoping Review

2019 ◽  
pp. 152483801988170
Author(s):  
Kathomi Gatwiri ◽  
Lynne McPherson ◽  
Natalie Parmenter ◽  
Nadine Cameron ◽  
Darlene Rotumah
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Residential Care ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Children And Young People ◽  
Residential Care Facilities ◽  
Indigenous Children ◽  
Trauma Informed ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Children In Care

In Australia and internationally, Indigenous children are seriously overrepresented in the child welfare system. This article provides an overview of literature investigating the needs of Indigenous children in residential care facilities. The provision of culturally safe and trauma-informed therapeutic care to Indigenous children and young people in residential care recognizes that the trauma and violence that they have experienced is exacerbated by their Indigeneity due to the colonial histories presenting. Utilizing a systematic scoping review methodology, the study returned a total of 637 peer-reviewed articles that were identified and reviewed for inclusion. The process of exclusion resulted in the inclusion of eight peer-reviewed studies and 51 reports and discussion papers sourced from gray literature. Findings from this study, though dearth, indicate that trauma-informed and culturally safe interventions play a significant role in Indigenous children’s health and well-being while in care. Their experiences of abuse and neglect transcend individual trauma and include intergenerational pain and suffering resulting from long-lasting impacts of colonization, displacement from culture and country, genocidal policies, racism, and the overall systemic disadvantage. As such, a therapeutic response, embedded within Indigenous cultural frameworks and knowledges of trauma, is not only important but absolutely necessary and aims to acknowledge the intersectionality between the needs of Indigenous children in care and the complex systemic disadvantage impacting them.

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