Since the spring of 2013, Roy Wade has seen the impact of trauma on urban youth and adults in low-income neighborhoods from three vantage points.
One is from his Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia research office 13 floors above Market Street.
A second is from his pediatrics office in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philadelphia.
And the third is from his travels in the neighborhoods to such places as boys’ and girls’ clubs, YMCAs, community health centers, homeless shelters, primary care sites and behavioral health organizations.
<--break- />The goal of Wade and other CHOP researchers has been to take the original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, a landmark 1998 examination of the effects of childhood trauma, and incorporate the voices of urban youth in ways that haven’t been heard before. This emphasis on listening to youth, researchers hope, will lead to better targeting of behavioral interventions.
“I wanted to understand what ACEs meant to them,” Wade said. “I wanted to speak their language of trauma.”
What he found was that the language that youths used to describe their experiences with trauma was hard-hitting, emotional, and sometimes graphic. One youth said in a Pediatrics journal article published by Wade and fellow researchers that “I seen my cousins getting raped by my uncles because they were addicted to drugs. … Literally if you woke up in the middle of the night, you would be scared to walk down the steps because your uncles were doing whatever to your cousins.”
Another said that “there were shootings every night, so much so that the kids couldn’t play outside. You wake up in the morning and find that someone in your friend’s family passed away.”
[For more of this story, written by Paul Jablow, go to http://thenotebook.org/blog/14...hildhood-experiences]
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