September 2022

By Victoria Namkung, Photo: Matt Kelly Elementary Community School, The Guardian, September 26, 2022 B efore California became the first state to implement a universal meals program for its 6.2 million public school students, Alyssa Wells would keep granola bars in her classroom for students who complained of being hungry. When the new program began in August at Foussat elementary school in Oceanside, California , which is primarily attended by Latino students from low-income families, the...

By Nell Bernstein, Photo: Washington Legislative Support Services, The Imprint, September 27, 2022 It was 8 a.m. in the Hotel Murano conference room in Tacoma and like any good host, 23-year-old Aaron Toleafoa understood his mandate: wake up the crowd. “How’s everybody feeling today?” he asked the guests who were gathered for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice’s annual Youth Summit. “Good, good. For everybody who’s not from Washington, y’all enjoy this town over here? It’s my hometown, so...

By AJ Willingham, Illustration: Alberto Mier/CNN, CNN US, September 27, 2022 Thirteen-year-old April Ajoy had a sense something wasn’t right. It was quiet in her Dallas house. Too quiet. Her brothers were gone. Her parents were gone. On her parents’ bed, a pile of her mother’s clothes signaled something terrifying. Ajoy’s mind began churning, trying to remember, trying to make plans. When was the last time she had sinned? Should she refuse the mark of the beast ? At least, she thought, if...

By James Garbarino, Photo: Unsplash, The New England Journal of Medicine, September 24, 2022 D oes gun violence affect the mental health of U.S. children? That question has the same answer as most inquiries about child and adolescent development: it depends. Rarely does a simple cause–effect relationship apply to the same degree to all children, and the same exposures may even have opposite effects on different children. Such variability is an essential truth of the “ecological perspective”...

By Caren Chesler, Illustration: Washington Post Illustration/iStock, The Washington Post, September 23, 2022 Police in a small but growing number of states are trying a new tactic on calls when someone is threatening suicide. They respond, assess and sometimes, depending on the situation, they leave. It’s happening in Fresno, Calif., where last year, police were called to the home of a man who barricaded himself in his house with a gun and was threatening to kill himself and police, if they...

“If you don't understand history, you're never going to understand trauma. And if you don’t understand trauma, you're never going to understand history. And this is part of our problem as a field,” said Dr. Bruce Perry in a June interview. He and “History. Culture. Trauma.” podcast hosts Ingrid Cockhren, CEO of PACEs Connection, and Mathew Portell, director of communities, discussed the intersecting fields of trauma and historical trauma and his best selling book, co-authored with Oprah...

Attachment & Trauma Network and the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint are excited to jointly host this all-day, virtual event on Friday, October 14, 2022 " We're offering this event NOW for this primary reason," explains Guy Stephens, AASR Founder and ED, "The past two years in education have been especially challenging. With the increase in stress, comes an increase of behaviors in the classroom. Traditional approaches to "managing" behaviors are failing...we all need help now!"...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site — abuseresearch.info — that focuses on the effects of abuse, and includes research articles on PACEs. Every month, she posts the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs, PCEs and PACEs. Thank you, Harise!! — Rafael Maravilla] Brown J, Spiller V, Carter M, et. al. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and youth firesetting: A call on criminal justice, emergency responder, and...

The "Great Resignation," "Quiet Quitting," and rising social awareness of historical racism have all brought attention to a common but frequently overlooked hazard of caregiving professions: Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS). In the execution of duties, professions that support our society with compassion and empathy can face traumatic stress from exposure to the experiences of the people that they are there to support. This stress can have deleterious physical and emotional consequences...

Here is an interesting OPED discussing violations of dignity as a core of violence of all types. Dignity and Conflict - Donna Hicks . It might be useful from the perspective of PACES to think of human dignity and its place in childhood experiences and in the lives of the adults children become. See attached paper on human dignity and childhood and how the dimensions of dignity identified by adult students are similar to those identified by Donna Hicks in global conflicts contexts.

By Anne Marshall-Chalmers, Photo: Katie Rodriguez/UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2022 Seven months ago, Betty Gray could climb the 11 inside steps leading to her Berkeley apartment, though it would take her about 15 minutes. In her 70s and suffering from chronic pain and congenital arthritis, she’d park her wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs and then scoot backward up each step. At the top, she’d pause before grasping the rail “for...

By Casey Parks, Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, September 23, 2022 The day after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation” of families with transgender children, the first case came up, and Morgan Davis’s name was on it. Davis was one of four investigators on a Travis County unit tasked with reviewing claims of child abuse. Usually, he and his colleagues took...