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David Monroe pulled a gun from his pocket, said “f— it,” and fired five shots at a boy he had never seen before. At age 15, he became a killer. The midday shooting on a Stockton street in 1997, while heinous, was hardly uncommon when it happened. In the mid-1990s, a juvenile was slain, on average, almost every day in California. Arrests of youths for violent felonies averaged about 60 a day statewide. Juvenile halls became so overcrowded, authorities were forced to release hundreds of young...

This past weekend, my preschooler’s neighborhood buddies didn’t want to play frisbee with him. Despite his insistence, they left him to go play with his soccer ball—and, unsurprisingly, he was fuming. Although my son didn’t stay mad for long, kids, like adults, can hold on to intense anger when they feel wronged. At its most extreme, this anger can lead young people to ruminate about betrayal and seek revenge through acts like physical aggression that can devastate families and communities.

The HEARTS team met folks from Californians for Safety and Justice (CSJ) in April last year when they contacted us about AB2701 , a bill that sought to create a state-wide grant program for providers of school-based trauma services using the HEARTS program approach as a model. Dr. Joyce Dorado and I worked with the team just before it was presented and I was excited to testify at a hearing about the bill. I went to Sacramento the day before to see another hearing taking place, and spent...

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By K. Hecht, P. Berman, and A. Ho sa ck The trial had started. Larry had been so fretful the night before that he almost fell asleep at the beginning when the attorneys were whispering something stupid to the judge. Is Branister still on my side or is he making some deal for his own benefit? Larry couldn’t imagine Branister could ever really care about what happened to him. His parents had beaten him to a pulp. His teachers had ignored his bruises and his lack of a lunch and just yelled at...

Since last week, two Parkland students who survived the mass shooting just over one year ago died of apparent suicide. And this week, the father of one of the young victims of the Sandy Hook attack also died by suicide. Many factors are at play in any suicide, and it can be hard to draw direct lines between something like the Parkland attacks and the suicides of survivors. But one thing is certain: witnessing gun violence — either once on a mass scale or through continued exposure — has an...

By ranking the health of nearly every county in the nation, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) illustrates how where we live affects how well and how long we live. CHR&R also shows what each of us can do to create healthier places to live, learn, work, and play – for everyone. This year highlights an important element that shapes how well and how long we live: secure, affordable housing. Summary of Key Findings Across the U.S., more than 1 in 10 households (11%) spend more...

When Ashley Franks got pregnant with her son, her grandfather kicked her out of the house. She didn’t know where to go. So she lived out of her car throughout the pregnancy. “Daily life [when living in the car] is trying to find a place to take a shower, make sure that your hygiene is kept up, make sure that your vehicle is running properly, because that’s all you have,” Franks says. Years before, Franks experienced the kind of loss every parent dreads, twice: A daughter drowned, and then...

An immigrant facility in New Mexico is under fire for what advocates call “rampant sexual harassment, discrimination and abuse” of gay and transgender migrants, NBC News reports. The American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU ) drafted a letter to immigration authorities and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ’s ( ICE ) Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral stating that migrants who complained of mistreatment were often threatened with solitary confinement. The letter also alleges that gay...

Yasmin Behbehani had just walked into her third-period health class when her friend asked her if she had seen the list. “There’s a list of the girls’ names,” her friend Nicky Schmidt, a fellow senior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, said. “And we’re ranked.” Behbehani didn’t want to see the list, or know whether she was on it. She had spent the past four years recovering from an eating disorder, working hard to avoid comparing herself with others, she said. But by her...

Gov. Gavin Newsom made it clear throughout his campaign that improving the health and welfare of California’s children and young families would be among his signature issues. To underscore his commitment in the days after he took office, Newsom named Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician who specializes in the impacts of trauma and toxic stress on the health of children, as the state’s first-ever surgeon general. The 44-year-old Burke Harris was born in Canada and lived in Jamaica when she...

Almost seven years ago, the School District of Philadelphia revised its student discipline policy, instructing schools not to suspend students for certain types of nonviolent behavior such as failing to follow classroom rules or making obscene gestures. To examine what happened after the policy changed, Mathematica’s Johanna Lacoe teamed up with Matthew Steinberg, an education researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. What they found provides the strongest evidence to date that when...