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Late in the evening on Jan. 27, 2004, four teenagers broke into an elderly neighbor’s house in the Southern California town of Perris, looking for cash. One of them, Shawn Khalifa, guarded the back door. Shawn, who had just turned 15, slipped into the kitchen and stole some chocolate candies. He briefly saw that the homeowner was seriously hurt, and he ran back outside. No one accused Shawn of laying a hand on the victim, Hubert Love, 77, but a jury convicted the teenager of first-degree...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday signed a pair of measures that limits when and how young people can be prosecuted for criminal charges. It continues Brown’s efforts, in his final term, to undo many of the tough sentencing policies he supported during his first stint as governor, which contributed to an unconstitutionally overcrowded prison system in California. Senate Bill 439 establishes 12 years as the minimum age for prosecution in juvenile court , unless a minor younger than 12 has committed...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — In a pivotal week for women in the United States, the U.N. put forth its own clarion set of female voices at its annual meeting of nations. And women’s empowerment was only one of their rallying cries. At the U.N. General Assembly, the first since the #metoo movement took root in Fall 2017 and began to amplify women’s voices in a new way, some of the most powerful words have come from the mouths of female leaders, a group whose numbers, influence and ambitions for the...

Today (October 1), marks the first day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month . While White women are most likely to develop breast cancer, the American Cancer Society reports that Black women are most likely to die from it . That’s especially true for Black women under 35 , who are twice as likely to have it and three times as likely to never recover. The AMBER Consortium is analyzing the four largest studies of breast cancer in Black women to discover genetic and other risk factors that underlie...

I loved my upcoming interview with ACEs Connection member, Emily Read Daniels, founder of HereThisNow! Please join us this Friday at 7:00 pm (or download to listen any time) as we discuss trauma-informed trainings, workshops, speaking, blogging, and so much more. Be sure to check out their course offerings and upcoming retreats.

While many organizations are trauma-informed, becoming trauma-responsive means looking at every aspect of an organization’s programming, environment, language, and values and involving all staff in better serving clients who have experienced trauma. Moving from Trauma-Informed to Trauma-Responsive: A Training Program for Organizational Change provides program administrators and clinical directors with key resources needed to train staff and make organizational changes to become...

Children who are abused might carry the imprint of that trauma in their cells—a biochemical marking that is detectable years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and Harvard University. The findings, based on a comparison of chemical tags on the DNA of 34 adult men, still need confirmation from larger studies, and researchers don't know if this tagging—known as methylation—affects the victims' health. But the difference in methylation between those who had...

Precolonial black history is often reduced to a troubling binary: Africans as a uniformly subservient arm of the triangular trade and Africa through the lens of monarchies like ancient Egypt and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Consider Nas’s 2003 song “ I Can ” (his highest-charting single to date), which was widely lauded for its uplifting message. To open his last verse, he pleads with black children to look to the distant past for inspiration: “[Before] we came to this country / We were kings...

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas. Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and...

The fight to confirm the 2018 Agriculture and Nutrition Act —generally known as the farm bill—has been contentious, as public-health advocates spar with lawmakers over key provisions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Now, it looks like no one will win: According to Politico , Congress will put off passing the new farm bill until after the mid-term elections. The current farm bill expired on Sunday. In the meantime, Congress can extend the bill. If they fail to do so, what...

Interventions that help students think flexibly and feel more control over their learning may help counter the effects of disadvantage and trauma, suggests emerging research at the International Mind-Brain Education conference here. More than 1 in 3 U.S. children have experienced at least one major trauma—from abuse or neglect to the loss of a family member to death, prison, or drugs—by the time they enter kindergarten. By the end of their school years, nearly half have had at least one...

Gallons of rain Hurricane Florence dropped on the Carolinas: at least 8 trillion Number of people killed in the disaster: at least 37 Conservative estimate of the financial damage caused by the storm: $17 billion [For more on this story by Billy Corriher, go to https://inequality.org/research/disparate-devastation-hurricane-florence /] For another story on a similar topic see Recent Disasters Reveal Racial Discrimination in FEMA Aid Process .