Does anyone have any thoughts on the recent wordage around the homeless being named as "the most vulnerable population?" Here in Camden, NJ, there has been an uptick in terminology like this to push for housing with the sense that once someone has housing, then their own anxiety and stress can lower. I totally get this and laud the efforts to work with the homeless.
However, what I am concerned about is with a tool like the ACES score, we are not using that to talk about vulnerability--rather we use a situation to talk about vulnerability I would be inclined to see homelessness as a symptom of adversity and potentially like to look at it from the framework of ACES. In using labels like "most vulnerable" without reference to ACES, it seems we run the risk of claiming which "symptom" is most worthy of attention. I worry that such an approach misses "What has happened to someone" and even makes it more difficult to work with certain groups as they are not in the "identified most vulnerable population." Here in Camden, I work with youth who have dropped out of school--some 70%. The poverty rate for youth is close to 55% with over 80% of youth living below 200% of poverty. It is dire. However, the community is not labeled as vulnerable. Rather, their symptoms are often discussed and much work goes into changing behavior but not in understanding "What has happened to them." I find that tragic---in fact, we are working hard to use ACES to help reframe the conversation to allow us to do this. We have been taking an ACES inventory of our youth and they score very high on the scale but public response to them is not one of being a vulnerable population.
I am wondering if others have experience with moving the language and the frameworks of your respective communities from "affinity groups" to a framework of trauma and ACES?
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