Blog

I recently wrote a Facebook post asking about sexual abuse and the link to obesity. I thought I might get a few messages, but was surprised when more than 150 people — including a few men — shared their stories. “I was sexually abused by a babysitter at age 5, and by my cousin from ages 8 to 13,” said Sarah Fitzsimons, 38, from Colorado. “I always felt like my parents didn’t do anything to protect me.” Fitzsimons says the focus in her family was the way she looked. She recalls being referred...

For decades, students at Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, Texas, have sung their alma mater at pep rallies, assemblies, sporting events, and other functions. Robert E. Lee we raise our voice in praise of your name May honor and glory e'er guide you to fame. … And so the times will not divide us for united we'll be Our Memories will bind us to Robert E. Lee. But not everyone cherishes the song. Joralen Mauldin, 16, a black junior at Lee, read the lyrics her freshman year and cringed. “It’s...

In June, the Trump administration hired Jerry Milner to lead the federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees federal child welfare funding and policy. The Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) was established in 1977 and oversees the Family and Youth Services Bureau as well as the much larger Children’s Bureau, which was created by President William Howard Taft back in 1912. As acting commissioner of ACYF, Milner oversees a budget of $9.7...

Devon Patrick Kelley was discharged from the Air Force in 2014 for “bad conduct” after being prosecuted for domestic violence and child abuse. But Kelley was not the only one guilty of bad conduct. The Air Force gave him a break, letting him avoid a more serious charge that could have put him in prison for much longer and would have given him a dishonorable discharge. He only spent a year in jail for a rage-filled assault on his step-son and wife. And it was not the first time he had...

Cissy's note: This article was written by the same @Claudia Gold who was the featured guest in one of our Parenting with ACEs chats . Here are excerpts from her article published in Psychology Today.

Every week, I wait for the cold steel bars to close behind me, for count to be called, and for men who have years – maybe the rest of their lives – to spend in this prison to come talk with me. I am a clinical psychologist who studies chronic antisocial behavior. My staff and I converted an office in a Connecticut state prison into research space that allows us to measure neural and behavioral responses. Recently, Joe, a man serving a life sentence, came into our prison lab. Before I could...

Pregnant women today are more likely to have chronic conditions that could cause life-threatening complications than at any other time in the past decade - particularly poor women and those living in rural communities, a new Michigan Medicine study suggests. Using a national sample of 8.2 million childbirth deliveries over 10 years, researchers analyzed the prevalence of common chronic conditions —including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and substance-abuse disorders.

White defendants generally get better plea deals than their black counterparts, and are more likely to avoid incarceration for low-level offenses, according to new research by Carlos Berdejó of Loyola Law School, who analyzed more than 48,000 cases occurring over a period of seven years. Most research into racial disparities in the criminal justice system has focused on arrests, initial charges, and sentencing, Berdejó points out in his report. These studies often reveal that African...

This Sunday’s shooting at a Texas church, last month’s massacre in Las Vegas, and so many more, have raised once again the debates around gun control on the left and of course mental health on the right. But there’s a causal factor here that no one is talking about which is the way we discipline children. While a broader brush is warranted, I specifically talk of spanking. In short, the prevalence of spanking as a form of discipline is a much bigger contributing factor in why some people go...

The knowledge, talent, and ideas that power urban economies do not emerge out of thin air: They are shaped and organized by great research universities. Universities have long played a role in educating people and contributing to a more civilized, tolerant, and democratic society. And in more recent decades, research universities like Stanford and MIT have been credited with helping spur the development of tech clusters in the Bay Area and around Boston. But today, universities play an even...

The news media is awash with hysteria about the opioid crisis (or opioid epidemic). But what exactly are we talking about? If you Google “opioid crisis”, nine times out of 10 the first paragraph of whatever you’re reading will report on death rates. That’s right, the overdose crisis. For example, the lead article on the “opioid crisis” on the US National Institutes of Health website begins with this sentence: “Every day, more than 90 Americans die after overdosing on opioids.” Is the opioid...

U.S. states are rapidly removing Confederate statues, symbols of racial oppression. But there is another holdover from slavery that is prevalent in our society today — the routine use of shackling persons using handcuffs, leg irons and other hardware to confine individuals in the justice system. This past summer, I had the opportunity to view a felony appellate courtroom in Casablanca, Morocco. These were appeals by people imprisoned for felony offenses who were asking the court to reduce...