In California's Tulare County, violence, drug abuse and sex offenses occur at alarmingly high rates. For young children in troubled families, the experience of such traumas can lead to poor academic performance, mental health problems, and higher...
For children, stress can go a long way. A little bit provides a platform for learning, adapting and coping. But a lot of it — chronic, toxic stress like poverty, neglect and physical abuse — can have lasting negative impacts. A team of...
[The Center for Investigative Reporting] CIR began investigating the solitary confinement of teenagers in prisons, jails and juvenile halls across the U.S. in March 2013. Juvenile justice experts had been pressing the Department of Justice to flex its muscle on behalf of young inmates, to no avail. Holder’s shop declined all interview requests by CIR. Our reporting quickly zeroed in on Rikers Island, the massive jail complex in New York City, where last year about a quarter of...
At Children's Home Society of Washington, social service providers are using video clips of parents interacting with their young children to help the parents identify their own strengths and learn which interactions best promote healthy development....
The prevalence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) among Hawai'i adults and their impact on the health of affected individuals are unknown. Aiming to provide Hawai'i State baseline information on ACEs and their associations with health...
This study explored the prevalence of childhood trauma in a sample of male sexual offenders ( N = 679) using the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scale. Compared with males in the general population, sex offenders had more than 3 times the odds of...
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including various types of abuse and other forms of household dysfunction (i.e. witnessing domestic violence, parental substance abuse, etc.), have been consistently linked to increased rates of health risk...
You've all experienced it. That heady feeling, that remember-to-breathe moment, that wide-eyed amazement at the ideas and words that hit your own bulls-eye of the reasons why you're devoting your life's work to preventing child maltreatment and...
This is an edited version of a comment I added to a blog post by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey about a "Culture of Health". In a culture of health, one root of the vision begins in public schools. [Associated Press photo] Last week, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey shared a vision for "A Culture of Health". It's a vision that requires a "seismic shift" in perspective and values, to be built grassroots from the ground up, she...
[Olimpia Zagnoli illustration] ...the ideology of modern parenting...can lead to unnecessary feelings of guilt and shame, for it ignores an inconvenient truth: that many women and men experience significant psychological distress in response to becoming a parent and that much of this distress isn’t caused by a hormonal epiphenomenon of the birth process. It is driven instead in large measure by the objectively bleak circumstances new parents often face.
Children in Connecticut have been dying of abuse or neglect at an alarming rate over the last 18 months — pushing officials to look for ways to identify and act on less-serious injuries earlier in the lives of at-risk children. One effort would...
We have only to look at official crime statistics to be reminded of the status quo: Last year, Tennessee ranked No. 6 among states for highest rate of murder of women in domestic violence situations. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation reports...
According to a survey from LifeWay Research which interviewed 1,000 senior pastors of Protestant churches in the U.S., pastors rarely include the topics of domestic and sexual violence in their sermons. Co-sponsored by the Christian...
[Photo: SC Department of Mental Health] When emergency room patients are deemed “a danger to themselves or others,” every state requires hospitals to hold them until a psychiatrist conducts a face-to-face evaluation to decide whether it is safe to let them leave. In rural hospitals across the country, it can take days for a psychiatrist to show up and perform the exam. Five years ago, rural hospitals in South Carolina illustrated the problem. On a typical morning, more than...
Photo credit: Thomas Leuthard, Flickr The connection between prostitution and a history of childhood sexual abuse is staggering. Some studies have found that 70 percent of female prostitutes were sexually abused as children; others peg the...