This isn’t your usual article about domestic violence, the one that’s pretty much been repeating itself since the 1980s: that there’s too much of it, the lifelong pain it causes (mostly) women and their children, that there’s not nearly enough support for them. All that is true. This article focuses on a remarkable solution to family violence: Programs that expand the focus on healing to the abuser.

In the world of family violence, the focus is on healing victims (survivors). This includes funding for domestic violence shelters, thousands of research projects, state and federal legislation, and changing the criminal justice response. But that’s providing help for only half the people involved in the problem.

By Brookings, Photo: from article, Brookings, April 28, 2023 The torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) developments contrasts with the torpid processes for protecting the public interest impacted by the technology. Private and government oversight systems that were developed to deal with the industrial revolution are no match for the AI revolution. AI oversight requires a methodology that is as revolutionary as the technology itself. When confronted with the challenges of industrial...

It is with a happy heart that I post this great news! As of May 1, we’re spinning off ACEsTooHigh.com from PACEs Connection. The reason? It gives the organizations the flexibility each needs to grow as it should.

Rodney and Temecia Jackson speak at a news conference at The Afiya Center on 6 April. Photograph: TheAfiyaCenter/Twitter By Edwin Rios, The Guardian, April 14, 2023 Last week at a press conference, Temecia Jackson recalled the moment when police officers and child protection services agents had “stolen” her baby from her Dallas home. Her words, and her story of how her newborn baby was taken from her because she opted to follow a midwife’s recommendation over a physician’s, sparked outrage...

Our beloved friend and former PACEs Connection staff member, Cissy White, died peacefully in Weymouth, MA, on Sunday morning, surrounded by family and friends. This the obituary the family wrote that appeared here . So many people are holding this angel of grace, strength, beauty, intellect, humor, and compassion in their hearts right now, remembering Cissy’s deep kindness and generous, brave heart. She taught us all how to live. Cissy leaves daughter Kai Schildmeier, mother Nancy Atwood and...

By Dave Davies, Photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images, National Public Radio (NPR), March 28, 2023 In 2020, the overall life expectancy in the U.S. dropped by 1.5 years , largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the reduction wasn't shared equally among the general population; Native American people lost an average of 4.5 years of life expectancy ; Black and Hispanic people lost, on average, 3 years, while white people lost only 1.2 years. This figure tracks with other health trends: In...

By Anna Gallegos-Cannon, WPLN News, March 28, 2023 Dr. Katherine Koonce was one of the six people killed Monday at Covenant School , but the head of the private Christian school will be remembered for the positive impact she had on her students and friends. “She was just a dynamo, and she honored humanity so much. She had such a deep, abiding respect for the sacredness of life,” Anna Caudill told This Is Nashville on Tuesday . Caudill met Koonce when as a high school teacher at Christ...

By Emine Saner, Illustration: Fran Pulido/The Guardian, The Guardian, March 12, 2023 When I was studying as an undergraduate, almost 30 years ago, I was taught that the human brain stops developing in childhood. But that is wrong. Now that we have the technology to look inside the living human brain and track changes in its structure and function across a lifespan, we know that the brain continues to develop substantially throughout adolescence and into early adulthood. We define adolescence...

By Alissa Quart, Illustration: Paola Saliby, The New York Times, March9, 2023 From a child's earliest age, independence is extolled as a virtue, with “doing things on your own” as proof of maturity. I celebrated my daughter when she was little for picking out her books herself. She always wanted to go on the monkey bars without help and swung and did tricks until her hands were blistered. Now that she’s 12, I cheer her for taking herself home from school on the train and for climbing by...

Registered nurse Jamie Simmons speaks with a patient during an appointment at the Greater New Bedford Community Health Center in Massachusetts. The patient, whose first name is Kim, says buprenorphine has helped her stay off heroin and avoid an overdose for nearly 20 years. Jesse Costa for KHN By Martha Bebinger, National Public Radio (NPR), March 6, 2023 For two decades — as opioid overdose deaths rose steadily — the federal government limited access to buprenorphine, a medication that...

By Phillip Inman, Photo: Tetra Images/Getty Images, The Guardian, March 12, 2023 Large corporations have fuelled inflation with price increases that go beyond rising costs of raw materials and wages, pushing shopping bills to record highs, according to an analysis of hundreds of company accounts. Highlighting a trend dubbed “greedflation” , the research indicates that supermarkets, food manufacturers and shipping companies are among hundreds of major firms who have improved their profits and...

By Sophie Hardach, Photo: Getty Images, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), March 7, 2023 Sebastian Schwerk lay awake at night, his mind racing. His father had recently died of leukaemia. Schwerk had been caring for him for months, together with his siblings, as well as looking after his own family. Now his mother needed care, too. His two older children were going through puberty. And he worried that with so much going on, his youngest son wasn't getting enough attention. "All of those...

The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Kingston hit $1,615 this year – roughly 25% more expensive than three years ago. Photograph: Wilfred Chan By Wilfred Chan, The Guardian, March 8, 2023 I t’s 2pm after an overnight shift, and Amanda Treasure is lying in bed unable to sleep. She can’t stop thinking about how most of what she brings home from her full-time job as a caretaker – two $900 checks a month – goes to rent for the two-bedroom apartment with a mold problem she shares with...

Sara Baldwin’s job was to mine James Bernard Belcher’s past for information that might sway a jury towards mercy after he killed Jennifer Embry. Photograph: Melanie Garcia/The Marshall Project By Maurice Chammah, The Guardian (co-published by the Marshall Project), March 2, 2023 The first mystery was who could have done such a thing, who could leave someone like that. Jennifer Embry was found in her bathtub in January 1996. She was 29. Her younger brother Ricky had come looking for her after...

By Lori Teresa Yearwood, Photo Illustration: Jackie Guzman/Slate, Slate, February 20, 2023 About a year before her death, Denise Lerma began taking the steps she thought would save her life. First, she quit shooting heroin into her veins. Then she walked as far away from a lifetime of homelessness as her traumatized body and psyche could take her. On her last day living in Lincoln Park, in Los Angeles, Lerma handed Louis, a friend living in the encampment, a pink balloon. It was her way of...

During Black History Month, Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport of BEM | books & more curated a list of the top books about Black food. Composite: HarperOne/Candlewick Press/ Bloomsbury USA By Kayla Stewart, The Guardian, February 25, 2023 F or sisters Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport , every month is a good time to read about Black food. As the owners of Brooklyn’s BEM | books & more , the country’s first book store to focus on the topic, the two sisters are regularly curating works...

A homeless encampment that was threatened by rising waters in Sacramento last month. Credit... Max Whittaker for The New York Times By Soumya Karlamangla, The New York Times, February 21, 2023 Yvonne Soy had to move out of her apartment in Contra Costa County because she couldn’t pay her rent. She began living in her car, with her two cats, and tried to get work as a secretary or a legal administrator. But the showers at the local homeless shelter didn’t open until 8:30 a.m., too late for...

By Jeneen Interlandi, Photo: Donovan Smallwood, The New York Times, February 22, 2023 I. ‘Let’s not crowd her right out the gate.’ It was late summer, and the sun was high over East Harlem. Terrell Jones stepped out of a large black van that advertised help with detox and free hepatitis C testing and scanned the homeless encampment beneath the elevated train tracks across the intersection from where he stood. He was looking for a specific inhabitant, a white woman in her late 20s or early...

By Erum Salam, Photo: Robert Kneschke/Getty Images/EyeEm, The Guardian, February 21, 2023 Local news organizations across the United States need to be given serious government financial help, especially in the form of tax breaks, in order to stave off a crisis in the media sector and help save US democracy, a leading advocate for non-profit journalism has said. Steven Waldman, co-founder of Report for America, said a new initiative, called Rebuild Local News, wanted to revitalize hundreds of...

New York state Assembly member Andrew Hevesi (D), left, and Sen. Jabari Brisport (D), stand with lawmakers and advocates supporting a package of bills that would fund communities most affected by child welfare agencies. Photo by Hans Pennink. By Madison Hunt and Adilia Watson, The Imprint, February 7, 2023 A group of lawmakers, youth activists and advocates for children and families gathered today on the steps of the New York State Capitol to call for direct investments in communities with...

By Amanda Ripley, Image: Screenshot from article, The Washington Post, February 9, 2023 We hear a lot about the shocking dysfunction in Congress. By my count, this paper has published 90 articles on the GOP’s many tortured attempts to elect a speaker and another 84 (and counting) on the debt ceiling. But what about stories of shocking function? Lately, I find those stories even more captivating. For example, if any congressional committee were set up to fail, it was the Select Committee on...

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on his economic agenda at a training center run by the Laborers' International Union of North America, February 8, 2023, in Deforest, Wisconsin. Photo: Morry Gash/AP Photo In the opening paragraphs of Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Biden declared , “I ran for president to fundamentally change things, to make sure the economy works for everyone so we can all feel pride in what we do. To build an economy from the bottom up and the...

From California Department of Health Care Services, February 13, 2023 Purpose: As part of the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) released a Request for Application (RFA) on February 9, 2023, seeking proposals for the second round of grant funding totaling $100,000,000. For the second round of EBP and CDEP grant funding, DHCS seeks proposals to scale trauma-informed care available to children, youth, parents and...

From Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, February 2023 Introduction & Purpose The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Culture of Health Prize (“the Prize”) honors the work of communities that foster health and wellbeing for all by addressing systemic inequities. In the 10 years since it launched, the Prize has recognized more than 50 communities across the country that are at the forefront of advancing health, opportunity, and equity for all. The Prize serves to inspire change and...

By Joanna Cheek, Photo: Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press, The Toronto Star, February 4, 2023 On Jan. 28, 2020, Jennifer Kagan brought an emergency motion to court to suspend or supervise her ex-husband’s access to their four-year-old daughter, Keira. “I pleaded with judges that my ex-husband was abusive and dangerous,” the Ontario physician said. He had abducted their daughter, regularly breached court orders and was caught trying to deceive the court, she said. There were 53 court orders in...

By Sara Miller Llana, Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman, The Christian Science Monitor, February 7, 2023 Because of Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, Christina Haugan’s husband is dead. But every April 6, she feels tugged toward the inexperienced semi driver who, on that day in 2018, barreled across the Canadian prairie through a blinking rural crossroad stop sign, and collided with the bus of the beloved Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team that her husband coached. Mr. Sidhu’s moment of dangerous...

By Allison Kelliher (The Conversation), Photo: Donovan Quintero/Reuters, PBS New Hour, February 3, 2023 Six and one-half years. That’s the decline in life expectancy that the COVID-19 pandemic wrought upon American Indians and Alaska Natives, based on an August 2022 report from the National Center for Health Statistics . This astounding figure translates to an overall drop in average living years from 71.8 years in 2019 to 65.2 by the end of 2021. [ Please click here to read more .]

Do you know someone or an organization that is changing the lives of victims and survivors of domestic violence? The Purple Ribbon Awards hosted by @domesticshelters are now accepting nominations for their 3rd annual awards program. Winners will receive a Purple Ribbon Award medallion and other prizes and be eligible for up to $30,000 in grants. Now accepting nominations through February 28th Learn more about how you can nominate at PurpleRibbonAwards.org For more shareable content click...

Bayard Rustin, at right, sits next to acclaimed writer James Baldwin on the speakers’ platform in Montgomery, Ala., during the 1965 civil rights march from Selma. Stephen F. Somerstein/Getty Images As I began writing “Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer,” my biography of the 20th-century radical leader and activist, one of my colleagues cautioned me not to “fall in love.” This, of course, is good advice for any biographer, and I tried to follow it. But it wasn’t easy, because Bayard Rustin was...

By Amanda Morris, Photo: Getty Images, The Washington Post, January 23, 2023 Practicing mindfulness to relieve anxiety can be just as effective as medication, new research shows. A recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry showed that people who received eight weeks of mindfulness-based interventions experienced a decrease in anxiety that matched those who were prescribed escitalopram, a common anti-anxiety medication that is often prescribed under the brand name Lexapro. A seven-point scale...

In light of the three recent mass shootings in the last three days in California—Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay and Oakland—take a look at " A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths " that Nicholas Kristof posted in the New York Times. To solve this plague of violence requires many parts working together, he says. Using alarming and revealing data and graphs, he includes these among his many recommendations: Keep guns out of the hands of people under 21 (Wyoming has such a law), as well as those...

Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, is the co-chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. It happened again. Thousands of supporters of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s government buildings on January 8 in protest of their newly sworn-in president . The riots...

Associated Press King blasted his era’s version of White “allies,” confessing to being, “gravely disappointed with the white moderate.” King challenged the moral equivalency of his day, which found White political and civic leaders at times castigating both the practitioners of Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights activists who protested against this unjust system. This kind of political handwringing is reflected in parts of today’s political climate, where White moderates hesitate to...

Among the key findings: Each of the 20 largest US cities is spending at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year on the criminal legal system, with the vast majority of those resources going to the police. Many cities and counties spend in the billions, with New York City the largest at $7.7 billion in 2022. In total, these cities and their counties are spending $37.9 billion on the Mass Criminalization System in 2022. 16 out of the 20 cities invest more on the Mass Criminalization...

Danielle Del Plato When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen...

Photo: Courtesy of Alliance for Safety and Justice In a new book, Lenore Anderson says the legal system doesn’t serve most victims or alleviate unaddressed trauma. For decades, the cause of victims’ rights has been one of the most powerful political movements in the US. From the 1980s to 2010s, advocates worked with law enforcement to transform the criminal justice system, passing more than 32,000 laws explicitly in the name of victims. Fueled by backlash to the civil rights era, white...

Loss of parental rights can be the ultimate punishment from a court. Unpaid debts for foster care can delay the reunion. Some parents are still getting bills even though the feds told states to stop. When parents go through periods of crisis and their children are at risk, the state steps in. Kids go to foster care. A judge tells parents all the things they need to do to get their kids back. For mothers and fathers, it's often a confusing process, especially in one state where NPR...

In April, Jarl Rockhill placed a sticker with racist imagery — a man making a Nazi salute below the word “pure” — on the fence of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Ore. Upon identifying Rockhill in surveillance footage, investigators determined that he was a member of a Portland neo-Nazi group, according to court documents. After he was arrested in May, the Oregonian reported , police recovered several firearms and a Nazi flag in a search...

Some child advocates worry that California’s tool to screen kids for adverse childhood experiences has pitfalls that could cause even greater harm. Doctors argue that the innovative program is effective and beneficial, and creating systemic change in health care. A recent commentary published by CalMatters raised a concern that screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, may lead to unwarranted reports of suspected child abuse or neglect to Child Protective Services. There is no...

Last week I posted “ The trouble with trauma (-informed), the aggravation of ACEs (screening): We're trying to fit both into traditional frameworks and it isn't working .” This post goes one step farther to describe the first easy steps that all organizations can use, no matter what the sector, to wrap their minds around integrating healing practices and policies based on PACEs science. In the comments section, Rebecca Bryan asked, “What is a reliable tool to assess organizational ACEs? Does...

What do you call it? The PACEs movement (PACEs = positive and adverse childhood experiences)? The NEAR movement (NEAR = neurobiology, epigenetics, ACEs and resilience)? The resilience movement? The trauma-informed movement? No matter what you call it, this movement emerged from two mind-bending, culture-changing developments that grew and evolved over the last 25 to 30 years. One is a groundbreaking epidemiological study, the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study , first...

Photo: Fred Olivier / Alamy [Personal note: People often ask what prompted me to found PACEs Connection, which began as ACEs Connection in 2012. There are two parts to this answer: the professional part—how ACEs Connection grew out of my reporting on violence epidemiology. And the personal one, which I haven't written about in great detail until now. It appears on HiddenCompass.net , a remarkable travel site that calls itself "the antidote to clickbait".] CONTENT WARNING: This story contains...

By Gretchen Reynolds, Photograph: Jamal Jordan for The Washington Post, The Washington Post, September 14, 2022 Working out for 30 minutes every day “might not be enough” to counter the health issues created by prolonged sitting, said the author of a sweeping new study Are you an active couch potato? Take this two-question quiz to find out: Did you work out for 30 minutes today? Did you spend the rest of the day staring at your computer and then settle in front of the television at night? If...

The other day, I heard about a funder who was advised by a consultant to get “out of the ACEs bubble” and move on to something else. That’s like telling geologists to move on from plate tectonics (how continents ride on moving plates to cause earthquakes and volcanoes). Or telling biologists and physicians to move on from germ theory , which showed that bacteria and viruses cause disease, not “bad air” (!). The science of positive and adverse childhood experiences is just as revolutionary as...