In the summer of 2007, a woman was brought by ambulance to the emergency department of the Medical Center Haaglanden, a hospital that serves an inner city area of The Hague in the Netherlands. The woman was drunk and had a severe head injury. Her eight-year-old son was with her. Hester Diderich, an emergency nurse, and other hospital staff members looked after the boy while they attended to his mother. “We were very nice to him,” Diderich remembers. After treating the woman’s injuries, they...

An often-overlooked aspect of the opioid epidemic that has exploded across the U.S. in recent years is how often the abuse of heroin or prescription opiates is accompanied by domestic violence. This is tragic enough for the adults involved, but it’s a ticking time bomb for children who are exposed to these adversities, raising their risk for future drug use and multiple health and mental health conditions. Here’s how one community is trying to address the problem.

It’s a warm spring afternoon and Arturo Soriano is in his old stomping grounds—at Teralta Park, a small urban park atop a sunken freeway in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood. As a teenage gang member in the 1980s, Soriano roamed the park and the surrounding streets before spending the better part of two decades in prison. Now 40, he has returned with a different mission.