Treating Mothers' Trauma as a Way to Prevent Youth Violence

The Fulton Community Supervision Center in Missouri provides trauma-informed, gender-specific care and services to women who face the risk of recidivism. Participants live at the center, where they receive services like cognitive behavioral therapy and classes that teach coping mechanisms and personal and professional development. Core to much of the programming is helping women find their self worth.

For 20 years, the Center for Young Women’s Development has been a safe space for thousands of young women ages 16 to 24 who have been incarcerated or are homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area. The center is most recognized for its strategies to give these women opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Alcohol has claimed more lives in Rio Arriba County in the past five years than other drugs. SMART, a secular alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, provides one path toward recovery, increasingly incorporating scientific findings into treatment as well as support for family members of addicts, helping them change the environment.

Healing Hurt People (HHP), the program that helped save his life, now employs men like Jermaine McCorey - men who used to be a part of a violent life on the streets of Philadelphia - to reach out to boys and young men in the emergency department and help get them through empathy and personalized support. HHP's goal is to help young people recognize the role trauma has played in shaping their lives, to respect and honor their experience and to help them avoid fueling the cycle of violence.

Healing trauma has never been an easy process but programs like Healing Hurt People help to promote recovery in traumatized, angry young men. This program, in partnership with local medical services, aims to provide therapy in place of violence, which would only cause more trauma down the road. Those who stick with the program have found great success in overcoming their pasts.

Sometimes just having someone to talk to can help those who are suffering from depression. The Friendship Bench program in NYC borrows an idea from Harare, Zimbabwe, where healthcare workers—affectionately called Grannies—sit and consult with patients on benches outside of healthcare clinics. The Grannies help people discuss their issues and have had a measurably positive impact on those they’ve reached. In New York, the Friendship Benches connect individuals to peer mentors willing to listen across the city.

Creating a more compassionate working environment helps lead clinicians suffering from depression, trauma, or burnout, to seek care. The University of California San Diego’s medical system has piloted several approaches. Code Lavender encourages small acts of intentional kindness toward co-workers. Caregiver Support Teams identify peer mentors that can provide emotional support and help struggling colleagues.

Once deemed youthful “superpredators” condemned to spend their entire adult lives in prison, the peer counselors in Philadelphia’s Life After Life support group help other formerly incarcerated people transition back to freedom. Of the more than 100 former “juvenile lifers” who returned to Philadelphia after the Supreme Court deemed them eligible for a second chance, none has been convicted of a new crime or serious parole violation – a key metric that encourages Pennsylvania to continue whittling down its record-high population of juvenile-life-without-parole inmates.

In New Hampshire, a healing and bonding program is offering veterans and first responders experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder ways to cope with their stressors. From social interactions to equine therapy, participants have reported that the program has had a positive impact on their wellbeing.

To help veterans struggling to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, the Phoenix VA Health Care System has started using sports and outdoor recreation as a means of therapy. Although it does not replace medications or act as a cure-all, this practice has been shown to reduce symptoms and can lead to a reduction in medications.