We know how punishing traumatized children creates even more broken children and exactly what we don’t want to happen in our community (failing children, more crime, and more child abuse). We also know how valuable the ACES, Adverse Childhood Experience healing model is in mending children and ending the growing public health problem generational child abuse has become. But we still expell and incarcerate rather that heal and help these children heal from traumas inflicted on them in toxic homes.
Too many of us accept the harsh practices our nation is built on and the damage more punishment does to millions of broken children already living in abusive homes. Its an American cultural practice reaching deep into our collective psyches and down into our public institutions.
Punishment model does not facilitate healing or learning. Instead it is responsible for most failing children and the primary reason for underperforming schools. Instead of blaming bad teachers we would do well to accept that these brutal policies and the absence of trauma informed practices put the final brick in the wall of learning and social skill development almost guaranteeing this child a life of mental health and behavior problems that make them dysfunctional adults.
This is the punishment model that Minnesota’s former Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz was referring to when she stated that, “90% of the youth in the Juvenile Justice system have passed through the Child Protection system” and her more painful statement that; “The difference between that poor child and a felon, is about 8 years”.
We live in a nation where 30% of youth are arrested by their 28th birthday – and there are not enough prisons to house two million Americans as 9-year prison recidivism rates stay at 80% and our prisons have been at or over 100% capacity for decades. We know that the punishment model cannot fix children or make our communities safer, happier or more productive.
California’s Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris has declared (ACES)
Adverse Childhood Experiences
a public health epidemic and public school’s crisis.
We know that childhood trauma leads to generational child abuse. We know that skill building and trauma informed practices heal children and provides them with what they need to become productive members of our communities. Join Kids At Risk Action in making your community a trauma informed care community by providing ACEs awareness to governors, healthcare providers, daycare providers, school principals, superintendents, law enforcement and teachers”.
Let’s all work to improve the lives of at-risk children and make our community safer, happier and more productive. By giving all children a chance to heal and become functioning members of the community. Become a friend of KARA and the children we speak for here: and share this and future posts with your friends and especially your State Representative (they make the laws that govern the lives of abused and neglected children) FIND THEM HERE.
KARA reports on the issues of child abuse.
This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen
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