Trauma: Community of Color Exposure to the Criminal Justice System as an Adverse Childhood Experience

The reality that traumatic childhood experiences are directly linked to negative health outcomes has been known and widely recognized in public health and clinical literature for more than two decades. Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACEs”) represent the “single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today” according to Dr. Robert Block, former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics. ACEs are traumatic events that occur in early childhood, which can range from abuse and neglect to experiences derived from household and community dysfunction, such as losing a caregiver, being incarcerated, or living with a household member suffering from mental illness. The prevailing framework for addressing the ACEs crisis has been a medical model focused on after-the-fact interventions for individual survivors, rather than a model targeted at upstream, systemic issues that directly contribute to the trauma that individuals, families, and communities collectively suffer. More recently, literature has begun to explore the connection between trauma and race, outlining how structural violence, generational poverty, and historical trauma is often suffered both at the individual and community levels, focusing particularly on the traumas of violence and discrimination experienced by Black, indigenous, and persons of color. Such work has largely focused on improving economic opportunities for trauma-stricken communities, improving the physical/built environment, and supporting the development of healthy social-cultural environments. Largely absent from the body of work on the causes and impact of childhood trauma, however, is the exploration of how the United States justice system is at the epicenter of the current childhood trauma crisis. Each childhood experience described in screening instruments, which were used over the years to identify trauma, has a direct and undeniable nexus to the justice system. This nexus is evident for the abuse survivor seeking to escape her abuser through an order of ...