As California increasingly considers how past trauma impacts violence, a new community center in South Los Angeles is focused on healing. Rather than seeing violent crime as a problem exclusively for law enforcement, the Community Healing and Trauma Prevention Center seeks to understand and tackle the root causes of violence and its traumatic effects.
The people who come into our shelter in Santa Cruz County have frequently been beaten, trafficked and sexually assaulted in Central America. They have come to the United States as a last resort—in order to save their lives.
But a policy change under our current presidential administration threatens the health and well-being of these victims of violence.
As our country faces a gun violence epidemic, I find myself perplexed by the blatant gaps in our prevention systems. California law and the public agree that batterers should not own guns, and yet law enforcement agencies are not equipped to enforce these regulations.
“There are survivors of domestic violence who have done what the system tells you to do, which is get a protective order, and they’re supposed to be safe during that. The law tells people that they cannot access guns and that they have to relinquish those—but we’re not actually supporting that law.”
Immigrant women in California who are pursuing asylum after fleeing domestic violence in their homelands could face deportation in the wake of a ruling Monday by the Trump administration.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered immigration judges June 11 to stop granting asylum to the majority of people seeking the protection on grounds that they suffered domestic or gang violence in their home countries. The ruling could affect tens of thousands of domestic violence victims—mostly women—some of whom are detained in California while they await the outcome of their cases, advocates said.
Women who experience sexual assault are more likely to need medical care for mental health and stress-related problems in the year following the attack, new research suggests.
As my generation has grown up, we have had to bear witness to more and more reports of gun violence—like the school shooting Friday in Santa Fe, Texas.
This is an issue so many people stand for, because it comes down to one basic thing: safety.
As a youth advocate, it’s my personal responsibility to help fix forms of injustice where I see them. I will be using my voice, along with other youth to stop gun violence, whether by participating in national walkouts to get Congress aware of our concerns or by badgering our representatives for comprehensive reform. If our representatives disregard us because of our age and supposed lack of knowledge, then we’ll know who to vote out when we turn 18.
My school has its own on campus police that continues to criminalize young black and brown students. We are being over-policed, and our schools are slowing becoming prisons. We cannot arm our teachers as if they are maximum-security prison guards.
Gun violence has taken too many lives and there needs to be a change.
Gun violence in this country is an epidemic, and it needs to be treated like every other epidemic—as a public health crisis. The first step to finding a “cure” for any public health crisis is research.