The Violence Project

by Jillian Peterson

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  In our current system, it’s easy to fall through the cracks. Doctors and teachers aren’t uniformly trained in how to recognize trauma or how to step in and help connect a child or parent with the resources they need. Parents may also refuse to consent to treatment owing to their own lack of understanding or fear or even their own trauma and the stigma attached to mental health.10 According to the National Association of School Psychologists, 60 percent of children don’t get the services they need due to access and stigma.

  Untreated childhood trauma can cause permanent damage, but even if a traumatic experience itself cannot be undone, early detection can largely resolve its impact, because children are resilient. Safely screening for trauma at the doctor’s office or in a school setting is the first step. A model called Safe Environment for Every Kid (SEEK) starts by training doctors and nurses in primary care settings in how to identify traumatic experiences in kids and talk about them with the children. Screening children in the doctor’s office and connecting families with needed resources such as housing, crisis centers, and mental health care have shown a number of positive outcomes, like fewer reports to Child Protective Services and fewer reports of harsh physical punishment by parents.8 They’ve also been shown to reduce emotional aggression from mothers and reduce domestic violence and parental stress.

  However, even if a child is screened, it doesn’t mean they can access the services they need. The homes of mass shooters were often chaotic and impoverished in addition to being violent. The idea of bringing a child to a therapist’s office several times a week is unrealistic for many families. Then there are other barriers, such as lack of insurance coverage, lack of transportation, financial constraints, lack of treatment providers, and the stigma of seeking out treatment. Home-based intervention is one solution whereby a mental health practitioner visits the child at home to provide assistance. The Nurse-Family Partnership program (NFP) also sends nurses into homes to work with parents of young children. This program has been associated with a 48 percent reduction in rates of child abuse and neglect in families.9

  Still, when we spoke by phone with school psychologist Eric Rossen, a national expert in trauma screening, he felt that school was the best place for screening to occur because every child is entitled to school-based mental health services, whether or not they have a formal diagnosis or can afford to pay. Unfortunately, there are too many barriers to treatment in clinical or even home settings, Rossen said, and by virtue of their daily proximity to children, school-based mental health providers can also better contextualize trauma and its treatment. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has called to expand school-based mental health services because they are so successful. In the best examples, school-based mental health centers offer a broad range of services, including assessment, treatment, case management, and individual therapy; these centers refer out only for the most severe cases or for ongoing family therapy. And as the Defending Childhood State Policy Initiative argues, trauma screening tools are so quick to administer (taking five to twenty minutes on average) that schools could easily adopt universal screening of all children, thus removing the stigma.

  We reached out to Professor Katie Eklund, an educational psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who specializes in trauma screening. We couldn’t visit her in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but over the phone she told us, “We do screening for vision and hearing. And for academics. Why don’t we do the same for social-emotional and mental health?” She went on: “Screening for trauma gives the data needed [for us] to know where to focus services and support. ‘What grade level do we need to think about universal support?’ ‘About broader social emotional learning systems?’ ” She added, “If you screen the entire student population, about 10 to 15 percent of children will be identified as at risk. In schools with increased needs, more trauma exposure, lower SES [socioeconomic standing], it may be more like 20 to 25 percent. Schools know about a lot of students, but some of [these kids] aren’t known to school staff. Screening data can raise a red flag. What do we need to know about this child? What other information do we need?”

  Screening may be easy, but what comes next isn’t. Only thirty-one states and the District of Columbia mandate school counselors, and when schools do have counselors on campus, the majority are overburdened. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 250 students per counselor, but over 90 percent of students attend schools with higher ratios. (The national average is 444:1.) Years of defunding in education have led to chronic shortages of social workers and psychologists in schools. A ratio of 500 students per psychologist is recommended, for instance, but to reach that goal, public schools across America would need to hire more than 50,000 new psychologists—the national average today is 1,500:1. And the numbers don’t tell the whole story, because a lack of school personnel in general means that counselors, social workers, and psychologists often are repurposed in schools and tasked with other duties outside their area of focus or expertise.

  The term trauma-informed refers to how practitioners work with people who have experienced trauma. Trauma-informed practitioners are doctors, nurses, teachers, school aides, administrators, social workers, and psychologists who embrace the idea that a cycle of care can overcome a cycle of violence. Communication is the primary focus of trauma-informed care. Being respectful and nonjudgmental, but also taking steps to make sure everyone feels safe in the space. A trauma-informed approach doesn’t just help the trauma victim and their family. Eric Rossen quipped, “It’s like seat belts; it’s good for everyone.”

  Most trauma assessments are delivered to all children universally, to benefit all children in school. Responses include universal interventions like safety planning, trauma programming, classroom strategies, prevention programming, and family and community engagement. Then there is targeted trauma-informed programming for the highest-risk kids. However, in order for practitioners to help in trauma recovery, they need to be looked after themselves, by employers who offer adequate support and supervision.

  In schools, teachers see children the most, so they need to know the signs of trauma, but in teaching teachers about trauma, “many of them in that moment begin to do some self-reflection and see it in themselves,” explains Mona Johnson, executive director of Wellness and Support in the South Kitsap School District, located in Port Orchard, Washington. Johnson is herself a trauma survivor, having grown up around alcohol-fueled domestic violence. She is now a leading voice on the need for trauma-informed schools. Being trauma-informed means “being able to gently tell teachers they have their own issues to work on,” she tells us, “because their own struggles can be a barrier to engagement for students.”

  Once teachers have worked through their own trauma and recognize the signs of exposure, decades of research shows that one of the best things we can do to help mitigate its effect is to teach children how to handle stress, resolve conflicts, and manage their emotions. This is often referred to as “social and emotional learning” (SEL), which involves helping children develop their skills in communication, problem-solving, conflict management, empathy, coping, and emotional regulation. SEL is not new, but in the years following the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, so-called whole-child education took a backseat to high-stakes testing and narrow “common core” academic standards in mathematics and English language arts.

  “Thankfully, the pendulum is starting to swing back,” Mona Johnson tells us. SEL programs train children to understand the personal coping mechanisms that work for them, such as listening to music, walking outdoors, or playing sports, and to practice understanding what impact their behavior has on the emotions of other people. Reviews of studies looking at social-emotional learning programs constantly find that they reduce violence across ages and demographic groups.

  Shortly after her six-year-old son, Jesse, was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 while in his first-grade
classroom, Scarlett Lewis founded a social-emotional learning program of her own. Speaking to us on the phone, she describes finding a note that Jesse had left written on the fridge the morning he died—“nurturing healing, love”—which she grew to understand as his message to the world. She describes the worst day of her life as also the one that taught her the greatest compassion. “We don’t choose what happens to us, but we always have a choice in how we react,” she says in her TED Talk. “We can always choose a loving thought over an angry one.” Scarlett created the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement to deliver social and emotional learning for free to schools, a valuable tool for helping children safely process any adversity in their lives. The program focuses on developing courage, gratitude, and compassion in children so that they might manage their responses to any situation.

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  Childhood trauma does not explain or excuse a mass shooting. Millions of children experience adversity or live with trauma, but only a tiny fraction of them ever goes on to pull a trigger. It’s important to identify trauma in children, but its long-term impact is unpredictable. In fact, two children may experience the exact same type of adversity and respond in different ways. So, what separates someone who experiences adversity in childhood and develops heart disease in adulthood from someone who experiences adversity in childhood and grows up to commit mass murder? The characteristics of adverse events (such as their intensity, duration, or whether a caregiver caused the child harm) are important, but individual factors such as the characteristics of the person and their life experiences play a huge role. Gender identity, race, and socioeconomic status create variation. People have different genetic vulnerabilities, different personalities, different relationships with peers and significant others.

  The Benevolent Childhood Experiences (BCEs) scale is a new instrument designed to assess positive early life experiences in adults that help mitigate the negative impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). It asks: When you were growing up, during the first eighteen years of life . . .

  • Did you have at least one caregiver with whom you felt safe?

  • Did you have at least one good friend?

  • Did you have beliefs that gave you comfort?

  • Did you like school?

  • Did you have at least one teacher who cared about you?

  • Did you have good neighbors?

  • Was there an adult (not a parent/caregiver or the person from the first question) who could provide you with support or advice?

  • Did you have opportunities to have a good time?

  • Did you like yourself or feel comfortable with yourself?

  • Did you have a predictable home routine, such as regular meals and a regular bedtime?

  People who answer yes to these questions tend to live with less psychological distress despite their high ACE scores and their adverse circumstances.11 Eric Rossen is clear that context matters: “ACEs are a narrow view. It is ACEs combined with poverty, discrimination, historical trauma, food insecurity, which makes screening an incredibly challenging process. So it’s not just ‘What happened to you?’ You need the context in which it happened and how it was perceived.” Rossen explains that you can have a horrific experience, but if you are in a supportive environment or an understanding school, it might not affect you in a long-term way. We can’t just look at traumatic experiences in isolation, without other things like family, support systems, and relationships. In doing so, we risk oversimplifying a very complicated picture.

  The importance of context becomes clear when you look at the siblings of mass shooters who grew up in the same household and experienced a similarly traumatic upbringing—particularly male siblings, because men tend to engage in crime and violence more. For example, the perpetrator of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was the son of an infamous bank robber who had spent eight years in the 1970s on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for robbing three banks in Arizona, running down an FBI special agent with his car during his arrest, and escaping from a federal prison in Texas, where he was sentenced to serve twenty years. He fled to Oregon and was never recaptured. Prior to his life as a fugitive, he had four sons.

  Four brothers, each raised by their single mother on her secretary salary. The oldest grew up to become the worst mass shooter in history. Another brother was in constant trouble with the law—vandalism, criminal threats, theft, driving with a suspended license. He was recently homeless and arrested for child pornography. The third brother described all the boys in the family as “bad kids,” but the Vegas shooter had supported him growing up, and eventually he retired early thanks to the perpetrator’s business ventures. The fourth brother is an engineer in Arizona, living a normal life. Four brothers, each with dramatically different outcomes in life due to genetics, personality, peer groups, and other life circumstances.

  This sibling paradox was something Jill experienced firsthand while working as a death penalty mitigation specialist. Her first client, the one who had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a young woman who was walking home alone, was just nineteen years old. The perpetrator had two older brothers, both of whom were in prison serving long sentences for violent crimes. He also had a younger sister, with no criminal record, who was doing quite well in high school. The four siblings each grew up in the same terrible conditions, removed from their parents’ care for abuse and neglect at young ages. But there was one difference with the younger sister. Yes, she was female, but following their mother’s death from a drug overdose, the sister was reunited with their aunt, who took a special interest in her. She bought her new backpacks for the school year and made sure she did her homework, checking in with her and providing things she needed. The sister spent a lot of time at the aunt’s house; the two had a strong, trusting bond. The sister thrived, while the three boys spent their lives in prison.

  According to the Harvard Center for the Developing Child, the single most common factor for children who are resilient in the face of trauma is a stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult in their lives. This adult could be a teacher, coach, extended family member, neighbor, or volunteer. These relationships with positive adults actually buffer against the impact that traumatic experiences have on children. To learn more about this, we sat down with Stefan Van Voorst, executive director of One2One, a nonprofit mentoring program for at-risk youth that is embedded in public schools throughout the Twin Cities. Van Voorst, a musician who years ago performed for audiences in the thousands, knows how to connect. He explains that the role of a mentor, whether formal or informal, is simply to walk alongside someone while they figure out who they really are. Listening is the most important skill. He jokes that “mentoring is an opportunity for mentors to grow ears and for mentees to grow mouths.” When it is done right, however, the results can be powerful.

  Van Voorst recalled a middle school student who was constantly getting into fights with her peers. One day, she disclosed to her mentor, a community college student only a few years older than she, that her mom and her sister had been arguing a lot. Her sister had once threatened suicide, and their had mom said, “Well, if she’s going to do it, you might as well, too.”

  “The next thing you know, that student’s cutting,” Van Voorst explains. Knowing that story, the girl’s mentor anticipated her behavior escalating, but the opposite happened. The student was now connected to her mentor, meeting with her weekly, opening up to her about her experiences and emotions. Van Voorst adds, “Her response to that event changed because the mentor was with her through that process . . . [The student] stopped getting into fights. So you went from a fight every week to zero fights. There was a mentor there working with her every week, so in the midst of a traumatic experience, she had somebody accompanying her through that. Someone walking with her. That was the difference.”

  We’ll never know if something as simple as a positive relationship with an adult could have turned around the lives of the mass shooters in our study, but we know the majo
rity of them had no one to turn to. As Perpetrator B told us, “People knew I was suffering, but they never knew how bad it was.” If only he had had a relationship with an adult who could have asked.

  CHAPTER 4

  CRISIS

  We meet Grace and Larry in their small, sunny West Coast home to talk about the downward spiral their son, Perpetrator C, experienced before committing one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. Over cups of tea and coffee, they start out by explaining the culture in their home: “We didn’t promulgate a culture of talking. Be stoic, be grateful you have a good house, food on the table. I didn’t encourage him to tell me what he was thinking or feeling.”

  Perpetrator C was attending graduate school, and to Grace and Larry, things appeared to be going well. He had his very first girlfriend, his own apartment near the university, and his parents were feeling hopeful about the future. It was Christmas break when they began to sense things going downhill. Perpetrator C came home sick with mononucleosis and spent the entire two-week vacation sleeping. After he returned to school, his girlfriend broke up with him. He called his parents to say that his classes weren’t going well. “We told him that we would send him a ticket if he wanted to come home for Easter. [He] said he couldn’t. He had one hundred slides to memorize and a ten-page essay to write,” Larry remembers.

  Grace and Larry didn’t know it at the time, but their son had sought help from a campus social worker after disclosing to his former girlfriend that he was having thoughts about killing people. The social worker said he was “the most anxious person you’ve ever seen.” Perpetrator C also saw a psychiatrist, who prescribed him Zoloft for anxiety and depression.

  Grace serves us a lunch of salad and homemade soup. “He was getting sicker and sicker, and [the psychiatrist] kept upping the dose,” she told us. You can hear the anger in her voice.