Inner City Youth Trauma

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Finding Support for the Youth Gunshots, drugs, violence, and crime plague the streets not only in Chicago but in many of the inner-cities across the United States. This is just an everyday occurrence for most young kids and they have just accepted this. A young black male, age 15 and whose name cannot be mention due to him being a minor, was walking to school casually on his phone. Until he heard the first gunshot, he stopped and quickly made his way back to his house. While traveling back he heard multiple gunshots which turned his jog to a full-on sprint. He checked his body to see if he was potentially hit, luckily, he was not. Barbara Herron, the young boy’s great aunt, speaks out how raising her nephew in a battlefield that she calls …show more content…

From Trauma Narratives with Inner City Youth: The Storiez Intervention by Megan Corrado she gives insight how these urban communities effect young children’s mindset. Research shows that inner city youth are being exposed to trauma at alarming rates. Not only are youth exposed to a certain incident of trauma but, they are often victims of complex trauma. Students tell their unique stories on what they experience in their community. As a result of those experiences that lead most of the students to feel more trauma in their lives than most. One of the kid’s stories was told by a girl who felt alienated because she came from a low-income family, this soon made her highly depressed throughout that term. This is exactly why Youth programs are important for children and young adults who come from battered down communities that don’t support them. Parental guardians are not always home, due to the low wages that many experience in inner cities there is a demand for work around the clock to be able to support the children. Jennifer G. Roffman, Ph.D., Maria E. Pagano, Ph.D., and Barton J. Hirsch, Ph.D., authors of Youth Functioning and Experiences in Inner-City After-School Programs Among Age, Gender, and Race Groups, claim afterschool programs held for urban children will help them physiologically and help them develop a brighter attitude. One certain article even goes into detail that outdoor programs can improve a child’s emotional status. The article, Measuring conflict management, emotional self-efficacy, and problem solving confidence in an evaluation of outdoor programs for inner-city youth in Baltimore, Maryland, written by authors Stephanie Caldas, Elena Broaddus, and Peter Winch claim that analytically assessing the outdoor programs they preform can help them understand if the

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