More handpicked essays just for you.
Effects of traumatic events on young children
Effects of traumatic events on young children
Essays on impact of emotional trauma on children
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Dan Dallas’s Savagery Show and Tell (1978) article discusses the mental health efforts implemented to minimize trauma in young children and their parents after exposure to a homicide that occurred in public view. The murder took place in front of over 50 students of an elementary school in Illinois. Immediately, the elementary school was concerned with the possible psychological effects witnessing the murder could have on the students. In response, the school implemented various methods of processing and coping to minimize potential negative effects. Although Dallas covered an interesting and important topic in his article, there are many flaws with how the article was written. The six primary concerns with Dallas’s article are: ambiguity of …show more content…
the abstract, emotionally charged language, incorrect statements, gross assumptions, lack of proof reading, and incorrect APA format. An uninformative and ambiguous abstract is the first concern with Savagery Show and Tell (1978).
Dallas’s abstract includes a description of the homicide that was witnessed by the students, a question posed by a student, and a breath of information regarding the immediate implementation of counseling services. Although some of this information is relevant to the article, it also leaves out several essential details. With that being said, the abstracts lacks a hypothesis and leaves the reader questioning the purpose and the focus of the article. For example, is the article about the effect of the trauma on the students, or parents, or is the article about the counseling efforts to avoid the effects of trauma before or after the onset of symptoms? Furthermore, the abstract does not indicate any methods or outcomes of the counseling efforts mentioned. Additionally, the already brief abstract includes an off topic question regarding what to do when a child asks questions about the acceptableness of murder. This question is only addressed briefly and is not a central theme of the …show more content…
article. The Savagery Show and Tell (1978) article contains language that is emotionally charged. With that being said, neutral words are less distracting and misleading to readers and should be preferred over overly dramatic words. For example, when describing the details of the homicide in the first paragraph of the article, the author used all of the following words: slaying, exploding, savagery, aggressive, butcher, gory, utter disbelief, rush of pain, crying for help, pursuit, pleading continually, punctured, rage, jammed, and spastic hysterical frustration. The amount of emotionally charged words used to describe the homicide needlessly distracts the reader and misleadingly sets the stage of the article around the event rather than based on counseling efforts for trauma prevention. The author also states “super power surged through the son”, which is both a gross exaggeration of ability and presumably impossible. Ultimately, the type of emotionally charged language discussed alters readers’ perspectives of the event and distorts the purpose of the article. The author also made an incorrect and contradictory statement about the offender when he repeatedly used specific language to distract from his true age.
The Dallas (1978) indicated once that the offender was 23-years-old, then directly addresses the offender six times as being a young man or a youth. Much like the misleading nature of the emotionally charged words, calling a 23-year-old a youth misleads readers and distorts judgements of the events. By wrongfully giving the impression that the offender is younger, the author makes the offender seem more innocent than he is, and in turn, makes the homicide seem more shocking and potentially traumatizing than it really
is. The author also makes gross assumptions about the details of the event that he couldn’t possibly know to be true. For example, the Dallas (1978) states that “the youth’s irresponsible thinking led him to use the butcher knife…” and “in utter disbelief, and experiencing the sudden rush of pain…” which would imply that he knew the mind of the offender and the victim in the moments of the event (Dallas, 1978). This is, of course, not true. The author can speculate on what the offender and the victim experienced and thought, but he cannot know what actually occurred in the moments leading up to the murder. With that being said, instead of irresponsible thinking, it could have been any variation of thoughts that caused the offender to act. Additionally, instead of the father being in disbelief, the father may have been expecting the offender to act out the way he did. The author also comments on the city employees, who were apparently “caught in a dream and could not move or even utter a sound out of their paralyzed throats” (Dallas, 1978). Of course the author cannot know this to be true. It is possible that the city employees were unable to call for help or react to the violence because of fear, but it is an exaggeration to indicate that anyone who seen the violence was paralyzed in the throat. Additionally, it is unclear what being caught in a dream is actually describing. Ultimately, speculations should be clearly stated as being speculations, not facts. In addition to the issues discussed regarding Dallas’s (1978) language and statements, the article also should have been proof read. Excluding grammar and punctuation use, there are about eight plainly apparent instances of careless errors that should have been caught and corrected after having been proof read. For example, a space precedes a period at the end of a sentence, a sentence is concluded with two periods, random letters stand on their own within paragraphs, a colon is being used as a comma, a paragraph ends with a quotation mark and a single letter following it, etc. There are times that simple errors can be mistakenly overlooked amongst a large published text, but for an article that’s length is under three complete pages, this many errors are indicative of careless writing. Dallas (1978) also lacks a basic understanding of APA format. The author uses the number 1 to refer to “1 positive action”, instead of spelling the number; one (Dallas, 1978; Publication manual of the American Psychological Association, 2009). This is a simple mistake that is either evidence of a lack of knowledge of APA format or neglecting to proof read. Additionally, the author misuses a block quote in several ways. Material being quoted needs to contain 40 words or more to be placed in a block quote; the author used a block quote to quote a 35-word segment. Therefore, the quote should be in the above paragraph with a quotation mark at the beginning and end of the quoted material. Regardless of the quote not meeting the required word count to be a block quote, it also deviates from APA format in two other ways. First, block quotes are required to be a half inch in from the margins, so as a result, they should appear more narrow than the standard paragraphs. Second, in brackets, the author’s reference of the quote wrongfully begins with “quoted in…” (Dallas, 1978). APA format just requires the authors last name followed by the year of publication, and a page number if applicable.
According to the FBI, more than 75 percent of all murder victims are women, and more than 50 percent of the women are between the ages of 14 and 29 years old. A part of that statistic is Kitty Genovese,a murder victim who is the focus of an editorial, “The Dying Girl that No One Helped,” written by Loudon Wainwright. Kitty was a 28 year old woman who was brutally stabbed to death while on her way home from work. The woman, named Kitty Genovese, lived in a pleasant, welcoming, residential area, in New York. There was at least 38 witnesses that came forward, and they all heard her cries for help, but no one came to her aid. Wainwright effectively demonstrates how society has started turning a “blind-eye” toward problems that can endanger someone's
The tragedy that happened in Newton, Connecticut swept the world with a variety of emotions. Many individuals became angry or saddened by the tragedy. I think more of the individuals were angry of what happened to those 20 innocent children. Parents send their children to school thinking that they are safe but in this case ended in tragedy. I am going to discuss similarities and differences between two articles. I am also going to discuss how this shooting is a symbolic crime, how likely policy changes will be enacted and how unlikely they are to be enacted.
Violent Media is Good for Kids, by Gerard Jones, is an article which makes many claims to support the argument in which a controlled amount of violence could be beneficial for a young, developing child. Even though the topic of this article can be controversial, the claims serve to support the argument in many noteworthy ways. It is written in such a way that it tells a story, starting when the author was a child and works its way to his adulthood. In this case the author uses, what I believe to be just the correct amount of each rhetorical strategy, and fulfills his goal for writing the article. This argument is interesting and at the same time, effective. Throughout the analyzing process logos, ethos, and pathos are searched for and scrutinized.
I chose to do my paper on the movie, For Colored Girls, by Ntozake Shane (2010). In the movie For Colored Girls, I thought about all the Tangies who have not been professionally treated for their childhood rape. It is not an easy subject to talk about. The victims sometimes hide their emotions for years. Sexual abuse on a child is vulgar and according to Martin (2010), it is considered maltreatment and should be reported to authorities. Tangie knew her attacker, in fact he lived with them. He was a caregiver who was supposed to protect her. She held a lot of anger towards her mother because she felt that at least her mom should have protected her.
On August 20th, 1989 Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents inside their Beverly Hills home with fifteen shot gun blasts after years of alleged “sexual, psychological, and corporal abuse” (Berns 25). According to the author of “Murder as Therapy”, “The defense has done a marvelous job of assisting the brothers in playing up their victim roles” (Goldman 1). Because there was so much evidence piled up against the brothers, the defense team was forced to play to the jurors’ emotions if they wanted a chance at an acquittal. Prosecutor Pamela Bozanich was forced to concede that “Jose and Kitty obviously had terrific flaws-most people do in the course of reminding jurors that the case was about murder, not child abuse” (Adler 103). Bozanich “cast the details of abuse as cool, calculated lies” (Smolowe 48)...
Yet, as a profession (and a society) maybe a little shock treatment now and then is good for us, especially if we ourselves work in relatively “safe” schools and communities. Maybe it’s time to remind ourselves that one school’s problem can become every school’s problem if the profession at large is not watchful and careful. No school is immune to the potential of extreme violence, as many of us, without meaning to, have learned. If you’re a long-time, veteran English teacher, you may never have thought you’d see the day when an issue of English Journal would be devoted to school violence. The idea never occurred to me, either. But here we are, and here that issue is. And, what’s more, it’s high time. While none of us needs convincing that the violence problem is serious in a great many places, some of the statistics are sobering.
Robinson, Lori S, and Jimmie Briggs “Kids and Violence” Emerge November. 1993:44+ Seifert, Kathryn. A.
Asaro, M. R. (2001). Working With Adult Homicide Survivors, Part II: Helping Family Members Cope With Murder. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 37(4), 115-124.
Since violence had become part of every individual's life, they see it as a regular event, which reduces the hatred for violence. Nelson implies that when an individual get exposed to controversial violent acts such executions, those individuals are less likely to react and take action against this violent topic. Nelson argues that “Model of shaming-us into-action-by-unmasking-the-truth-of-our actions cannot hold a candle to our capacity to assimilate horrific images and to justify or shrug off horrific behavior” (Nelson 300). Desensitization to violence takes away the individual's senses of supporting “right” and “wrong” cause of violent acts. As a results, individuals either try to justify the violent acts or just ignore or deny. Likewise, instead of getting horrified by the news of the murder of Matt Shepard, some residents of Laramie became defensive, by attempting to deny the existence of intolerance in their town. Loffreda writes that‘“Hate is not a Wyoming value,’ residents kept telling each other, telling the visitor, telling the press. ‘We really take care of each other here,’ a woman told me one day in a coffee shop, echoing a dearly held ethos I’ve heard from many in Laramie ”(Loffreda 254). Media, through their twisting and manipulation of the murder was
In the non- fiction essay Savages author Carol Edgarian describes the relationship between herself and her two siblings from adolescence until adulthood. Edgarian writes a very descriptive informal essay about the ups and downs, in and outs of life, that draws the reader in and takes them back to reminiscing about childhood. The key symbols represented in this passage are the bond between siblings and how they behaved as “savages,” but also allies whom knew each other inside and out.
Meadows, R.J., Understanding Violence and Victimization, 5th edition, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc. 2010
In her article “Are We Desensitized?” Nastacia Goodwin expresses her frustration with the media and her peers by contrasting her own reaction to the Virginia Tech Massacre against the reactions of people she knew in school. Goodwin’s reflection on her experience brings her to the conclusion that the peoples’ mass exposure to violence has converted them into apathetic monsters. She starts by laying out expectations of her school’s reaction to the Virginia Tech Massacre, believing that the school will be troubled and paranoid, only for her to find that life is continuing as usual in high school. Goodwin goes through the rest of her day in a state of silent disgust while observing people’s lukewarm reactions to the massacre. Goodwin makes an appeal to pathos by refuting her friends’ statements with her emotions, rebuking them for their lack of genuine sympathy.
A person experiences violence regardless of his or her geographical location. Violence is catastrophic, toxic and dramatically impactful on a community. Violence is a product of misbehavior and lack of emotional outlets. People bring violence to the streets of Chicago because they believe that actions speak louder than words. People solve confrontation on the streets with the pull of a trigger rather than taking a minute to talk it out. Many Chicagoans have become numb to the headlines that read- “40 shot and 4 killed this weekend” or “She didn’t have a chance.” Chicagoans shake their heads and scoff, while saying “There goes another one.” How could traumatic events become ordinary? Community members continuously march for justice and peace in their neighborhoods while city officials create new programs and jobs to keep young
In today’s communicating environment, individuals are bombarded with mass media violence. Silver et al. (2013) argue that potential mental-health issues may arise due to vicarious media exposure to violence or disasters. Early research that looked at children affected by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1990 Gulf War found a relationship between media exposure and trauma-related symptoms (Silver et al., 2013). Exposure to traumatic events may affect individuals’ physical and mental health. This includes individuals that are present during the trauma or those indirectly exposed to the stressor. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, traumatic events are a shocking, scary, or dangerous experience that can affect an individual
Television violence causes children and teenagers to be less caring, to lose their inhibitions, and to be less sensitive. In a study on the connection between violence and television done with 1,565 teenage boys over a six-year period in London, William Belson, a British psychologist, found that every time a child saw someone being shot or killed on television they became less caring towards other people (Kinnear 26). William Belson also discovered that every time a child viewed this violence on television, they lost a fragment of their inhibitions towards others (Kinnear 26). In addition to William Belson’s study, studies done by many scientists and doctors show that seeing violence on television causes viewers to become less sensitive to the pain of others (Mudore 1).