Trauma and Attachment Theory

• Study notes for weeks 9, 10, 11 and 12

Types of Trauma

• Episodic trauma includes incidents like car accidents, natural disasters, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
• Persistent trauma involves ongoing violence, abuse, neglect, bullying, intimate partner violence (IPV), imprisonment, and poverty.
• Collective trauma affects groups such as communities or nations, including events like genocide, colonialism, poverty and war.
• Historical trauma spans generations, such as the Holocaust, residential schools, and slavery.

Trauma and Its Impacts

• Jude's impacts of trauma include intrusions, avoidance, re-exposure, hyperarousal, and a crisis of identity.
• Zehr's impacts of trauma are disorder (world turned upside down), disconnect (profound shame), and disempowerment (loss of control).
• Individual trauma can lead to mental health issues like PTSD, mood disorders, and personality disorders.
• Trauma can also lead to addictions.

Attachment Theory

• Attachment is a biological process essential for human relationships.
• Attachment figure is a caregiver who provides care and has an emotional investment.
• Attachment behavior: an emotional bond between a child and their caregiver.
• Bowlby's theory states that attachment is a biological function rooted in social behavior.
• Ainsworth identified attachment patterns including secure (healthy), anxious, and avoidant.

Collective Trauma

• Collective trauma is the harm that traumatizes a group of people, whether a family, a community, or a nation.
• The politics of trauma involve accountability and response, identity and mobilization, power dynamics, and instrumentalization of trauma.

Biopower

• The concept of biopower involves decisions for large populations based on data.

Punishment

• Punishment is unlikely to decrease recidivism.
• Punishment can be traumatic and dangerous.

Strength Approach to Youth Justice

• The strength approach focuses on believing in people’s abilities.

Custodial Options

• Open custody is more effective, less restrictive, and community-based, suitable for less serious offenses, and offers better access to resources.
• Closed custody involves strict limitations on movement, is used for serious offenses, includes locked facilities with perimeter security and controlled access, and is used when public safety requires strict control.

Incarceration and Hegemonic Masculinity

• The prison code includes acting tough, suffering in silence, never admitting fear, not trusting anyone, not snitching, fighting when manhood is disrespected, and being willing to inflict pain.

Risk Assessment Tools

• Risk assessment tools measure criminogenic risk, need, and responsivity.
• The Psychopathy Checklist Youth Version (PCL-YV) measures a young person’s psychopathy or antisocial tendencies through a 20 question interview.
• The Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) measures static and dynamic risk factors for future violent behavior using a 30-item checklist.
• Level of Security Inventory Models (LSI) are actuarial models.
• RNR (Risk-Need-Responsivity) model:
  • Risk principle: match the level of service to the offender’s risk of re-offending.
  • Need principle: assess criminogenic needs and target them in treatment.
  • Responsivity principle: tailor the intervention to the learning style, motivation, abilities, and strengths of the offender.
• Risk assessments often predict recidivism in a range of only 5-20%.
• Correlation does not equal causation.
• Tools rigorous/reliability.
• Exclusion of other social factors.

Restorative Justice

• Focuses on repairing harm rather than punishment.
• Addresses the harms, needs, and obligations involved in a crime.

Restorative Justice in Practice

• Methods include peacemaking circles, family group conferencing, and victim-offender conferencing.
• Support-based RJ is also utilized.

Critiques of Restorative Justice

• It risks framing domestic and sexual violence as non-serious.
• Practitioners are sometimes not sensitive to victim needs and trauma.
• It sometimes offers no role for the government.
• Definitions, terms, and goals are sometimes problematic.
• It is sometimes offender-oriented.
• Programming is limited.
• It further individualizes crime.

Trauma-Informed Care

• Aims to bring awareness of the impacts of trauma to work in youth justice.
• Ensures interventions do not trigger past trauma but instead promote healing.
• Involves safe communication: validate, acknowledge, normalize, listen, mourn, empathize.
• Maintains a position of respect by seeking informed consent, being non-judgmental, honoring diversity, and being trustworthy.
• Takes a strength-based approach to foster resilience through appreciative inquiry.
• Healthy practitioners practice self-care.

Core Principles of a Trauma-Informed Approach

• Safety
• Trustworthiness and transparency
• Peer support
• Collaboration
• Empowerment
• Humility and responsiveness

Trauma-Informed Care With:

• Victims: journey toward meaning, honor, vindication, and justice.
• Offenders: acknowledgement and admit wrong, support for change, acknowledge harm, make amends.
• Communities: safety, mourning and acceptance, engagement with offenders, integration of trauma with identity.

Trauma-Informed Prevention

• Decolonization: dismantling systems of colonialism.
• Become “colour brave”: recognizing systemic discrimination.
• Dismantle systems of patriarchy: intervening and preventing male domination/violence.

Five Principles of Trauma-Informed Youth Justice

• A set of shared values
• Indigenous peoples and women are in leadership roles to decolonize and dismantle patriarchy
• Restorative justice is the framework
• Trauma-informed care and prevention guides practices
• Justice processes are victim-centered

Future Trends in Youth Justice

• Restorative justice and trauma-informed approaches
• Community-based justice
• Youth engagement
• Mental health and substance use support
• Addressing the disproportional impact on BIPOC individuals