Urban Youth Trauma: Using Community Intervention to Overcome Gun Violence

(Paperback)

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Description

Trauma has unfortunately become an all-too familiar occurrence in the lives of children, with a majority of youth experiencing a traumatic event before the age of 18. With the rise of school shootings and recent March for Our Lives, this timely book will address intervention strategies for social workers and counselors to combat this negative phenomenon. Urban Youth Trauma focuses on urban violence and guns, while due attention is also paid to other forms of trauma in order to ground violence-related trauma within the constellation of multiple forms of trauma. Violence, and more specifically that related to guns, is very much associated with urban centers and youth of color.

Divided into three parts, this volume traces the roots of urban youth trauma. Parts I and II provide context and foundation for the problem and intervention strategies. Part III takes the reader through a variety of intervention strategies directly related to the communitys assets. The strength of Urban Youth Traumas lies in its focus on the community itself as the key to survival, resilience, and change.

Reviews

Urban Youth Trauma by Delgado (Boston Univ.) addresses one of the most vexing problems currently facing urban minority youth in contemporary America, namely easy access to guns and the consequent and ever-present threat of falling victim to gun violence. This issue is especially pressing when considering that hazards from exposure to indiscriminate shootings occur with unremitting regularity in many cities, compounded by urban law enforcement who have also contributed to the injury and death tolls with their occasional excessive use of force. In the early chapters Delgado presents extensive and convincing evidence of the dangers minority youth face today in their communities from the threat of gun violence, including the potential for increased incidence of PTSD and a variety of other mental health difficulties. In later chapters, he addresses the kinds of social programs that can help resolve these problems, helping children to overcome these obstacles to live useful, productive, and satisfying lives. . . [A] richly informative and useful work.



Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels.

* Choice Reviews *
This book is personal, powerful and prolific. The author pulls the curtain back and shows readers Americas violent structures and polices that fuel neighborhood trauma in communities of color. A rallying call for social workers to organize around this important social justice issue. -- Dexter R. Voisin, University of Chicago

Author Bio

Dr. Melvin Delgado, M.S.W, Ph.D., is professor of social work at Boston University School of Social Work. He is the former Chair of Macro Practice. He has over forty years of practice, research, and scholarship focused on urban population groups, specifically within the Latinx community. Dr. Delgados research has addressed a variety of social issues and needs, and he has published over thirty books on urban community practice topics. He is currently the series editor on Social Justice and Youth Community Practice, Oxford University Press.