April 22, 2004

Newsfeed: Karen Abram

Karen Abram discusses trauma among juvenile detainees

A recent Northwestern study concludes almost every boy and girl currently detained in a juvenile facility has experienced at least one major trauma. Karen Abram, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and lead author of the study, says a large proportion of these children have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

PTSD involves re-experiencing the trauma in dreams or intrusive recollections, or being in situations reminiscent of that. It’s also characterized by avoidance of the trauma, loss of interest and emotional numbing and by having increased arousal or hyper-vigilance. Many people self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to try to decrease the arousal and intrusive recollections.

Abram says the traumatic experiences happened outside detention.

We inquired about eight different kinds of trauma and the most prevalent event was witnessing someone being badly hurt or killed. Also prevalent were experiences of having been threatened with a weapon or having been in a situation where you thought you or someone close to you was going to be badly hurt or killed.

Abram says traumatic experiences left unaddressed can lead to behavior that gets people in trouble with the law.

For example, if you’ve been a victim of a violent crime or you were restrained in some way, just being arrested and being handcuffed can really set you off. Traumatic experiences can cause emotional effects that can lead kids and adults into trouble. So it’s important to understand the correlation between the kinds of emotional experiences that have gone unaddressed and subsequent problems.

According to Abram, more intervention and support is necessary for juvenile detainees.

These kids you see in detention centers are living daily with exposure to really horrific trauma, either witnessing it or experiencing it directly. It becomes sort of part of the social fabric, but it’s important that schools and the community treat these events with the kind of importance they deserve.

— Samira Puskar