Trapped in Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality and Law

David D. Troutt

11 April 2017

Each year, psychological trauma arising from community and domestic violence, abuse and neglect brings profound psychological, physiological and academic harm to millions of American children, disproportionately poor children of color. This Article represents the first comprehensive legal analysis of the causes of and remedies for a crisis that can have lifelong and epigenetic consequences. Using civil rights and local government law, it argues that children’s reactions to complex trauma represent the natural symptomatology of severe structural inequality—legally sanctioned environments of isolated, segregated poverty. The sources of psychological trauma may be largely environmental, but the traumatic environments themselves are caused by spatial inequality. The Article sets forth a theory of structural inequality that demonstrates the importance of place-based differences in institutional functioning and the role of such disparities in producing the neurobiological, psychological and behavioral outcomes comprehensively described in the literature from those disciplines (including the results of an original study of Newark, NJ school children). This alternative legal analysis of child trauma compels a different remedial approach to both intervention and prevention. It argues that interventions like special education reform are necessary but problematic because they risk pathologizing the African-American poor and exhausting institutional capacity. Instead, it provides a framework for prevention focused upon increased mobility and reformed local institutions. 

Gunshots and other psychologically traumatic experiences reveal a lot about the structure of inequality in the United States. In economically marginalized environments, a single gunshot can live on indefinitely, beginning with the flesh it tears, the memories it traumatizes and the stereotypes it confirms in the minds of distant others. That lone traumatic event can travel from barrel to bone and beyond over the space of generations, marking and defining the places where opportunity dies or thrives. Violence begets violence and also efforts to ensure its absence. Thus, the child witness who fears, sees and relives violence may react to the experience with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other conditions that potentially re-wire her brain, impair cognitive abilities, imperil learning and condition her body for an array of life-threatening addictions and illnesses over time. On the other hand, many people who learn about the gunshot from local TV news may see a sad but distant routine of murders by young black men of other young black men. They often react to the shooting by supporting policy decisions that maintain the safe distance between the world of shootings and their own, such as rejecting affordable housing or new bus lines that cross poor neighborhoods. These dichotomous reactions organize this legal analysis of the child trauma crisis. 

In the last two decades, the myriad harms from psychological trauma have garnered considerable attention from neuroscience, the therapeutic professions and educators. The public is discovering the crippling effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on returning combat veterans, victims of international rape and sex trafficking and the children of war and natural disaster. Psychological trauma reflects our species’ natural reactions to atrocity. Its effects can linger intergenerationally through the descendants of Holocaust survivors and African-American slaves. It is experienced through various forms of violence, abuse and neglect. Yet it is far more common among children than many of us believed. Privacy rules and beliefs make precise numbers impossible, and uniform metrics do not exist. Based on reported child abuse, domestic violence and the numbers of children in traumatic placements such as foster care, “the most moderate estimates suggest that at any given time, more than eight million American children suffer from serious, diagnosable, trauma-related psychiatric problems. Millions more experience less serious but still distressing consequences.”

However, children—mostly black and Latino—who live in areas of concentrated poverty are vastly overrepresented in the incidence of trauma. The chronic and unpredictable traumas to which they are exposed are deemed “complex”, the most disabling kind. In 2015, families in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods were exposed to 2,939 shootings in Chicago, including 468 murders, several of children. In 2016, there were 3,500 shootings and 766 murders there. The shocking effects of the resulting trauma on children are reflected in neurobiological changes during formative periods of growth, psychological injury such as PTSD, socio-emotional development, academic difficulties and lives shortened by related illnesses, substance abuse or more violence. As Dr. Judith Herman wrote, “[T]he person with unrecognized post-traumatic stress disorder is condemned to a diminished life, tormented by memory and bounded by helplessness and fear.” Yet despite the clear crisis presented by so much trauma, these effects on children are often missed.

Continue reading this paper in its entirety below:

 Trapped in Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality and Law