Reclaiming Childhood: A Call to Action

As we reported earlier in April, James Bell, founding Executive Director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute presented at the Portland State University School of Social Work’s annual Charles Shireman Memorial Lecture on April 17, 2014.
His presentation, “Reclaiming Childhood,” was a call to action for communities to begin looking at child well-being as the preferred child safety strategy. Mr. Bell urged the audience to remember that the ills of humanity are best healed by more humanity. Additional key points made by Mr. Bell include:
Moving Beyond Trauma Informed
There is a need for systems to move beyond trauma informed and become trauma responsive. Many service providers are trauma informed, but becoming trauma responsive would help improve safety, trust and collaboration.
Shifting Service Paradigms
When the risk to public safety is low, a youth’s need for services should not lead to their secure confinement. Focus instead on child wellbeing as a child safety strategy means assessing life outcomes as the measure of success. One strategy to move toward this paradigm shift would be for the juvenile justice system to refuse to accept referrals from schools and/or mental health providers and hold those systems accountable for finding appropriate responses for youth with a low risk to public safety, but a high need for services.
A big thank you to Mr. Bell for all of his great work in juvenile justice reform.

Susan Richardson is national executive director for Reclaiming Futures. Formerly, she was a senior program officer in the health care division of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust in North Carolina, where she led a three-year effort involving the state's juvenile justice and treatment leaders to adopt the Reclaiming Futures model by juvenile courts in six North Carolina counties. She received her B.S. in Public Health, Health Policy and Administration, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.