β Scribed by Alicia F. Lieberman
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The impact of our society's escalating violence on children's emotional development and mental health has only recently become the focus of attention, and Joy Osofsky plays a pivotal role in spearheading this new awareness. She has now edited a book that should become a wellthumbed reference source for many different audiences because it explores this phenomenon in depth and from a variety of perspectives. Each chapter contains important information, but the book as a whole offers much more than the sum of its parts -a goal aspired to but only occasionally achieved by edited volumes. The 16 carefully selected chapters complement and add to each other in portraying the truly frightening dimensions of the problem at the epidemiological and societal levels, and tracing its ramifications for the individual development not only of the adolescents who are only too often the central players in this national tragedy, but for babies, toddlers and young children as well. After reading it, one is left chagrined by the facts and feeling the need for engagement in sustained and focused action to change those facts.
The book is divided in two sections, with Part I presenting the scope of the problem and Part II describing prevention and intervention programs for children and families exposed to violence. Space constraints prevent a review of each chapter, and in any case it is better to read them in their entirety to truly appreciate their message. The first chapter presents us with the shattering personal impact of societal violence as Joy Osofsky reminds us that violence is never anonymous: there is always a victim who, along with family, friends and acquaintances, continues to suffer its consequences long after it is no longer public news. And there is also a perpetrator, increasingly often also a child, whose life and the lives of those close to him are also scarred, in different but equally permanent ways, by the violence committed and the consequences it brings. Yet, as Osofsky points out, societal response to violence is relying increasingly on harsher punishment for juveniles rather than on prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation.
James Garbarino and Kathleen Kostelny (Chapter 3) compare the rates of American children exposed to or victimized by violence to those of children growing up in war zones around the world. They point out that risk accumulates, leading to an escalation of developmental damage for children who endure not one or two risk factors, such as poverty and inadequate housing, but three, four, five or six additional risk factors such as dysfunctional schools, fractured families, community violence, domestic violence, and prevalence of drug abuse -a social profile that is not unusual in our poorer neighborhoods. In these circumstances, despair begets violence, violence begets more violence, and children are the most chronic victims.
The central role of firearms -particularly the ubiquitous handgun -as the agent of the
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