A person who has experienced four or more traumatic events during childhood, also known as adverse childhood experiences, is seven times more likely to spend time in prison, according to Edwin Weaver, executive director of Fighting Back Santa Maria Valley.
Weaver was just one of several experts who spoke to an audience of 50 at a youth violence prevention meeting in Santa Maria on Aug. 21. The meeting was not a part of the city’s Task Force on Youth Safety, which centers on teens. Instead, the event focused on preventing long-term community violence through better care for children in their formative years: ages 0 through 5.
“It’s really hard for a 17-year-old who has seen a lot of stuff over the years to just suddenly be healthy,” Weaver told the Sun. “It’s a lot easier for them to have never experienced these things.”
The panel consisted of experts in a variety of topics, including Santa Barbara County District Attorney Joyce Dudley, who once specialized in childhood development and worked for Head Start, a program dedicated to helping families in need. Dudley said many parents face stresses that can make it seemingly impossible to raise healthy children, making availability of community services vital.
“I did more to prevent crime in four years at Head Start that I have in 27 years of prosecuting people,” Dudley said.
Stephen Walker, of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, gave an emotional presentation about his past work as a juvenile correctional officer, while the system was becoming increasingly militarized and prison-centric.
“Locking a kid in a room is not the answer,” Walker said. “If you put anything in a room in the dark, you know what’s going to happen to it. Why would a child’s soul be any different?”
Fighting Back’s statistics on the correlation between childhood trauma and adult violence came from an Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES), where more than 17,000 adults answered a questionnaire relating to trauma. Those experiences, Director Weaver told the Sun, can range anywhere from a member of the household leaving for prison, to sexual abuse.
Each year, Weaver said, Santa Barbara County Child Welfare Services receives nearly 5,000 reports of child abuse. From July 2016 to June 2017, there were more than 2,000 reports of child abuse in Santa Maria.
“Kids end up making really bad decisions when they suffer adverse childhood experiences,” he said.
Weaver said childhood and parenting education services for several families is less costly to the government than a prison term for a single person.
“If we’re serious about doing more with less, we need to start focusing on the formative years,” Weaver said.
The best way to prevent violence is to prevent childhood adverse experiences, according to Ben Romo, executive director of First 5, an organization that funds childhood development and parent education services through cigarette taxes. And Romo said the best way to prevent childhood adverse experiences is through parent education.
First 5 tells parents to talk, read, and sing to their children as often as possible. Exposure to words, Romo said, is extremely important to a child’s formative years. If a parent is illiterate, Fighting Back Santa Maria Valley provides a service that teaches parents to “read” books to children by decoding a story through images.
The Santa Maria Public Library also provides “toddler time” for children ages 3 and lower and “reading time” for kids 5 and below, according to a librarian in the audience. There, children sing, read, dance, and talk for free.
Although the meeting was separate from the city’s Task Force on Youth Safety, several Task Force members were in attendance. Romo urged leaders to consider the formative years in their conversations.
“Invest in the early years as a prevention method,” he said.
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.