Neighborhood Trauma Due to Violence: A Multilevel Analysis

Abstract

In Syracuse, New York the social determinants of trauma from neighborhood violence are rooted in historical processes, including urban renewal, the Rockefeller drug laws, and de-industrialization. These contributed to destabilizing Syracuse communities of color, resulting in disproportionate incarceration, family disruption, and economic devastation. Community violence, clustering in densely populated neighborhoods, creates unmanageable stress for the families who live in them. A map of gunshots and gun fatalities (2009 to 2014) illustrates the continuing onslaught of bullets being fired, often in close proximity to elementary schools. A community survey indicated that over half of respondents personally knew more than 10 murder victims. Half the respondents scored positive on the Civilian PTSD Checklist; there thus is a great deal of unaddressed traumatic stress in the community. This analysis, conducted to prepare for planning future interventions to reduce the community trauma and violence, is part of an ongoing university-community collaboration.

Blood in the Rust Belt: Mourning and Memorialization in the Context of Community Violence

“…A full discussion of the nuances and differences involved in distinguishing CARE work from each of these areas is be-yond the scope of this paper and has been discussed in other publications (Lane et al 2011(Lane et al , 2017a(Lane et al , 2017b. Nonetheless, it is worth highlighting one of these differences: the commitment that the action anthropology model makes to equality among researchers and community members, what some have described as "decolonizing" anthropological knowledge (e.g., Smith 2015).…”

“…The CARE model includes partnerships with community members, who request Syracuse University faculty assistance in addressing problems; CARE also involves students in each project, explicitly framing the project as both research and pedagogy. Our current work aims to understand and reduce the incidence of the trauma of residents living in extremely violent communities (Bergen-Cico et al 2015;Lane et al 2017a). Part of this research addresses the cultural context in which everyounger perpetrators kill their peers.…”

“…We formalized this aspect of our university-community partnership as the Syracuse Neighborhood Violence Research Collaboration. Together we have developed interventions, written grants, and published peer-reviewed articles (Bergen-Cico et al 2015;Jennings-Bey et al 2015;Keefe et al 2017;Lane et al 2017a;Larsen et al 2017). The impetus for this article on unaddressed grief, memory, and future retaliation emerged from this earlier work.…”

Exploring Contextual Trauma in Cambodia: A Sociointerpersonal Perspective on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

“…Residing in countries and communities with increased violence and instability may reiterate trauma experience through exposure to increased stressors and violence (Lane et al., ; Perlsetin & Motta, ). The communities in which people live affect availability of resources and social capital, which impact recovery from a mass traumatic experience (Hobfoll, ).…”

“…Including community levels in trauma theory addresses the nested nature of individuals within communities (Hobfoll, 2001;Kawachi, & Subramanian, 2006;Lane et al, 2017;Maercker & Horn, 2012;Zaiontz & Sarkar, 2014) and attends to the need for prevention of trauma across all levels of a system (Magruder et al, 2017). Likewise, conceptualizing trauma from an individual perspective alone does not consider cultural values of collectivistic societies and fails to take into account the overall impact the trauma can have on the larger society (Somasundaram, 2014).…”