In the framework of this webinar, the topic of the combined crisis was discussed, involving the crisis of community violence, the COVID-19 pandemics, and civil unrest. Regarding current pandemics, it is essential to implement various intervention strategies in safety, calming, self-efficiency, connectedness, and hope. The psychological state of humans all over the world has changed due to deviations in social life and people’s communication specialties during COVID-19. By providing people with care and help, nurses can connect with humans and help them involve in public decision-making easier. During COVID-19, the number of family violence has also risen. The key concepts of mass violence and community violence involve a dose of exposure, secondary adversities, the interplay of trauma and grief, critical loss of trauma and loss reminders, and prior trauma and loss experience. Social media can impact the state of those experiencing violence, allowing the victims to watch materials from the incident several times and gather in online groups that might remind them about the victimization from a long-term perspective. It is possible to help victims to navigate social media in order to minimize the negative effects on their condition.
There are several organizations that help fight the trauma among various groups of communities occurring after violent incidents. One of them was represented in a webinar, Urban Youth’s Trauma Center, which has a model that helps solve the issue. According to their model, it is essential to accumulate attentiveness to the problem, promote the usage of best actions regarding violence anticipation, promote individual-level involvement and awareness, and support interrelations and partnerships to target community violence.
Webinar also illuminated the common denominators of developmental trauma, which were hypervigilance, reactive aggression, and hopelessness masked as indifference. The tolls of the condition can be various behavior models, including school absence, suspension, disengagement, retention, drop-out, depression, and many others. Developmental trauma disorder has various criteria: victimization and attachment trauma, emotional and bodily dysregulation, cognitive and behavioral dysregulation, and self and relational dysregulation.
To prevent and reduce youth violence perpetration, the Park Forest Police Department developed a multi-tiered violence prevention approach, including policy change, department-wide training, screening and referral, violence prevention programming, and tactic. The data reports positive outcomes after the implementation of the program: in 2015, one million arrests were made of individuals under 18, and since 2016, juvenile arrests have decreased by 80%. To tackle youth disorders and violence in the community, it is essential for police to cooperate with other partners such as school staff and mental health workers to deliver suitable trauma-sensitive interferences as soon as possible. Youth service providers created a community-wide action plan that represents a summary of common themes, strengths, and challenges within the community and the implementation of best practices for violence prevention. Police also work with awareness increase about the causes of the issue in order to prevent the numbers of violence and trauma.
The webinar provided useful knowledge about the institutional responses to combined crises persisting nowadays due to various reasons. It is essential to study the basis of the crisis to understand the ways of developing strategies to enhance the problem. Mental health providers are professionals that contribute the most to helping people deal with traumas; however, they need help from other authorities to develop a complex approach to these patients. Involving police, school staff, and the community can reach better outcomes and decrease arrests regarding victimization issues.