Are you eligible for trauma-informed care? Are you a trauma-informed scholar? These new identities entered our culture in record time.

The takeover in academia happened so quickly, it could be called “the short march through the institutions.”

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Social worker Jill Levenson, MSW, PhD

Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
The trauma-informed concept has spread like a virus through academia. Having been invented as a term since only 2001, the number of papers with "trauma-informed” in the title or abstract is over 130,000.
 
Who Did This?
A subset of scholars in academia, numbering in the thousands, made this happen, most of them sporting a range of Leftist progressive and neo-Marxist beliefs. An illustrative example is one of the most frequent writers on the topic: Jill Levenson is a social work professor at Barry University who conducts workshops all over the world as a “SAMHSA-certified” trauma-informed care instructor. She has published at least nine papers on trauma-informed care since 2014, explaining how it can be incorporated into work with sex offenders, family members of sex offenders, correctional systems, LGBTQ+ clients, and general social work practice. She also promotes the extraordinary idea that Adverse Childhood Experiences can cause individuals to become sex offenders, and gently refers to pedophilic sex offenders as “minor-attracted persons.”
 
The Premise
In 2001, the concept of trauma-informed services sprang into being absent an empirical base or pedagogical lineage (see here on its birthing and here on its moral basis). The call was for all social service agencies to revolutionize their practices so that trauma victims would not feel frightened to use their services. All staff must upgrade their consciousness towards the permanent Leftist agenda of transforming humans through sensitivity training. All consumers must be considered potential trauma victims who are a unique class of emotionally disabled individuals and who require special treatment no matter how such treatment violates common sense or other people’s rights.

​The adjacent figure shows the distribution of the top ten fields for publishing trauma-informed articles, showing the breadth of how widely the concept has been adopted.

There also has been an incredible 13,233 dissertations written by PhD students who will become the next generation of academia. 

​Analysis
Despite the explosion of writings on the topic, the evidence remains incredibly thin. A 2023 literature review of trauma-informed practices in primary care and community mental health care setting found only six non-randomized studies. They reported the “Evidence for intervention effects was limited and conflicting” [1].

A 2024 literature review using different search criteria located six randomized studies but none of them bothered to measure change in how clients use services [2].
A 2025 review of trauma-informed practices in substance abuse settings was forced to conclude, “However, most of the studies were qualitative and quantitative descriptive meaning drawing causal inferences is difficult” [3].

It seems evident that the thrust of this explosion of writings has not been to gather evidence, it has been to install a new concept by sheer force of repetition.

Why Did This Happen?

“Cultures fight wars with one another.
They must do so because values can only be
asserted or posited by overcoming others,
​not by reasoning with them.”
​(Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind)

What is really new about the trauma-informed movement is that being a consumer deserving of trauma-informed care represents a value judgement in creating a new identity that never appeared in American culture before 2001. It joins a lengthy list of other aggrieved factions that relatively recently posited new identities based on sex, race, ethnicity, and other oppressed status claims.
Being a bone-fide trauma-informed scholar or trainer is yet another new identity.
These are part of identity politics, which gains its currency by identifying oppressed groups that demand redress from society. The process usually goes by woke, critical race theory, or anti-racism. While driven mostly by the radical Left, these have become the dominant positions of the Democratic party.
The rise of identity politics is one of the main factors cited by many critics as the source of destroying American civility, if not American democracy. With new identities, comes new rights and new powers. It is a new kind of power, different in kind from most traditional politics in that there is no common ground.
 
References
[1] Lewis NV, Bierce A, Feder GS, Macleod J, Turner KM, Zammit S, Dawson S (2023). Trauma-Informed Approaches in Primary Healthcare and Community Mental Healthcare: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review of Organisational Change Interventions. Health and Social Care in the Community, Volume 2023, Article ID 4475114, 18 pages. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2023/4475114
[2] Chin B, Amin Q, Hernandez N, Wright DD, Awan MU, Plumley D, Zito T, Elkbuli A (2024). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Trauma-Informed Care Frameworks in Provider Education and the Care of Traumatized Patients. J Surg Res. 2024 Apr;296:621-635.  doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2024.01.042.
[3] Mahon, D (2025). A Systematic Review of Trauma Informed Care in Substance Use Settings. Community Ment Health J 61, 734–753. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-024-01395-z