Source: Daily Montanan
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On December 18, 2024 the Montana Supreme Court ruled in favor of plaintiffs in the case of Held v Montana that they have a constitutional right to challenge man-made climate change, and the state must change how it evaluates projects for environmental impact.
 
Who Did This?
The plaintiffs were a group of sixteen children, ranging from two to eighteen years when the case was filed in 2020. Oregon-based law firm Our Children’s Trust brought the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs. The firm specializes in using groups of children as plaintiffs and filing in liberal courts to establish a new right for a healthy environment. They have active cases in Alaska, Florida, Hawai‘i, Utah, and Virginia.
 
The Premise
The case was filed in 2020 alleging that actions by the state of Montana exacerbated the harms that the sixteen children were feeling from man-made climate change. They sought two main things: (1) a declaration that they have legal standing to use a constitutional right to use man-made climate change as grounds for lawsuits, and (2) removal of a state law that was blocking analyses of climate impact on all new projects which require state approval.
In 2023, a district court ruled in their favor on all points. The State appealed to the Montana Supreme court. In December 2024, the Supreme Court’s decision, on a 6-1 vote, agreed with the district court.
 
The decision was based on the Montana state constitution, which was created in 1972 with a right to a “clean and healthful environment,” which is not part of the inalienable rights in the U.S. Constitution. The court ruled that climate is a domain of environment, and that man-made impact on the climate through carbon dioxide emissions was scientifically indisputable.
 
Analysis
A crucial aspect of determining legal standing to sue is that alleged wrongs must cause injuries to individuals. The court made an unusual ruling in this case that physical or mental injury did not need to be proven. Instead, any state law that impinges on the capacity to assess man-made climate effects is sufficiently harmful to their constitutional right.
 
The lone dissenting justice expressed alarm about this ruling. Because no physical or mental harm is needed to have standing to sue, the Court overstepped: This opens the door for citizens to challenge statutes by mere assertions that the State failed to protect citizens against harm.

The complete lack of equipoise about a complex scientific issue was disturbing. Despite the consensus in the academic and media liberal hegemony that man-made climate change is an existential crisis, many experts have thoroughly debunked that argument, but received little press [1,2].
 
What does this have to do with trauma?
This ruling by an activist court sets a precedent for citizens to sue based upon a mere assertion that a State actor failed to protect citizens. Trauma activists have worked persistently over the past two decades to install an intellectual framework of Fragilism about human nature with a plethora of alleged societal traumatic oppressions that cause permanent neurobiological harm. Based on the Montana precedent, we can easily imagine lawsuits against governments for failing to prevent trauma, regardless if evidence shows true harm. A climate-based trauma argument has already been extensively promulgated, for example, by Harvard’s activist Center for the Developing Child (see here) and in the form of so-called eco-anxiety by many scholars (see here).
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] Wrightstone G (2017). Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know. Silver Crown Productions, LLC: USA
[2] Koonin S (2021). Unsettled?: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. BenBella Books: Dallas, TX.

Source: The Tennessean
Read time: 1.8 minutes
 
This Happened
A juvenile court judge and three associates from an architectural firm penned an editorial outlining their vision to provide services to juvenile criminals instead of incarceration. This includes plans to redesign the interiors of juvenile court buildings to replace the “damning architecture of yesterday.”
 
Who Did This?
Judge Sheila Calloway was elected Juvenile Court Judge in 2014 servicing Nashville and Davidson County. In her bio, she prides herself on challenging traditional perspectives in the legal system. She gave a TED Talk in 2017 advocating for restorative justice where criminals are viewed as victims of life experiences who just made some bad decisions.
Todd Orr, Alexandra Serralles, and Karla Iannicelli are employees of DLR architecture firm. DLR is a large firm with 33 offices, specializes in government buildings, and champions the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement. The DLR site includes posts such as “How Design Can Decarcerate the U.S.”
 
The Premise
The editorial outlined their plans to redesign three buildings in the juvenile justice campus to help heal the wounds of adolescents who committed serious offenses based on the premise that “we don’t believe that young people are hardened, irredeemable criminals but are vulnerable individuals deserving of support and rehabilitation.”
The Family Services building, where parents learn how to care for their children, is modeled after a living room and kitchen, instead of brick boxes, so that individuals do not feel isolated from the community. The Respite and Assessment Center will provide therapy, social services, and shelter for homeless youth instead of jail. The “pre-trial housing” will resemble college dorms rather than “cement, steel, and barbed wire” of jails.
The editorial claimed that juveniles committed crimes in part because they were victims of trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and it is scientific fact that trauma damages child development. They intend to break the “abuse-to-prison pipeline” be providing “services instead of incarceration.”
 
Analysis
The terms of progressive agendas are typically couched in humanitarian compassion—extraordinary promises of a better world where everyone is equal in capacities. They can also act as a balm of moral self-inflation, capable of convincing individuals that the evidence is what they assert, not what is proven.
​
Despite the chorus of advocates for the toxic stress and ACEs agenda who claim the science is settled that trauma damages the brain and derails child development, it is not proven. In fact, the evidence far more often has disproven it (see here and here).
The restorative justice agenda emerged as an alternative to traditional retributive justice in the 1970s. But after studies trickled in, a report in 2019 summarized the consistent lack of positive results.
It is not surprising that these agendas merged within a relatively new offshoot of trauma-informed architecture. There are neither negative nor positive studies of trauma-informed architecture.
 
Interior design change may seem like a trivial concern. The importance of it, however, is a constant symbolism of an intellectual framework driven by a misguided understanding of criminal behavior and human nature.
 
 
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Source: Fox SA news
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
A specialty court in the San Antonio, Texas metropolitan area that deals with domestic violence recently received certification as an agency trained in trauma-informed care
 
Who Did This?
This specialty court is the brainchild of Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez who was elected to the bench in 2018 and then spearheaded the creation of this specialty court to use a more therapeutic approach to justice. A registered Democrat, she is openly gay and advocates for LGBTQ issues [1]. The judge is married to psychologist Stacy Speedlin Gonzalez who helped advocate for the specialty court.
In 2020, the judge was sanctioned by the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct and ordered to remove a pride flag and other pride paraphernalia from her courtroom after a local defense lawyer filed a complaint. The judge claimed this was a personal attack because she believed the defense lawyer was homophobic and xenophobic [2]. The defense lawyer, however, Flavio Hernandez, appears to be Hispanic, as is Speedlin Gonzalez. The judge appealed the order and won four years later. She did not return the flag to court because she didn’t want to deal with more potential grievances [3].
In 2022, Transportation Security Administration agents found a handgun in the judge’s carry-on bag as she tried to board a plane. The gun had a loaded magazine inserted in it and a bullet chambered [4]. She paid a $2,475 fine 9 [5].
 
The certification comes from The Ecumenical  Center, based in San Antonio. The center provides counseling, workshops, and other community services.
 
The Premise
Judge Speedlin Gonzalez’s specialty court was created in 2020 to work with first-time domestic violence offenders who also struggle with substance abuse. It takes a public health approach to develop treatment plans for perpetrators to access community services. The judge meets with perpetrators every other week to make sure they are following their treatment plans [6]. Once those first-time offenders complete the one-year requirement, their case is dismissed and expunged, giving them what the judge says is a true second chance. 
 
Analysis
Other courts in the world have adopted trauma-informed frameworks but were not awarded a certification. The certification has no formal standing with judicial practice or government agencies. It is a product created by the South Texas Trauma Informed Care Consortium, which is a group formed in 2018 in partnership with the City of San Antonio Metro Health department and a local health center. The Ecumenical Center serves as the certifying entity for the Consortium.
 
Details were not provided, but if it was like other trauma-informed trainings it would have included few actionable practices to implement. Trauma-informed training is more about the installation of an intellectual framework to indoctrinate participants to believe that life-threatening trauma impacts health, emotions, behaviors, character traits, and relationships. Victims of trauma thereby need to be treated as fragile and require special handling to avoid being retriggered and further damaged. It was not clear how the trauma-informed certification would alter court practices.
 
Consistent with this framework, Speedlin Gonzalez does not consider the perpetrators in her court to be criminals. Instead, they are victims of trauma. “We get them sober, we treat the trauma, we give them skills so that they don’t come back into the criminal justice system and do not reoffend and that opens bed at the jail for true criminals not traumatized people that have mental health issues,” said Speedlin Gonzalez.
 
The executive director of the Ecumenical Center, which provided the certification, claimed the trauma-informed care approach has been proven to work. There are, however, little to no research data showing that employees who are forced to take trauma-informed training have knowledge deficits that necessitate the training. Rather, supporters of trauma-informed care assert that such training is an implied good that can’t be anything but helpful. Research studies have shown that participants in trauma-informed trainings often perceive themselves to be better informed and more competent, but there is zero evidence that trainings improve outcomes of any type of agency work.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Trauma-informed care is part of the spectrum of neo-Marxist, postmodern ideologies that assert humans are highly malleable from oppressive forces in society. Programs have been springing up frequently in the past ten years in schools, medicine, addiction, and nonprofit charities that focus on social justice. The ideology also finds traction with judges with utopian visions for rehabilitating criminals.
 
It’s unusual to see faith-based organizations promoting the trauma-informed movement, probably because of the underlying radical premise of the trauma-informed movement that there is no inherent fixed human nature and all aspects of humans are highly malleable from environment. Perhaps the Ecumenical Center is involved because, in the ecumenical mission of trying to bring together disparate Christian denominations, the Center believes the trauma-informed ideology shares a utopian vision of a better world.
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] Trellis. Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez: Professional background and legal expertise. Accessed 6/8/2024. https://trellis.law/judge/rosie.speedlin.gonzalez
[2] Elizabeth Kuhr, NBC News (4/21/2020). Texas judge says she was forced to remove pride flag from courtoom. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/texas-judge-says-she-was-forced-remove-pride-flag-courtroom-n1188891
[3] The Whitley Law Firm (3/1/2023). Bexar County judge wins appeal on displaying rainbow flag in courtroom. Accessed 6/8/2024.
[4] Dillon Collier, KSAT.com (9/27/2022). ‘Oversight on my part’: Judge Speedlin Gonzalez found with loaded gun at San Antonio International Airport. Accessed 6/8/2024. https://www.ksat.com/news/ksat-investigates/2022/09/27/oversight-on-my-part-judge-speedlin-gonzalez-found-with-loaded-gun-at-san-antonio-international-airport/
[5] Dillon Collier, KSAT.com (10/14/2022). Judge Speedlin Gonzalez pays $2,475 fine for loaded gun incident at San Antonio International Airport. Accessed 6/8/2024. https://www.ksat.com/news/ksat-investigates/2022/10/14/judge-speedlin-gonzalez-pays-2475-fine-for-loaded-gun-incident-at-san-antonio-international-airport/
[6] The Bexar County Specialty Courts Coalition Resource Guide 2021. Accessed 6/8/2024). https://www.bexar.org/DocumentCenter/View/23613/BCSC-Coalition-Resource-Guide-PDF?bidId=
 
 
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Source: Local 3 News 
Read time: 1.8 minutes
 
This Happened
A two-day training was provided April 18 and 19, 2024, in Cleveland, TN, open to the public, on Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI). The model is designed to coach parents and children on how to address problems believed to arise from negative attachment experiences in early childhood.
 
Who Did This?
The Bradley County Juvenile Court in Tennessee helped sponsor the event. Training was led by staff from OrphanWise, a local nonprofit organization. OrphanWise was founded in 2019 by Katie Rinaudo in Cleveland, TN, to disseminate the TBRI model. To expand work beyond orphans and adopted children, the organization rebranded in 2020 with a name change to CareEquip by OrphanWise.
Trainers are not clinical providers. The four OrphanWise trainers in TBRI have a variety of backgrounds. Rinaudo and another staff have master’s degrees in holistic child development, one staff has a bachelor’s degree in public relations, and one staff has a master’s in international development.
 
The Premise
Trust-Based Relational Intervention® (TBRI) was developed by psychologists Karyn Purvis (deceased in 2016) and David Cross (retired) at Texas Christian University in 2000. The Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development at TCU remains a training headquarters for TBRI.
TBRI teaches that the emotional and behavioral problems seen in many orphans and adopted children stem from psychological stress of no or limited attachment connections which permanently damages brains. TBRI attempts to reverse that damage by coaching caregivers to provide love, trust, and model attachment behaviors. The treatment principles of TBRI aim to impose emotional regulation on children through caregiver actions that include: (1) make children feel safe with smooth and predictable transitions during the day, (2) address sensory processing deficits for touch and food textures, (3) address excessive sensitivity to hunger cues with nutritional snacks and water every two hours, (4) improve sleep hygiene, (5) regular physical activity, (6) encourage touch and eye contact, and (7) practice attunement between children and caregivers [1].
The Purvis Institute’s mission is to expand the use of TBRI into “juvenile justice, child welfare (congregate care, foster care), medical, legal, law enforcement, education, mental health, advocacy, and beyond” [2].
 
Analysis
As Trauma Dispatch has reported, many types of trauma-informed trainings are held around the Western world, and especially in the United States, all with the grand ambition to embed the unproven and discredited narrative that stress and trauma damage the brain. TBRI is unique for its primary focus on attachment disturbances.
The founders of TBRI repeatedly call it an evidence-based intervention, yet it meets none of the traditional criteria for being evidence-based because it has never been studied with a control group.
It’s not clear how TBRI interventions can be implemented in juvenile justice as there are no known studies in that setting.
It's also not clear how a model that was developed for working with children who had been infants in orphanages can translate to working with adolescent criminals. The notion that some or most criminals just need love and trust that they never received in childhood has been a hypothesis of humanitarian reformers for decades, but that belief has never survived tests in the real world. Criminals tend to lack empathy and remorse for their actions, and no therapeutic intervention has succeeded in creating those outcomes de novo.
 
The main reason for holding a training in Bradley County appears to be that OrphanWise is based in Cleveland, which is the largest city in Bradley County. The county is home to only 110,000 people and the rate of violent crime is lower than the national average [3].
 
 REFERENCES
[1] Karyn B. Purvis, David R. Cross, Donald F. Dansereau, Sheri R. Parris (2013). Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI): A Systemic Approach to Complex Developmental Trauma, Child & Youth Services, 34:360–386, 2013, DOI: 10.1080/0145935X.2013.859906
[2] Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development. Texas Christian Univesity, https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/tbri/. Accessed 5/14/24.
[3] Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime Data Explorer. https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend. Accessed 5/17/24.

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Source: New York Post
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
Update July 16, 2024: Sen. Menendez was found guilty of all 16 counts.

This Happened
On May 3, 2024, multiple news outlets reported that attorneys for Sen. Bob Menendez wished to argue that the senator is afflicted with “intergenerational trauma” which created a mental condition that causes him to stockpile his valuables at home. Menendez is scheduled to go to trial next week on charges that he accepted bribes in the form of cash and gifts in exchange for his political influence.
Who Did This?
Bob Menendez is serving his third term as a senator from New Jersey. He was charged in 2023 with accepting bribes in exchange for his political influence. He had been charged on a different bribery matter in 2015 but a jury could not reach a verdict. He is the first sitting senator to be charged on two unrelated criminal matters.
The attorneys for Menendez wrote a letter to the judge as part of their legal strategy to present evidence of his intergenerational trauma. The strategy became known only because the letter was made public by government prosecutors. 
Karen Rosenbaum, M.D. was named as the expert who would testify to the claims. Rosenbaum, who has a private practice in Manhattan, completed a forensic psychiatry fellowship, and has testified in other cases. She lists on her personal website that she holds a Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery Certification from Harvard University. On Rosenbaum’s personal blog site, she has authored posts favorable to Black Lives Matter and the concept of structural racism in America.

Prosecutors stated that if the judge allows this strategy, they must be allowed to have their own psychiatrist evaluate Menendez.​
The Claim
When investigators searched Menendez’s home in June 2022, they found $480,000 in cash—much of it stashed in clothing and closets—and 13 gold bars. The claim of intergenerational trauma appears to be a legal strategy to provide an innocent explanation of the stashed valuables.
The letter to the judge reportedly stated that Dr. Rosenbaum would explain that intergenerational trauma was caused by his parents being immigrants from Cuba; their funds were taken by the Cuban government and they were left with little cash that they had stashed in their home. Since Menendez was born in New York City, it’s not clear if Menendez observed his parents stash cash in their home while growing up in America or if he learned of it from stories about Cuba.
In addition, his behavior of stashing valuables was a coping mechanism that developed after his father, a compulsive gambler, committed suicide after Menendez stopped paying his father's gambling debts. It was not reported when his father died.
Despite these mental health problems, the letter stated that Menendez never received treatment.
 
Analysis
Intergenerational trauma is neither an accepted diagnosis nor a validated type of trauma. The theory of intergenerational transmission of trauma, however, is immensely popular despite being controversial and unproven. The theories of how transmission occurs are fuzzy but tend to be of two main types. One type posits that thoughts and behaviors pass from one unconscious mind (the parent) to another unconscious mind (the child) by repetition. Children observe or somehow intuit parental psychodynamics. The mechanism of how that happens, whether it be psychodynamic or physiological in nature, is unproven.
A second type is a physiobiological mechanism that involves epigenetics. As parents engage in maladaptive behaviors (e.g., stashing cash) with concurrent psychological stress, abnormal methylation of their DNA occurs, causing changes in gene expression. These methylations somehow get physically transmitted to children. This is highly controversial, and seems impossible, because only chromosomes, not transitory methylations, are passed from parent to child in sexual reproduction.
Despite the mysterious and missing details about intergenerational transmission of trauma, or probably because of them, the theory has often been used to explain many perceived social injustices for advocacy movements.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Blaming criminal behavior on trauma historically has been a frequent tactic for defendants in desperate legal situations. Intergenerational transmission of trauma is a relatively new twist on that tactic.
 
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Source: The Guardian
Read time: 2.7 minutes
 
This Happened
A commissioner with statutory oversight of government treatment of Australian children published an opinion piece on January 21, 2024 hinting that crime is caused by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
 
Who Did This?
Natalia Lewis has been the appointed Commissioner of the Queensland Family and Child Commission since 2020. Her Commission, and other regional commissions, are charged with oversight of government treatment of children, including child protection services and justice. Like other woke progressives, she is known to list her pronouns and begin a presentation with a land acknowledgment.
 
The Claim
For the juvenile justice system to be effective, we must recognize the rights of incarcerated youth, or as she calls them “young people in conflict with the law.” This includes believing that ACEs have a causal impact on criminal behavior.
 
Analysis
Lewis demanded changes for the handling of incarcerated youth because the recidivism rate is 90% in Queensland. One part of her wide-ranging solution was to presume that children commit crimes because they are disadvantaged, which includes health problems, undiagnosed or inadequately supported disabilities, and experiencing ACEs. We must, therefore, provide them with “restitution, healing and rehabilitation.”
 
The central premise of the ACE theory is that psychological stress damages the brain, alters anatomical brain structures, and permanently disrupts hardwired neurocircuitry to cause a vast array of physical diseases and mental dysfunctions, including criminal acts. The research evidence, however, does not support this conclusion. Since Dr. Vincent Felitti’s initial 1998 ACE study, one hundred percent of the ACE studies that have been cited by activists are cross-sectional studies, which have zero power to make causal conclusions.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Her opinion was written to seize on a current controversy in Queensland (one of six Australian states with the population size of South Carolina) where juveniles are held in cells designed for adults, called watch houses, at police stations. Lewis seems to have viewed this as a crisis opportunity to promote broader ideological reforms.
 
What’s Next?
Lewis, like thousands of others who have promoted the ACE theory before, did not provide details on how to prevent and/or remediate the impacts of ACEs. A common denominator to all of them, however, is to expand the role of government with taxpayer-funded entitlement programs for interventions with no evidence base. If this philosophy is followed, it seems unlikely that the Commission will facilitate approaches that might truly be helpful to this population.

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