Source: Montclair State press release
Read time: 1.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In October 2025, the New Jersey Office of Resilience in partnership with Montclair State University announced the third cohort for its online training course for professionals in education, law enforcement, social services, and mental health.
Who Did This?
The New Jersey Office of Resilience promotes training in “trauma responsiveness” tools, firmly positioning trauma-informed practices as a policy solution. The office was created in 2020 by administrative decree minus a sufficient funding stream. The founding director, Dave Ellis, was salaried by several non-profits but for only two years. Legislators now appear to be scrambling to create the office in law; a 2024 bill failed to get to a floor vote.
The Premise
The 10-week online course is titled From Trauma to Healing: Healing-Centered Approaches to Trauma in Families and Communities. The premise is straightforward: childhood adversity causes lasting harm; trauma is widespread; and professionals across multiple sectors need formal training to identify and respond to it. Trauma, as defined loosely by the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) framework, is the primary explanatory mechanism for a seemingly unlimited number of behavioral, health, and social outcomes. By infusing “healing-centered” frameworks into the job descriptions of professionals at social service agencies, the state asserts it can address social inequities.
Analysis
While ACEs research is frequently described as settled science, that confidence is not warranted. As it has been repeatedly documented in Trauma Dispatch posts, the foundational ACE studies are correlational and cross-sectional, meaning they cannot establish that childhood adversity causes later outcomes.

​Why This Is Happening
This project fits squarely within New Jersey’s progressive policy ecosystem. Nearly all the trauma-as-oppressor government projects have happened in reliably blue states, where trauma frameworks have become a powerful narrative tool: they offer a morally compelling explanation for inequality while justifying expanded government programs, professional mandates, and public spending--always without voter approval or outcome accountability (see California, Hawaii, and Illinois).
By elevating trauma from a clinical concept to a universal explanatory lens, policymakers can recast social disparities as technocratic problems requiring expert-led intervention. The Montclair partnership reflects this trend: trauma language leveraged to normalize an expanding governance model grounded more in ideology than in disciplined empirical science.

Source: Senate Democratic Caucus website
Read time: 1.5 minutes

This Happened
In July 2025, the governor’s office of Illinois unveiled a “trauma tracking tool” mandated by a new law.
The Premise
The state-wide tool was mandated by legislation passed two years earlier [bill HB 342]. Officially titled the Children’s Adversity Index, the tool is framed as a data-driven way to help schools and policymakers identify and respond to childhood trauma. In practice, it does something very different.
The Index aggregates 14 variables across three categories: community risks, unmet needs, and economic challenges. These include overdose deaths, juvenile delinquency, food insecurity, vacant housing, incarceration rates, unemployment, and median household income [see here]. The index (see below) is intended to guide schools, districts, and state agencies in identifying warning signs of mental illness, trauma, and suicide risk.

Analysis
But here is the problem: district-level socioeconomic data cannot diagnose or even meaningfully identify trauma in individual children. Nowhere in the bill or accompanying public statements is there an explanation for how community statistics are supposed to translate into actionable insight about a specific student’s mental health.
Despite the bill invoking the words “trauma” or “traumatic” nearly 70 times, only one of the 14 tracked variables—child abuse and neglect investigations—clearly represents trauma exposure. Two others, deaths among people under 20 and overdose deaths, might involve trauma depending on context and proximity. The remaining variables are standard measures of poverty, inequality, and social disadvantage. Calling this a trauma index is therefore a category error.
Who Did This?
The bill authorizing the index was filed in 2023 by Illinois House Speaker Emmanuel “Chris” Welch (D) and sponsored in the Senate by Kimberly Lightford (D), both prominent Black figures in the state’s progressive political leadership. Welch’s legislative priorities have included making Illinois a “Welcoming State” for immigrants, passing a Homeless Bill of Rights, and requiring corporations to publicly disclose the racial composition of their boards. His public career has also included several allegations of mistreatment of women [1,2], which—while ostensibly separate—underscore the possibility of psychologically-disturbed individuals whose personal weaknesses are projected as universal theories for causal explanations of human behavior at large.
Why Is This Happening?
The answer is likely not clinical but political. The index does not meaningfully help schools treat traumatized children, but it does create a permanent bureaucratic framework for ranking communities by “adversity.” Once such an index exists, it inevitably becomes a lever—converted from a continuous score into categories used to justify funding decisions, new mandates, trainings, and programs.
This is a familiar pattern in contemporary progressive governance. Language is moralized, technical tools are rhetorically oversold, and social problems are reframed as systemic trauma requiring administrative expansion. The result is more infrastructure, more consultants, more workshops, and more redistribution—without evidence that any of it improves outcomes for the children supposedly being helped.
Illinois didn’t build a trauma tracker. It built an inequality index and gave it a therapeutic name.
 
 
References
[1] Bruce Rushton (2021 1 15) There was no arrest, Speaker Welch claims. Attorney general says otherwise. Illinois Times
[2] Patrick Pfingsten (2021 1 15) Allegations Against Women Continue to Haunt New Speaker. The IlliNoize.

Source: Aces Aware Learning Center
Read time: 1.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In July 2025, California’s ACEs Aware campaign proudly announced that its online training for health professionals would remain available—an enduring centerpiece of the state’s grandiose effort to decrease adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Curious about how they believe an extraordinary social transformation could be engineered through a 10-item paper survey during routine health care appointments, I took the course.
The Only State Doing This
California remains the only state attempting a statewide system in which children are universally screened for ACEs during primary-care visits. The initiative launched in 2020 under the state’s inaugural Surgeon General, pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris, M.D., who served from 2019 to 2022.
The Premise, in Their Own Words
The training opens with 11-minutes showcasing Burke Harris delivering the standard points of the ACE narrative:

• ACEs supposedly cause a sweeping list of lethal diseases.
• The initiative is framed as a crisis in need of action because it promotes “health equity.”
• The goal is to cut ACEs in half in one generation.
• All guidelines are allegedly based in the “science.”
• ACEs are described as the “21st-century version of infectious diseases.”

From there, the training requires one to read five short clinical vignettes—with required test questions—intended to demonstrate how ACEs shape health across the lifespan. The lessons were familiar: a boy’s asthma worsens; a woman is anxious about a medical procedure; a nurse becomes destabilized by the rollout of ACE screening itself; all because their fragile psyches were triggered by memories of past childhood stress. One quiz question directly asserts that trauma “alters the structure and function of the developing limbic system” and causes neuronal loss in the prefrontal cortex.
The Basic Premise Is Implausible.
The entire ACE framework assumes that handing caregivers a screen in a doctor’s office—and maybe giving a few minutes of advice about community resources—can meaningfully prevent the underlying adversities themselves—something a century of social programs has failed to achieve. This is utopian delusions on steroids. If enormous societal problems such as abuse, addiction, mental illness, and domestic violence could be prevented through brief questionnaires, we would have solved them decades ago. But there is a deeper problem.
Correlation Is Not Causation—But ACE Science Pretends It Is
The foundational ACE studies are cross-sectional. They measure adversity from the past and health conditions in the present. Such studies have zero ability to determine what caused what. Yet ACE advocates insist they know causality.
A far more plausible explanation is that the same family environments where ACEs are more common are also environments where poorer physical and mental health are more common—for complex genetic, behavioral, and socioeconomic reasons that cluster within families. In other words, ACEs and health problems co-occur, but one does not necessarily cause the other. The ACE framework largely ignores basic facts of genetics and heritable traits.
Skipping the Science
The ACE movement sounds noble. But a closer look reveals a fabrication built on weak science, untested assumptions, an unwavering belief that correlation equals causation, and a public health experiment that uses children as guinea pigs.

Source: Somerset Council
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In July 2025, government officials in Somerset—a mostly rural district in the southwest of England—announced a bold initiative: five public schools will become the first “trauma-informed” schools in the county. Branded the Pathfinder Programme, these schools are meant to serve as the tip of the spear for a broader transformation. The council envisions them as demonstration hubs, showing other schools how to adopt trauma-informed practices and model “relational policy” in modern educational settings.
Who Did This?
Somerset is governed by a 110-member council, controlled since 2022 by Liberal Democrats. That political context matters. Trauma-informed schooling fits comfortably within a broader vision of liberal compassionate governance.
The Premise
The council’s public messaging describes the program in glowing terms. The chosen cohort includes four primary schools and one secondary school. Each will implement new practices meant to help children better identify, communicate, and regulate emotions. A July 16, 2025 post on the “Trauma-Informed Somerset” website explains that the new effort will position Somerset as a local leader in trauma-responsive education.
If you know nothing about the history of trauma-informed care, the language can sound wholesome, maternal even—like a warm blanket of institutional empathy. But a closer look reveals a philosophy of education that reaches far beyond helping children in crisis.
The Assumptions Behind It
To understand what Somerset is doing, it’s important to understand the underlying intellectual framework.

Schools have been a particularly fertile ground for this shift. Trauma-informed school training often encourages teachers to interpret misbehavior as symptoms of unhealed psychological wounds. Many programs adopt an unbending relational approach that prioritizes emotional safety, compassionate engagement, and the minimization of traditional discipline, under the belief that firm consequences may “re-traumatize” students. The central assumption is that schools should not only educate but also adopt a parental role committed to shaping children’s emotional lives.
The Moral Vision Embedded in Trauma-Informed Schooling
Trauma-informed approaches are cloaked in science jargon, but these are really skewed moral frameworks [see here]. This movement advances a particular vision of human nature—one in which individuals are fragile and perpetually vulnerable. Institutions adopting trauma-informed practices assume the role of arbiters of emotional safety.
This might sound noble. But it raises questions. Should schools be moral guardians of children’s emotional states? Should political frameworks define which life experiences are everyday stress and which represent “trauma”? And what happens when this therapeutic worldview crowds out other important moral values, such as personal responsibility, respect for family authority, or deference to empirical evidence?
A New Identity Politics of Trauma
The trauma-informed movement creates new identity categories, dividing students and staff into those who are “trauma-informed,” and those who remain outside the framework. Being a bone-fide trauma-informed individual is another iteration of identity politics, which almost always gains its currency by identifying oppressed groups that demand redress from society [see here]. The process usually goes by woke, critical race theory, or anti-racism, and demands that institutional cultures reshape immediately. Install a false intellectual framework, and ask questions later.
Where This Leaves Somerset
The county’s leaders no doubt believe they are pursuing a compassionate path, but so has every post-modern progressive movement. But compassion, when institutionalized without counterbalancing principles, can morph into its own form of tyranny. The Pathfinder Programme represents more than a school improvement initiative—it is a cultural shift that embeds a therapeutic ideology into the daily life of classrooms.
Whether Somerset’s trauma-informed experiment becomes a beacon of innovation or yet another nation-killing bureaucracy depends on whether its leaders remain open to questioning the assumptions at the heart of the movement.
If they don’t, the tip of the spear may soon become the edge of another wedge.

Source: Pinal County news release
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In June 2025, officials of Pinal County, Arizona held a ceremony to celebrate making history as the first county in the nation to earn Trauma-Informed Certification through a collaborative, multi-agency effort.
Who Did This?
The motivation for this effort seems to have been a group decision among Pinal County officials.
The trauma-informed training was provided by the AZ Trauma Institute, a for-profit company that conducts training seminars that supposedly reduce the impact of toxic stress in the workplace and create trauma-informed employees. They also offer online 6-month training programs to become a Trauma & Resilience Life Coach.
Trainings were made possible with public funds from the county Attorney’s Office.
The Premise
The initiative aims to improve how county employees interact with one another and with residents who have been affected by trauma. Trauma-informed care is built on the aims of recognizing trauma victims and proactively managing their emotions to promote unconditional safety everywhere in order to prevent re-traumatization (see here).
The goals of every trauma-informed training are aspirational, with no clear endpoints. “This isn’t just a box we’re checking—this is a culture shift,” said county officials. “We’re making sure our systems work with people, not against them, especially when they’re most vulnerable.”
As part of the certification, every county employee and stakeholder can receive individual trauma-informed certification at no cost for the next three years—helping ensure this new mindset becomes part of the county’s long-term culture.
It was not stated how many individuals or what county agencies had been trained.
Analysis
Trainings like this have been going on quietly across nearly all Western nations for years, almost always with no public debate or electoral mandate to justify the use of public funding. Often called “bureaucratic overreach” or, more ominously, the “deep state” at work, these represent significant concerns about government accountability and the decline in public confidence in government institutions.
Trauma Dispatch has documented many of these training efforts aimed at the following:

• Daycare providers (see here).
• Courts ( see here).
• Police (see here).
• Youth detention (see here).
• Librarians (see here).
• Emergency medical responders (see here).
• Architecture (see here and here).
• Creating state government infrastructure (see here).
• Creating federal government infrastructure (see here and here).
• And the most common target by far, teachers (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here); 

          including a school that hired a full-time trauma-informed coach (see here), 
          and a state law mandating this ideological training for teachers (see here).
 
Pinal County’s new status was hailed as a breakthrough in public service. But beneath the glowing headlines, it’s worth asking: What does this certification actually mean—and what evidence supports it?
The term trauma-informed has become a buzzword in recent years, promising empathy-driven systems that “work with people, not against them.”

There’s also little empirical evidence that making an organization “trauma-informed” improves safety, justice, or well-being at the population level. Extending this model to entire systems risks creating symbolic compliance—where employees attend workshops and receive certificates without real behavioral change or measurable benefit.
Critics warn that trauma-informed frameworks can blur accountability by framing most interpersonal difficulties as trauma responses. In criminal justice contexts, this may even complicate the balance between empathy and responsible sentencing of criminals to protect the public.
Pinal County’s efforts appear well-intentioned, but they are untethered from empirical experience, and driven by the misplaced compassion that defines the “woke” Leftist progressive agenda. Until there’s transparent evaluation and evidence of impact, this certification risks being more public-relations milestone than public-health achievement.

Source: California Office of the Surgeon General
Read time: 2.3 minutes
This Happened
In June 2025, California released the latest annual report on their state-wide screening program for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), the only such program in the nation.
Who Is Doing This?
The screening program, ACEs Aware, launched in Gavin Newsom’s first year as governor. The program offers training to primary care clinicians in the Medicaid network on how to screen for ACEs and provides $29 reimbursement for each screen. Reimbursement for screenings began on January 1, 2020. The program is paid for by a state tax on cigarettes.
The Premise
Since program inception, 46,270 individuals completed training on how to screen; 21,730 of those are Medi-Cal clinicians. They conducted 4,258,610 ACE screenings of approximately 2,395,440 unique Medi-Cal patients.
For children and adolescents ages 0 to 17, 7% had an ACE score of 4 or greater, which is the legendary cutoff from research that indicates an individual is considered “high risk for toxic stress.” For adults, 17% had an ACE score of 4 or more.
Since the premise of the program is to prevent ACEs, which in turn should prevent the swath of lethal physical illnesses that are allegedly caused by ACES, the key question is, How many lives have been saved? The report didn’t say.
Huh? Isn’t that the whole point of screening for ACEs? What do clinicians do with the screen results? Nothing, it turns out. The ACEs Aware program does not include interventions to prevent ACEs or to treat the alleged harmful impacts of ACEs. Instead, the program surveys clinicians on their intent to change how they practice: 63% said they intend to change their practice based on the screen data, but did not explain how.
Analysis
What is going on here? Some experts in pediatrics have explicitly recommended against ACE screening [1], noting its lack of clinical utility. ACEs Aware is untethered from basic principles of screening that the test must detect disease with sensitivity, and a positive result must lead to actionable next steps such as more in-depth evaluation or treatment.
Even worse, research has shown that retrospective ACE reporting is wildly unreliable [2]. If individuals cannot even consistently recall their childhood stressors, what exactly is being measured?
The strongest blow, however, comes from large-scale studies [3]. Yes, ACE scores correlate with health outcomes at the population level, but their predictive power for any given individual is abysmal—barely better than flipping a coin. In clinical practice, this renders ACE scores meaningless. Another commentary—including Robert Anda, one of the original ACE architects—openly admitted that ACEs as a screen is a fraud [4].

The program is one of the most striking examples of bad science being turned into government policy. At its core, the program assumes that a handful of social stressors—parental incarceration, substance abuse, divorce—carry unique biological toxicity, while everyday stressors of taking exams, moving to a new school, or struggling in a demanding job are ignored. This is ideology disguised as medicine: stressors deemed “systemic” by progressive policymakers are elevated as dangerous, while the common challenges of life, which millions overcome without chronic disease, are safe.
Why Is This Happening?
The California ACEs Aware program reflects the state’s deep entrenchment in progressive, neo-Marxist ideology that views individuals, especially children, as perpetually fragile and in need of state protection. It aligns with the broader agenda of social-emotional learning, DEI mandates, and trauma-informed education: redefining resilience as vulnerability, undermining parental authority, and expanding government’s role as the arbiter of personal well-being. The program was not born from strong medical evidence but rather from a cultural shift that equates social problems as oppression-causing disease and positions government as the cure. By labeling children with high ACE scores as biologically damaged, policymakers justify endless expansions of entitlement programs, school interventions, and taxpayer-funded bureaucracies.
 

References
[1] McLennan JD, MacMillan HL, Afifi TO, McTavish J, Gonzalez A, Waddell C. Routine ACEs screening is NOT recommended. Paediatr Child Health. 2019 Jul;24(4):272-273. doi: 10.1093/pch/pxz042.
[2] Baldwin JR, Reuben A, Newbury JB, Danese A. Agreement between prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019; 76(6):584-593. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0097.
[3] Baldwin JR, Caspi A, Meehan AJ, et al. Population vs Individual Prediction of Poor Health From Results of Adverse Childhood Experiences Screening. JAMA Pediatr. 2021;175(4):385–393. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.5602.
[4] Anda RF, Porter LE, Brown DW. Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience score: strengths, limitations, and misapplications. Am J Prev Med. 2020;59(2):293-295. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.0098. 

Source: CDC
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched an ambitious experiment. It awarded eight states five-year grants to do something no one has ever done before: prevent stressful life experiences. Each state—California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia—will receive $485,000 annually, totaling nearly $29 million in taxpayer funding.
Who Did This?
The funding announcement was issued during the tenure of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who is better remembered for the agency’s widely criticized mishandling of masks, lockdowns, and vaccine messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Premise
These grants were issued as part of a “cooperative agreement”—a mechanism federal agencies often use to steer research and programming toward their priorities. In this case, the CDC’s stated goal was to fund projects for “the prevention of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and promotion of positive childhood experiences (PCEs).”
Each state’s plan followed the CDC’s prescribed template:

1. Build surveillance systems to collect statewide ACE and PCE data.
   
2. Implement a prevention project targeting one or more ACEs, “with a focus on health equity.”
   
3. Use the data to guide future prevention strategies.

Analysis
At first glance, the program sounds noble. Who wouldn’t want to reduce childhood adversity? Yet the scientific foundation is remarkably weak. Researchers have observed correlations between reported childhood adversity and later health problems—but correlation is not causation.

The notion that ordinary stress can reliably “kill” people has been asserted for years with almost no pushback on the lack of a mechanism.
Even more striking, there are no known public health interventions capable of preventing the ten ACEs:

• Emotional or verbal abuse
• Physical abuse
• Sexual abuse
• Emotional neglect
• Physical neglect
• Divorce or parental abandonment
• Domestic violence
• Parental substance abuse
• Parental mental illness
• Incarceration of a family member

These are deeply personal and family-level problems, not phenomena that lend themselves to large-scale government prevention programs. ACE projects lack the basic principle of a screening program that it be connected to available and effective interventions. As others have noted “there are no evidence-based interventions tied to scores on an ACEs Checklist” [1]. Other criticisms (see here) include that crude ACE scores are inappropriate for individual screening [2].
The Leap of Faith
The CDC’s mission is to protect the public from disease, injury, and disability. Yet with this ACE initiative, the agency has skipped the essential scientific step of demonstrating that ACEs cause the claimed health outcomes. Instead, it has leapt directly to funding prevention efforts—programs with no track record of success and no plausible path to reducing stress at scale.
Why Is This Happening?
This initiative arose under the Biden administration, which consistently advanced progressive, “woke” projects across federal agencies. In that political climate, the CDC aligned itself with broader ideological goals by framing childhood adversity as a public health crisis. Rather than focusing on proven disease prevention strategies, the agency redirected funds toward social engineering under the banner of “equity.” The grants reflect not only a left-leaning administration eager to expand government authority into family and community life, but also a CDC leadership willing to embrace unproven theories in order to remain aligned with prevailing political priorities.
 
 
References
[1] John D. McLennan, Andrea Gonzalez, Harriet L. MacMillan, Tracie O. Afifi, Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708
[2] Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, David W. Brown Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2020;59(2):293−295; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009

Source: RiverBender.com
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On August 1, 2025, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill requiring all police officers and first responders to undergo recurring trauma-informed training.
Who Did This?
The legislation was sponsored by State Senator Mary Edley-Allen, a Democrat from suburban Chicago. It sailed through both chambers of the Democrat-controlled legislature with unanimous votes before receiving the governor’s signature.
The Premise
The law establishes the First Responder Trauma-Informed Response Training Act. Before hiring, every first responder must complete a state-approved trauma-informed curriculum. Once employed, they must repeat the training every 18 months. Failure to pass retraining bars them from key duties—such as answering emergency calls or interviewing victims—and may even result in loss of licensure.
The bill also amends the Illinois Police Training Act to require ongoing instruction “addressing trauma-informed programs, procedures, and practices meant to minimize traumatization of the victim.” Police officers must complete retraining every three years.
The curriculum, by law, must follow “evidence-based standards” covering report writing and responses to sexual assault and abuse. It emphasizes victim-centered, age-sensitive interviewing techniques purported to “minimize retraumatization.”
Analysis
Illinois now joins Florida (2019) and Washington (2025) as the third state, to our knowledge, to impose trauma-informed training on law enforcement. This development raises serious questions—both about the premise of such training and about the broader implications of mandating it by law.
First concern: the ideology behind the training
Trauma-informed care is not a neutral, evidence-driven practice. It emerged in the early 2000s from activist scholarship, not from medical or psychological science. Its central claim is that trauma can leave individuals permanently fragile, vulnerable to “re-triggering” when they encounter reminders of past experiences. There is no credible evidence that ordinary service practices routinely retraumatize customers or hinder their access to care. Yet, advocates argue that victims struggle to access services because institutions inadvertently retraumatize them—through paperwork, questioning styles, or perceived insensitivity. The proposed solution is sweeping: train staff in every public-facing institution to assume all clients may be trauma survivors and to modify interactions accordingly.
Second concern: the evidence gap
While the Illinois bill insists that training be “evidence-based,” no such evidence exists. Studies have not shown that trauma-informed programs change staff behavior, improve victim experiences, or increase service access. Despite hundreds of workshops and dozens of academic articles, the research base remains non-existent.
Equally absent is any consideration of costs—both to individuals and society. These mandates effectively tie employment in emergency services to ideological compliance. First responders risk their licenses if they do not repeatedly pass the prescribed training. Beyond employment, the broader social cost lies in cementing a view of trauma survivors as permanently damaged and easily destabilized—a categorization that risks fostering dependency rather than resilience.
Why Is This Happening?
The spread of trauma-informed training has not been driven by grassroots demand. No significant constituency of victims or families has petitioned for it. Instead, the movement was conceived and championed by a small group of activist scholars and amplified through sympathetic media and nonprofits (see here, here, and here).
These organizations positioned themselves as training authorities, producing curricula and certifications that state legislatures then codified into law. The strategy has been remarkably effective: identify a supposed form of oppression, construct a theory to explain it, create training programs to address it, and then push legislation requiring compliance. The benevolent rhetoric of “helping the vulnerable” has shielded the movement from scrutiny, leaving little room for debate.

Source: SAMHSA
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In 2014, the federal agency responsible for improving treatment quality in mental health published a report on trauma-informed care (TIC) that has become the central touchstone for the movement.

Who Did This?
The report’s lead author, Larke Huang, is a Yale-trained clinical psychologist and currently serves as Director of the Office of Behavioral Health Equity at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The report included six secondary authors. None of the authors have published on trauma in peer-reviewed journals.
Huang has long been celebrated as a social justice advocate. The American Psychological Association described her as someone who has “worked tirelessly her entire career as an advocate for social justice and a champion for diverse and underserved populations.” In 2024, leveraging her government platform once again, Huang published Guide to Equity Terminology: Promoting Behavioral Health Equity through the Words We Use—a document aiming to reshape discourse through prescriptive language.
​
The Premise
As discussed in earlier posts (see here and here), the TIC model was introduced in 2001 by Harris and Fallot. Despite no widespread demand for such a framework and no empirical evidence supporting it, within just four years, remarkably, SAMHSA established the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care based on little more than aspirational theory.
True to the nature of federal institutions, SAMHSA then began organizing conferences, funding academic and nonprofit initiatives, and publishing a stream of reports. Consistently concluding that trauma-informed care was essential to resolving a national crisis in service delivery, these efforts culminated in the infamous 2014 report, SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach. It introduced six “key principles” of trauma-informed care:

1. Safety
2. Trustworthiness and Transparency
3. Peer Support
4. Collaboration and Mutuality
5. Empowerment, Voice, and Choice
6. Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues

They then assembled a panel of “national experts,” including trauma survivors, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers. From this gathering, SAMHSA produced a draft document and posted it for public comment, drawing over 2,000 responses.

Do these principles align with Harris and Fallot’s original concept?
Harris and Fallot emphasized several key ideas, most of which were faithfully reproduced in the SAMHSA report: services should accommodate vulnerable survivors; environments should be inviting rather than threatening; staff should be empathic and trustworthy; and empowerment and autonomy were essential.
Both documents share the qualities of ambiguity and loose definitions. For example, the principle of Collaboration and Mutuality is described in the report to include “leveling power differences, including clerical and housekeeping staff... One does not have to be a therapist to be therapeutic.” These elaborations are vague and riddled with jargon, giving the illusion of depth while having zero evidence and offering little actionable guidance.

Why Did This Happen?
The TIC movement grew in tandem with the rising critical race theory (CRT) movement. Rooted in postmodernism, CRT claimed the moral high ground by championing the voices of the oppressed. Its adherents fashioned a political framework that fused identity-based grievance with institutional critique—often lacking empirical grounding but rich in rhetorical power.
Critics of both movements warned of the frameworks’ theoretical instabilities and manipulative tendencies. Yet, proponents of both skillfully outmaneuvered opposition and embedded their ideology within influential sectors of government, academia, and healthcare. They have reshaped some sectors of society to the extent that the social contract—the agreement between individuals and its government that defines and limits the rights of each—has been significantly influenced to reevaluate how rights are understood in relation to race and identity. Specifically, while CRT and identity movements claim to address systemic inequalities, their implementations often led to societal harm by fostering division, misunderstanding, and backlash against efforts for racial justice. The brilliance of both CRT and TIC lay not in intellectual coherence, but in strategic execution. And, if fully executed, will lead to nothing good.

Source: Arkansas State Legislature
Read time: 2.5 minutes plus 2-minute video
 
This Happened
On April 15, 2025, The Arkansas state legislature passed Senate Bill 458 which will require judges to consider whether juvenile criminals experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) or trauma.
 
Who Did This?
Greg Leding (D) was lead sponsor. He is the Senate minority leader.
 
The Premise
Judges must consider certain factors when sentencing juveniles or transferring juveniles to adult courts. These include the severity of violence and previous history of crime, among other things. A new law will add to that list whether juveniles experienced “exposure to adverse childhood experiences, childhood trauma, involvement in the child welfare or foster care systems, status as a victim of human trafficking, sexual abuse, or rape” [1].
The law does not define adverse childhood experiences but in testimony for the bill, a supporter explained that one could measure them with the well-known ten experiences popularized by Dr. Vincent Felitti’s research (see here). 

Analysis
There are at least three concerns about the passing of this bill. First, there is no good evidence that childhood experiences make people commit crimes they would not otherwise commit. There are two correlational studies that show higher ACE scores associated with criminal activity [2,3]. But, like one-hundred percent of all the other hundreds of ACEs studies that are correlational, they have zero power to prove causation. It is probably more likely that criminal behavior has a biological basis (i.e., genetic), dysfunctional parenting that places children in adverse experiences has a biological basis, and these genetic profiles greatly overlap. ACEs and crime are associated because of shared genetic vulnerabilities and neither causes the other. Taking ACEs into account to reduce sentences is more likely to increase recidivism than to decrease it.
 
Second, embedding the ACEs theory into law will undoubtedly expand from juvenile judges' standard practice. Seven of the ten ACEs are not traumas, including emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, divorce, parental substance abuse, parental mental illness, and a parent in prison. It seems inconceivable that, say, parental divorce contributes to criminal psychopathy, but that has now been quietly codified into Arkansas law.
 
Third, Republicans did this. Republicans hold 29 of the 35 Senate seats and it passed 35-0. Republicans hold 81 of the 100 House seats, and the bill passed 82-2 (9 voting Present). It seems this was possible because Republicans didn’t understand they were voting to codify a radical neo-Marxist view of human nature that society is the oppressor that drives fragile minds to hold dysfunctional moral codes.
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The testimonies of the sponsors were condensed into a misleading message that “it’s what we’re already doing.” The adjacent 2-minute video shows four clips: (1) In Sen. Leding’s testimony before a Senate committee, he misleads the panel by saying that a child who steals a loaf of bread because he is hungry is what this bill is addressing. He omits the bedrock of the radical ACEs theory that earlier experiences have long-lasting neurobiological effects long after the stress has passed. (2) In the same hearing, a judge is asked if we really need this bill, and the judge minimizes any change by saying, “We’re already doing this.” (3) In Sen. Leding’s testimony before a House committee, he repeats this minimization by claiming that this is already standard practice in juvenile courts. (4) He repeats this claim before the full Senate.

Why Did This Happen?
Judges have always been allowed to consider mitigating factors at their discretion. So, of all the mitigating factors that could be added to a binding law, why ACEs and trauma? It’s the same tragedy of misguided compassion for the 1960’s Great Society bills where it was believed that federal government welfare could lift people out of poverty, or, at least, it was worth a try. The unintended consequences of that were tragic in helping to destroy the two-parent family. It seems inevitable many states will repeat this type of doomed experiment with the trauma and ACEs belief system that gentleness can reform unempathic criminals.
 
References
[1] SB458. State of Arkansas 95th General Assembly.
[2] Lansing AE, Park J, Beck AN (2023). Cumulative trauma, adversity, and loss among juvenile justice-involved girls: Implications for health disparities. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 36(6):1015-1030, 2023 Dec.
 [3] Levenson, JS, Socia KM (2015). Adverse Childhood Experiences and Arrest Patterns in a Sample of Sexual Offenders. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 31(10), 1883-1911.