Healing a Community: How Gun Violence Trauma Shapes People

                                                
Uni High, in collaboration with WILL, present the following special podcast series, “Changing the Narrative: Preventing Gun Violence in Champaign-Urbana.”

Written by Anya Kaplan-Hartnett 

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Aditi Adve, Narrator

Gun violence is a pervasive issue for our community. According to the News Gazette, the daily newspaper of record in Champaign, Illinois, 35 people in Champaign-Urbana have died due to gun-related incidents between 2014 and 2019 alone, which demonstrates a marked increase in the frequency and severity of these violent events. However, our community has responded with determination and compassion in order to work towards a more peaceful future. This podcast delves into the essential anti-violence work being done in Champaign-Urbana. We’ve interviewed local activists, organizers, politicians, and entrepreneurs to learn more about counteracting gun violence. From Uni High, I’m Aditi Adve, a current sophomore and a member of the Class of 2023.  

This is “Healing a Community: How Gun Violence Trauma Shapes People,” the last in our series, “Changing the Narrative, Preventing Gun Violence on Champaign-Urbana.” The previous podcast explored how gun violence interacts with mental health issues. This episode dives into the ways in which gun violence traumatizes communities. We’ll learn about trauma-informed teaching, culturally embedded counselling, and supporting victims of domestic violence. A warning: This program contains graphic descriptions of gun violence and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

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Aditi Adve, Narrator

We spoke with Tracy Parsons, who serves as the City of Champaign community relations manager and facilitates the Champaign Community Coalition, about gun violence in our community.

Tracy Parsons

Gun violence really surfaced in our community in a new and different way in the last three to four years. In 2015 is when we really saw our biggest increase in gun violence. Other communities have experienced it differently. Most of the major cities, gun fire and gun activity and gang activity, all those things have been a big part of them. Not in communities like ours. This is all relatively new.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Tracy Parsons emphasized the way in which gun violence affects not only individuals, but the community as a whole. 





Tracy Parsons

There is nothing like having to talk to a mom, or a sister, or a brother that has lost a family member to gun violence. There is nothing that prepares you for that. There is no training. Maybe if you were a doctor or something, that you’re used to seeing people in traumatic spaces or states. But as a community worker, community organizer, there is nothing that prepares you for that. It is tough. It’s sad. It’s very destructive and it really is probably the most important community issue for us to solve right now. There is just no easy way to do it other than to do it. 

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Dr. Ruby Mendenhall, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois,  researches social inequality. Her current academic research incorporates African-American studies, urban planning and development, and biology in order to understand a holistic picture of trauma and its long-run effects on historically marginalized populations. 

Ruby Mendenhall

There’s research now on adverse childhood experiences that talk about exposure to different stresses. It can affect your physical health and your mental health as adults.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Dr. Mendenhall’s work took her to the City of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, a large public housing project on the city’s South Side which has now been demolished. At Robert Taylor, Dr. Mendenhall spoke with mothers raising children in a community surrounded by gun violence. 

Ruby Mendenhall

One mother talked about how her, I think it was her daughter, one of her friends was shot in the back of head. I think her son saw one of his friends shot through the eye. So her children had this exposure to their friends being exposed toward—Another mother talked about how their child, like, two of the friends, the child was there when bullets hit one friend, and then the child was present when bullets hit another friend.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Children who grow up experiencing this type of violence need wraparound support in order to help them process their trauma in a healthy way. Support can come from mentoring, counseling, or creative extracurricular activities. However, essential mental health services are often unavailable for families who have been systematically underserved. For the mother whose children witnessed their friends being shot, finding counseling proved difficult.

Ruby Mendenhall

She said there’s supposed to be counseling, but she called the school and the counselor was busy. She called again, the counselor’s busy, and she called back the next day. And I think she did it three times and then she just stopped. To me, that was really hard to hear, because again that’s very traumatic to see your friends shot in the head, and the eye, and not to be able to process that with someone.

 

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Trauma informed care is instrumental for individuals who have been exposed to situations such as the shootings Dr. Mendenhall described.

Ruby Mendenhall

You need a safe place to, kind of, talk about the trauma, to talk about your experiences. Hopefully that person also has experience in terms of understanding where children are developmentally, and so they may not have words for the emotions that they’re feeling, but helping them to give them words, helping them to figure how they want to process it. Some children are very talkative, so maybe they want to talk. Others are quiet, and maybe they need to move around, or create music, or let it come out through poetry. I think that it would be good, especially, and it really needs to be culturally sensitive. It needs to be embedded in the person’s culture and not outside of it, because then it’s hard to embrace something that’s not a part of who you are. It feels like you have to be someone else to incorporate the counseling.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Those affected by trauma need space to discuss their experiences with mental health providers who can truly empathize with them. Professor Mendenhall introduced the concept of culturally embedded counseling—mental health care that respects and builds on cultural and socioeconomic experiences in order to holistically treat patients. Without culturally embedded counseling, traumatized individuals may feel misunderstood and the therapy experience can be less impactful.

Ruby Mendenhall

When I talk with the mothers, sometimes that’s the critique they have of mental health services—that the therapist is not familiar with their experiences, so they spend a lot of time asking them, “So what is that like? Wow, that happened to you?” And they want someone who can come in and say, “yeah,” either “I know what that’s like,” or “Wow, that must’ve really been hard.” And then on top of that, you’re also dealing with the racial issues, like when you asked me “What was it like?” So I think it can be helpful, and I know that it also should be culturally embedded.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Counseling can be especially important for students because the trauma they have survived has ripple effects in other areas of their lives, such as performance in school. Tracy Parsons explains how violence can negatively influence children’s education.

Tracy Parsons 

If you think about as a student, if you live in a neighborhood or if you don’t live in that neighborhood, but you hear about gun violence or someone you know has been harmed, injured, or hurt through gun violence, and you’re aware of this, and you’re thinking about these things at night, and you’re coming to school with these kinds of things on your mind, you’re probably not pretty focused on school. You’re thinking about these kinds of things. 

 



Aditi Adve, Narrator

Dr. Mendenhall believes schools should play an essential role in helping students deal with trauma by using a framework of “trauma-informed” pedagogy in order to teach students while prioritizing their mental health.

Ruby Mendenhall

So think about what kind of programs, almost making it a part of school culture to talk about trauma, and what trauma does, and ways that you can be resilient, despite exposure to trauma. A friend of mine, she’s doing trauma-informed trainings for teachers and other people, because sometimes when you see children, they are acting out, they’re having a hard time concentrating, they seem mad, they may be turning over chairs. Instead of immediately like, “oh something’s wrong with them,” to think about, well maybe they have experienced some trauma, maybe they are trying to release some emotions, maybe they’re acting out something that has happened. It could be gun violence, sexual violence, all kind of things, but to kind of come at it from a trauma-informed perspective.

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Aditi Adve, Narrator

Aside from counseling through the school system, kids affected by trauma can benefit from outside support programs. Community activist Joshua Payne spoke to us about a mentoring program, called TRUCE, where he serves as an outreach worker. The program pairs kids with trained adults who help guide them through school while addressing their personal needs due to trauma.

Joshua Payne

Like I personally mentee about two or three kids. And then, some of the other anti-violence coordinators that I work with in our organization, they have a sector of kids that they mentor, advocate for. So, whether you take a direct mentoring role with the kid—I short-term mentor them around the trauma. Because I have direct access to trauma-informed agencies and pure advocating agencies, so I’m able to use my street knowledge and street training around violence prevention to help and bring in trauma counselors to help kind of clear the smoke.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Trauma-informed care means that counselors must understand the patterns that lead to violence and acknowledge the intersectionality of racism, sexism, and economic injustice. For example, domestic violence represents a subset of gun violence and disproportionately affects African-American women. Femi Fletcher is a lifelong Champaign-Urbana resident who works for the Urbana Fire Department and serves on the board of Courage Connection, a local organization dedicated to helping victims of domestic abuse. She spoke with us about the essential services this organization provides.

Femi Fletcher

Courage Connection is an agency that provides support for survivors of domestic violence. We currently offer a range of services. We offer an emergency shelter, we offer services like court advocacy, we offer some forms of career counseling, we offer transitional housing for survivors and their children who need somewhere to go while they get back on their feet. Those services are completely free. Anybody can use them. It doesn’t matter your economic status. You can be a millionaire or have three dollars in your pocket. You can be a man, a woman. If you are trying to escape a domestic violent situation, Courage Connection can help you.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

For Ms. Fletcher, domestic violence work is personal. This is her story.

Femi Fletcher

We got married when I was twenty, he was twenty-two. We had my son and then a couple years later we had my daughter, and we were married in total for eleven years. Probably, about the midpoint of our marriage, domestic violence began to be an issue. It began to be a pervasive issue, where it became clear that it wasn’t just a one-time thing. I felt as though it was going to continue to come up. Actually, before I left the last time, I had made several attempts to leave multiple times before that, and just different circumstances, and life, and work, and my family always kind of led me back, and I just thought, “well, we’ll try again, we’ll try to make this work.” The final straw that led me to leave the last time—there was an episode one day where my son was in middle school and he was supposed to go to basketball practice and then catch the bus home. Well, it got to be late, it got to be dark outside, and he still wasn’t home, so we were kind of panicking, like, “Oh my gosh, where is he? Where is my son?” And a friend of mine who lived down the street called me, and she said, “Hey, I want you to know, your son’s here, and he doesn’t want to come home.” That was kind of the, I guess the slap in the face that I needed to say that, “Something has to be different. I can’t let my children be this affected, that they don’t feel comfortable coming home.” And so it was that night that I decided, “Okay, we’re gonna make an exit plan.” Of course I didn’t tell him, but that was certainly the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

According to The National Domestic Violence Hotline, the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship comes after the victim has escaped. Leaving an abusive situation takes control away from the abusive partner, which often results in dangerous acts of retaliation. Femi’s ex-husband asked for a ride across town a few weeks after their separation, and she agreed. He shot her while in the car.

Femi Fletcher

So, I was shot eight times. I sustained seven gunshot wounds to my right arm and my torso and one gunshot to my head and I was conscious for most of the episode. In fact, I made my own 911 call and I remember very vividly, arriving in the emergency room and thinking, “Well, you know, hurry up and get working because this is probably pretty bad.”

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Femi Fletcher recovered from the shooting, and her experiences have informed the way she approaches her work for Courage Connection. 

 

Femi Fletcher

Survivors of domestic violence face lots of issues in trying to escape their situations. I feel like I was very fortunate that I had a really supportive group of people at work and a really—the community was very supportive. My incident was very public, it was in the newspaper and people were, like, starting GoFundMe accounts and all kinds of stuff. But everyone doesn’t have those resources, so Courage Connection is an agency that can help provide some of those necessary resources for people to be able to be okay after leaving a violent situation. 

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Courage Connection aims to assist victims not only with emergency shelter and transitional housing, but through supportive services such as trauma-informed counseling. Over the years, the concept of trauma training has grown not only in the Champaign-Urbana community, but nationally. Dr. Mendenhall told us about a recent initiative to support trauma survivors through storytelling.

Ruby Mendenhall

We recently, we’re doing a study on community healing through digital storytelling. And so we had focus groups where we asked people “so tell us about the violence, how do you think that’s affecting people in Champaign Urbana?” And people are concerned about the level of violence that’s taking place here. So listening to the stories, listening to people’s concerns, it’s a big deal. Even going to Community Coalition meetings. So yes, I think it’s significant, it’s something to think about and to address. And so our project, we collected stories, we actually have them on the web if people are interested. And now we’re trying to think about and asking community members “Well, what do you need to heal from?” We also talk about racial trauma, right, so, again, racial trauma is a historical trauma that has been part of the Black and Brown experience in the US, that again sets the conditions for what we’re seeing. So, what do people feel like they need to heal from that type of trauma.

Aditi Adve, Narrator

Trauma can come from many sources, including violent events, though underlying issues can be equally traumatizing. Trauma-informed care operates from a framework that acknowledges patterns of racial, economic, and gender-based discrimination, as well as traumatizing incidents such as gun violence. Trauma-informed teaching and counseling are meant to address these interconnected issues through a holistic practice that prioritizes each individual’s specific needs. Hopefully, a continued focus on trauma-informed practice can contribute to a more peaceful future for our community.

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Aditi Adve, Narrator

Thank you for listening to, “Healing a Community: How Gun Violence Trauma Shapes People,” the fourth and final episode of Changing the Narrative: Preventing Gun Violence in Champaign-Urbana, a student-produced podcast by Uni High’s oral history project team. Each episode in this series focuses on a component of anti-violence work, including community organizations, gun legislation, mental health, and trauma recovery. All interviews featured in this podcast were conducted in May 2019 by Uni’s eighth-grade class. If you’d like to listen to previous episodes of Changing the Narrative, check out the WILL website at will.illinois.edu/illinoisyouthmedia.

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