Structurally competent care for families facing the continuous traumatic stress of community violence and systemic...

In racially and economically segregated communities, structural violence and chronic adversity perpetuate the risk for community violence and related trauma exposure. Despite widespread awareness of community violence, urban youth of color are among those least likely to have access to services that promote trauma recovery. When these youth do encounter the mental health system, the focus is often on behavioral control rather than understanding and addressing the continuous traumatic stress they face. This paper, components of which were first presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, describes multipronged, interdisciplinary efforts to provide youth and families affected by community violence with trauma-informed, structurally competent services in both office- and community-based settings within an academic medical center that sees one of the highest volumes of bullet-related injuries in the United States.