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In nonfiction, our winner is Billy Lezra, for their piece 'Mother's Colors.' This year's nonfiction judge was Augusten Burroughs. Of the essay, he writes: 'The writer deftly brings a lifetime [...]

With many local, national, and international events impacting society, there is much focus on large-scale trauma and stressors. The COVID-19 pandemic, international terrorism, warfare, global climate change, and political conflict [...] more...

Introduction A substantial literature associates childhood psychological trauma with smaller limbic structural volumes in adults, consistent with the importance of these regions in emotion recognition, fear processing and episodic memory. [...], Background: Childhood trauma is reliably associated with smaller hippocampal volume in adults; however, this finding has not been shown in children, and even less is known about how sex and trauma interact to affect limbic structural development in children. Methods: Typically developing children aged 9 to 15 years who completed a trauma history questionnaire and structural [T.sub.1]-weighted MRI were included in this study (n = 172; 85 female, 87 male). All children who reported 4 or more traumas (n = 36) composed the high trauma group, and all children who reported 3 or fewer traumas (n = 136) composed the low trauma group. Using multivariate analysis of covariance, we compared FreeSurfer-derived structural MRI volumes (normalized by total intracranial volume) of the amygdalar, hippocampal and parahippocampal regions by sex and trauma level, controlling for age and study site. Results: We found a significant sex * trauma interaction, such that girls with high trauma had greater volumes than boys with high trauma. Follow-up analyses indicated significantly increased volumes for girls and generally decreased volumes for boys, specifically in the hippocampal and parahippocampal regions for the high trauma group; we observed no sex differences in the low trauma group. We noted no interaction effect for the amygdalae. Limitations: We assessed a community sample and did not include a clinical sample. We did not collect data about the ages at which children experienced trauma. Conclusion: Results revealed that psychological trauma affects brain development differently in girls and boys. These findings need to be followed longitudinally to elucidate how structural differences progress and contribute to well-known sex disparities in psychopathology. more...

School counselors must demonstrate effectiveness of counseling services in a cost-effective manner. This article reviews and applies commonly used, free-access assessment instruments for use with school-aged youth to provide evidence of effective individual, small-group, and large-group interventions. We present instruments assessing depression, anxiety, disruptive behavior, and trauma, so that school counselors can learn basic administration, scoring, interpretation procedures, and psychometric utility to allow immediate use with diverse students. Keywords assessment, counseling instruments, outcome measures, Every year in the United States, about 20% of youth experience significant emotional or behavioral challenges (Brown, Green, Desai, Weitzman, & Rosenthal, 2014; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013). [...] more...

INTRODUCTION 401 I. TYPES OF GATEKEEPER-IMPOSED CREDIBILITY DISCOUNTS 405 A. Story Plausibility 406 1. Internal Consistency 406 a. Neurological Trauma: Traumatic Brain Injury 407 b. Psychological Trauma: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [...], In recent months, we've seen an unprecedented wave of testimonials about the serious harms women all too frequently endure. The #MeToo moment, the #WhyIStayed campaign, and the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings have raised public awareness not only about workplace harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, but also about how routinely women survivors face a Gaslight-style gauntlet of doubt, disbelief and outright dismissal of their stories. This pattern is particularly disturbing in the justice system, where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose, because women telling stories of abuse by their male partners are simply not believed. To fully grasp the nature of this new moment in gendered power relations--and to cement the significant gains won by these public campaigns--we need to take a full, considered look at when, how, and why the justice system and other key social institutions discount women's credibility. We use the lens of intimate partner violence to examine the ways in which women's credibility is discounted in a range of legal and social service system settings. First, judges and others improperly discount as implausible women's stories of abuse, based on a failure to understand both the symptoms arising from neurological and psychological trauma, and the practical constraints on survivors' lives. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women's personal trustworthiness, based on both inaccurate interpretations of survivors' courtroom demeanor and negative cultural stereotypes about women and their motivations for seeking assistance. Moreover, even when a woman manages to overcome all the initial modes of institutional skepticism that minimize her account of abuse, she often finds that the systems designed to furnish her with help and protection dismiss the importance of her experiences. Instead, all too often, the arbiters of justice and social welfare adopt and enforce legal and social policies and practices with little regard for how they perpetuate patterns of abuse. Two distinct harms arise from this pervasive pattern of credibility discounting and experiential dismissal. First, the discrediting of survivors constitutes its own psychic injury--an institutional betrayal that echoes the psychological abuse women suffer at the hands of individual perpetrators. Second, the pronounced, nearly instinctive penchant for devaluing women's testimony is so deeply embedded within survivors' experience that it becomes a potent, independent obstacle to their efforts to obtain safety and justice. The reflexive discounting of women's stories of domestic violence finds analogs among the kindred diminutions and dismissals that harm so many other women who resist the abusive exercise of male power, from survivors of workplace harassment to victims of sexual assault on and off campus. For these women, too, credibility discounts both deepen the harm they experience and create yet another impediment to healing and justice. Concrete, systematic reforms are needed to eradicate these unjust, gender-based credibility discounts and experiential dismissals, and to enable women subjected to male abuses of power at long last to trust the responsiveness of the justice system. more...

The rape of the land and of women has long been connected in literature and across cultures (Phillips). Young Adult (YA) sexual assault narratives are growing increasingly popular, and the location of attacks in such stories is significant, such as when rape is depicted in nature, because, in reality, much sexual violence occurs in the private sphere (Kerber)--the home (Altrows). Using an ecofeminist lens and conceptions regarding the treatment of sexual violence in children's and YA literature (Marshall, 'Stripping'; 'Girlhood'), this paper examines Speak (Anderson), Living Dead Girl (Scott), and Exit, Pursued by a Bear (Johnston), which all set rape scenes outdoors. When individuals are violated in outdoor spaces, these sites can come to hold traumatic memories, prompting a shift in survivors' relationships with the outdoors. For the protagonists in all three novels examined here, outdoor spaces come to represent pain, and so a critical consideration of the setting of sexual assault in these stories--particularly spaces with land, trees, and water--is warranted.Keywords: Young Adult literature; sexual assault; rape; nature; ecofeminism; Speak; Living Dead Girl; Exit, Pursued by a Bear, The term 'rape' has long been associated with the wilderness, particularly in literature. For example, in Paradise Lost, John Milton pens: 'Men... / Ransack'd the centre, and with impious hands [...] more...