Abstract
Childhood trauma has been described as a public health crisis, thus calling for solutions at multiple levels and across child-serving contexts. Consistent with ecological systems theory, individual experiences of trauma are nested within wider contexts of influence that can result in collective and systemic experiences of trauma. Given that schools are an important child-serving context, there is need to attend to the ways that schools can contribute to both problems and solutions. In this chapter, we offer a wide focus lens to interventions for students exposed to trauma through a definition of trauma as within and across individual, collective, and systemic levels. We describe how much of the extant literature on school-based trauma intervention has targeted the individual student level, with increased expansion that integrates an ecological perspective to trauma intervention. Trauma-informed schools hold promise as a mechanism for promoting systemic resilience and disrupting systemic trauma. School mental health research and practice must enable trauma-informed schools that are culturally responsive and healing-centered across child, school, and community contexts.
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Chafouleas, S.M., Saleem, F., Overstreet, S., Thorne, T. (2023). Interventions for Students Exposed to Trauma. In: Evans, S.W., Owens, J.S., Bradshaw, C.P., Weist, M.D. (eds) Handbook of School Mental Health. Issues in Clinical Child Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20006-9_6
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