All too often shootings disrupt the peace of Virgin Islands neighborhoods, but what happens after the crime scene is cleaned up and the sirens fade away? How do people deal with the trauma of a violent act after the crime is done? The Association of Virgin Islands Psychologists challenged the public to grapple with the long-term consequences of violent crime at a public forum sponsored by the University of the Virgin Islands Anti-Violence and Peace Initiative and held on the St. Croix campus Thursday night.
Dara Hamilton, president of AVIP, said the issue of trauma was especially important in the Virgin Islands not only because of the high crime rate, but also because of the small size of the community.
“We live in a community that’s so small that when someone gets killed it’s somebody’s cousin or a friend of a friend,” she said. “The degrees of separation are so small that they ripple. They cause tremendous ripple effects.”
Hamilton said that it was relatively easy to identify the effects of trauma in the victim of a crime, but what about in the victim’s neighbors or their younger brother? She said it was harder to track how traumatic events impact these people on the periphery.
The symposium consisted of a series of presentations from a panel of experts including Police Commissioner-designate Rodney Querrard, Assistant Attorney General Jasmine Griffin and Carolyn Keys, a trauma healing trainer with extensive experience working in war-torn countries in Africa.
Querrard spoke about the effects of trauma he had seen in police work, both amongst officers and the community.
Querrard said he believed things were getting worse on the streets and he feared the effect this was having on the community.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for 26 years and I’ve seen that families and children and the community in general are being desensitized to what is going on around them,” he said. “Shots are being fired practically every day in certain areas and people aren’t even flinching anymore.”
Querrard went on to say that too many people had become detached from the things happening in their community and refused to get involved. He said this was only making criminals more brazen and the problem worse.
Griffin said she saw the effects of trauma every day in the juvenile offenders who end up in the system.
She said that at the core of most of her cases is “unresolved grief,” whether it is from the death of a family member or the end of a relationship. Too often people do not allow themselves to grieve, and then they end up lashing out at those close to them, Griffin said.
She warned that children were growing up learning to suppress their emotions and to not deal with their underlying problems Griffin said this can lead to tough-guy bravado or a state of arrested development in which the child does not mature.
Without being able to properly deal with the trauma in their lives, she said many end up acting out in a violent way and wind up in her courtroom.
Griffin said that more than anything, people in the community need a safe place to talk about their feelings and what has happened to them.
Keys agreed wholeheartedly with this idea. She recalled going on a mission trip to Burundi after their civil war where they had “one psychiatrist for seven million people.”
Keys said that her group trained local people to respond to the trauma in their communities by setting up “listening centers,” where residents could talk through the events of the war.
Keys said she would like to see a similar project in the territory. We need trained listeners, she said. “To listen to each other. To help each other heal.”
Keys said that the community needs to properly mourn all 562 people who have died from homicide in the territory since 2000. She said that we rush to honor those who die in war, but that we shouldn’t forget those killed on our own streets, regardless of who they were.
“Whether they were good or whether they were bad, they were somebody’s child,” Keys said.
Hamilton said she hoped to conduct a similar symposium specifically for policy leaders in the territory to discuss developing an institutional approach to relieving trauma in the community.
However, she stressed that people should not ignore the problems in their lives and wait for the government to fix them. “Part of what I’m hoping to get across today is that the individual can take a lot of responsibility for their own mental health,” she said.
The public forum will be followed on Friday with a professional training workshop on identifying and treating trauma. Hamilton said the workshop was designed for anyone working in fields where they deal with victims, such as social workers, police and even lawyers.
