Interview by SONIA DIAZ

I grew up hurt and scared. The trauma I went through affected me when I became a mother. Sometimes I would shut myself in my room so that I didn’t scare my kids, and I smoked weed to stay calm.

When I went to court facing neglect charges years ago, no one knew my story and I was afraid to speak up. My lawyer made me plead guilty to neglecting my kids. Even though my kids were not removed, I felt worthless as a mother for years.

So when I learned that some family courts are starting to help people with trauma, I felt good. Finally, someone is listening to people who sometimes can’t even understand what is going on in court.

Here, Judge Judith Claire of the Chautauqua County Family Court in upstate New York, and Aimee Neri, a licensed social worker who is the New York State Child Welfare Court Improvement Project Liaison to the 8th Judicial District, describe how they’ve brought awareness of trauma into the court and how it’s helping families:

Q: How did you decide to focus on trauma in your court?

Aimee Neri: We know that families who come to family court have had significant traumatic experiences in their past. We thought that taking a closer look at how trauma impacts families would be a way to increasingly focus on safety for families and support family permanency and reunification.

Judge Claire: Everybody who comes into family court has pretty much suffered some kind of trauma. Just the fact that you’re in family court means that things are not going great. What has typically happened is that family court is handled like any other court—as a judge, you deal with the petition and you send people home. What happens in family court, though, is that people keep coming back to court. The department keeps filing petitions. The underlying problem doesn’t get addressed. You deal with the immediate situation but nothing is improved.

With trauma-informed care, the idea is that if somebody comes into court who has suffered trauma, and we treat them the same old way, we may not only fail to improve things but we actually make the problem worse. Then we shake our heads and throw up our hands, and say, “What is wrong with that person? We told them what to do, and they went out and made this crazy decision that only complicated things.” That’s because we don’t understand what’s really going on with the parents who come into our court.

As part of this project, we had trainings to learn how the brain is affected by trauma. It was mindboggling to see those images of the brain. We learned that people are reacting the way they’ve learned to cope with trauma. It may not be the wise way, or the best way, but it’s helped them survive.

Trauma-informed court proceedings are based on five principles—safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment. When we use those five techniques—and it’s obviously complicated—it brings better results.

Q: What did you change about your court proceedings?

Judge Claire: In 2010 we received a grant to work with the University of Buffalo, the New York State Child Welfare Court Improvement Project and Chautauqua County Tapestry to develop a trauma-informed court. In February 2011 we held a kickoff—we had a daylong session and invited absolutely everyone who might come. That’s the only time we’ve ever done that, and there was a blinding snowstorm, but it was very well attended. We explained what we hoped to accomplish, listened to a clip of someone using trauma-informed practices in an interview, and had two professors from the University of Buffalo, Susan Green and Denise Krause, lead group sessions where we had to act out case scenarios. It generated a lot of interest.
 
Aimee Neri: Over time, we had trainings for everybody about trauma and trauma-informed care. We used a model developed by Maxine Harris and Roger Fallot. The idea is that, if we want to start changing how we work with the clients in front of us, we have to think about how we work with each other first. The first change has to come at the organizational level. Then we can look at how we work with the families that come to us.

Judge Claire: One thing we did was build collaboration. We all met and talked with one another–that was sort of earth shattering. Courts don’t do that. You don’t sit down with all your stakeholders—with social workers, psychologists, CASA volunteers, attorneys for children, public defenders, and Department of Social Services attorneys and caseworkers. Even though we have the same goals, we all go about it slightly differently, and there is a level of distrust. The caseworkers don’t trust the lawyers, and vice versa. Sitting down and talking openly is a big change. And it doesn’t just happen overnight, by the way.

Aimee Neri: We found that we needed to start with small steps. For instance, in this courthouse there are televisions in the waiting rooms and they were showing Fox News and CNN. They are typically reporting on horrific things. Think about that from the perspective of someone coming to a court proceeding. They’re in a crisis in their family, they don’t know what to expect in court, and we are putting them in front of a television that’s showing horrific events over and over again. Then they’re supposed to walk into a courtroom and think logically and trust the people around them. So we made a simple shift—we changed the channel. Now we play videos about parenting, or lists of positive things going on in the community, to have a calming impact.

Q: What’s been challenging?
 
Judge Claire: Everything! Certainly none of it was easy. Because it’s a major change in the way people think. Any change is difficult, but when the change involves people’s thinking it is particularly difficult. You’re asking people to view things in a whole new way—to open up their eyes to a whole new world that they don’t understand because they haven’t lived it. For any person to change their thinking on any topic is a challenge. And that’s exactly what this was about.

Also, dealing with all of these different agencies and strong personalities. Attorneys are not normally wimpy people and each agency has its own philosophy. To bring people together is a challenge.

Q: What benefits have you seen?

Judge Claire: The benefit that we’ve seen is that it works. It’s that simple. It leads to success. It’s gratifying and rewarding to see people responding. We have people who used to be cowering or defensive and they are smiling and participating now. It’s good to have another option in our arsenal of tools that makes our work with families more likely to be successful.

Our definition of success also has changed somewhat. Maybe you can’t cure everything but you can make some things better. We find that we don’t even understand what’s happened in families’ experience until years later. Now parents have come back and said, “You said something that stuck with me. At the time, I might have laughed at you, sworn at you, or whatever, but I have thought about it, and I have been able to change something or improve something in my life.”

With statistics there’s almost no way to track what you’d really like to see change but we’re aware of the changes in our families.

Aimee Neri: We’re also looking now at measures like: Are youth attending their court hearings? Are parents attending engagement conferences? Has there been permanency mediation rather than a termination proceeding? The answer is yes. We have permanency sooner. We have more resolutions and settlements.

Trauma-informed care is about doing with someone instead of doing for. We have seen that this is a wonderful way to actually reach people.

Q: How can other courts follow this lead?

Aimee Neri: In our case, the Court Improvement Project (CIP) was able to provide some funding. While funding is helpful, it’s not so necessary if you have someone internal who is really versed in trauma and can provide the support necessary.

What I do think was most beneficial was the support we got from the top down. Not just the judiciary but our stakeholders, their executives, their supervisors, all understood or were interested and willing to consider this approach.

Every state has a Court Improvement Project that they can reach out to. There are also some national organizations—Casey Family Programs, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges—that support this work. Plus, most state universities have some kind of psychology or social work program that supports trauma-informed work.

The CIP in New York State is finalizing a toolkit and curriculum based on what we did here that will be available. It can help you if you just want to think about how to get started—and all the way through a plan for a 2-3 year period of change.

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