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Dr. Daryl Steiner’s colleagues at Akron Children’s Hospital have called him a pioneer and a visionary in the field of child abuse evaluation and treatment. Steiner’s more humble than that, though. “As I look back over my career, I can see we’ve done a good job,” Steiner said in a conference room in the hospital’s Locust Building, where he heads the Children at Risk Evaluation (CARE) Center. “The best thing I did was hire good people.”...

Leonard Strickland’s barbaric and unnecessary death at the hands of prison guards at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York highlights the need for independent oversight of the state’s prisons. His beating in 2010, the details of which have only recently come to light, is the latest in a long list of instances of brutality toward inmates in New York’s prison system. The state’s inhumane practices involving solitary confinement have also generated...

We’ve long known two things about land use regulations. One is that elements of them—in the form of large lot requirements and other aspects of “exclusionary zoning”—have led to the racial and economic segregation. The other is that restrictive land use and building codes in cities limit housing construction (and therefore housing supply), leading to increased costs, worse affordability problems, and deepened inequality in urban centers. What we haven’t...

For at least a year before he shot and killed Laura Wilcox, Scott Thorpe had been convinced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was out to get him. He told his older brother Kent that they had planted a chip in his brain and were using it to track him. He was certain that at some point he and the lead agent in charge of his case would end up in a big shoot-out, and that this shoot-out would determine his fate. In secret, he took pains to prepare for this reckoning: He converted his...

Twice a month in Springfield, a group of men gather to talk. These men talk about their childhood sexual abuse. “If you’ve been through any kind of adverse experience, any kind of traumatic experience — and any kind of childhood sexual abuse is a traumatic experience — it shakes your core and changes your whole outlook on life as a safe place,” said Chris Davies, our staff lead for the men’s group (there are also domestic abuse and women’s sexual...

In 2013, the West Virginia Center for Children’s Justice launched a program called Handle With Care . The collaborative  program is meant to help children who’ve experienced abuse, neglect or other types of trauma succeed in school. The program that started on the West Side of Charleston is now expanding across the state and in other communities across the nation. [For more of this story, written by Roxy Todd, go...

“The Journey to the Heart” Summit was created for the survivors of emotional abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, child sexual abuse, or trauma of any kind.  It was also designed to help the spouses, families, and friends of trauma survivors. Starting on January 15th,  you’ll have access to interviews with more than twenty therapists, coaches, teachers, trauma specialists, authors, trainers, and healers.  Each one will teach you how to overcome abuse or...

This is, put simply, one of the best books on mindfulness that I have read. In Daily Meditations for Calming Your Angry Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Free Yourself from Anger, Jeffrey Brantley and Wendy Millstine provide about forty mindfulness exercises to help people focus on their special need or challenge regarding anger. They help us use various meditations to move past anger and instead respond to things that upset us with calm and kindness. Brantley and...

Claudio Sanchez is the senior member of the NPR Ed team, with more than 25 years on the education beat. We asked him for his list of the top stories he'll be watching in 2016. 1. The New Federal Education Law The long, grueling fight to overhaul the 14-year-old No Child Left Behind law is over, but that'll turn out to be the easy part. The new Every Student Succeeds Act returns most government oversight of schools back to states. But there are no guarantees that the states will do a better...

At the end of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie, the ruined, homeless George Hurstwood commits suicide in a New York City flophouse. "A slow, black boat setting out from the pier at Twenty-seventh Street upon its weekly errand bore, with many others, his nameless body to the Potter's Field,” wrote Dreiser. More than a century later, such anonymous burials in “potters’ fields” for the indigent or unknown are still generally the norm in U.S. cities. But...

Talking about grief and the loss of a loved one isn't typically dinner conversation. Many people, even those struggling to cope with loss, will avoid talking about such heavy topics, especially over supper. But a fledgling nonprofit designs dinners specifically for young adults to get together and talk about their experiences with loss. In cities across the country, the group The Dinner Party advises 20- and 30-somethings on how to arrange these gatherings. Some say it's one of the new ways...

When asked if she remembers feeling safe in her home while growing up, Laurie replied, “Never.” Raised in rural Washington state, her father cut her off from contact with any adults who might have been able to intervene to stop the sexual, physical and emotional abuse she and her siblings suffered. “He would go into rages over really small things and scream at us, call us names, hit us, psychologically torture us,” said Laurie, who is being identified only by her...