After reading this month’s piece on childhood grief, we thought it would be interesting to see how much that issue might impact the children we had been serving. This is the first time we’ve investigated the incidence of trauma type among participants of Project CONTACT. Here at CASGSL, as part of their standardized assessment, we ask children to indicate if they have experienced various types of trauma using a list of approximately twenty different traumas. Below is a table of listing those traumas and how often they were endorsed by children enrolled in our program. Although sexual abuse was clearly the most prevalently reported trauma, death of a loved one was the second most common.
| Trauma | Incidence |
|---|---|
| Sexual abuse | 201 |
| Death of loved one | 176 |
| Medical trauma | 124 |
| Family legal problems | 124 |
| Bullying | 122 |
| Family violence | 119 |
| Physical abuse | 117 |
| Verbal abuse | 114 |
| Serious accident | 104 |
| Separated from caregiver | 100 |
| Family substance abuse | 99 |
| Community violence | 92 |
| Family suicide | 80 |
| Insufficient food | 59 |
| Scary interaction with law | 59 |
| Identity-based trauma | 56 |
| Natural disaster | 49 |
| Trauma by animal | 47 |
| Neglect | 45 |
| Robbery | 41 |
| War | 11 |