Episode 2: Violence: Seeing the Forest From the Trees

Bending the Arc

At the March for Our Lives, 17-year-old South Los Angeles native Edna Chavez shared her experience of growing up surrounded by violence. “I learned how to duck from bullets before I learned how to read!” she told the crowd of protestors. While FBI crime statistics for 2016 suggest violent crime is on the rise, a closer read reveals that the type of endemic violence that Edna spoke of is both hyper-localized and long-lasting, suggesting that current policy is missing the mark. To broaden our thinking and help us understand what we’re missing, we turn to Dr. Kalen Flynn, a triple alumnus of Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice and a new Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She applies her groundbreaking research on violence to old human development models, allowing us to see how words, biases, and punitive and discriminatory policy and funding models are, themselves, types of violence we too often ignore.