via #LinkedIn
While African wisdom teaches us, “ it takes a village to raise a child,” we must also name a painful truth:
Not all villages are safe.
Some villages are cages of neglect, invalidation, abuse, trauma, and harm, caused by the very communities meant to raise, love, and protect children.
The struggles we witness in children and youth today are not simply individual “acting out,” anti-social behaviors, or pathologies as we often see them.
(1/8)
They are often reflections of the village’s failure:
Failures of systems.
Failures of care.
Failures of safety and belonging.
Where we locate problems in people and not see the state.
(2/8)
Before we rush to label youth as “at risk,”
before we reduce their pain to diagnoses,
we must pause and ask:
•What are the unmet needs behind those behaviors?
•What wounds have gone unspoken, unseen, and untreated?
•What social conditions, traumas, and exclusions pushed them out of the village and into the jungle?
Because the jungle is not just online,
it exists in our schools, institutions, streets, and war zones.
(3/8)
We see it in the school-to-prison pipeline.
We see it in adultification bias.
We see it in racial profiling, surveillance, and systemic neglect.
(4/8)
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