Trauma-Informed Practices in the Courts: Education & Research Programs

Why Focus on Courts?

The Institute brings trauma education to judges—and focuses on the courts as a source of research—for three primary reasons:

• Trauma can lead to legal involvement: The impact of trauma on the brain, body, and behavior — such as reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex and the development of harmful coping mechanisms — may increase the likelihood of trauma survivors engaging in violent or criminal behavior (Fox et al., 2015; Kar, 2018; Kim & Choi, 2020; McCord, 1983), which can lead to interaction with the legal system.
• The court process itself can be traumatic: Legal proceedings and the actions of legal professionals can either cause or intensify traumatic stress. Individuals accused or convicted of crimes, particularly those with marginalized identities, may face abuse or harassment by legal personnel (Listwan et al., 2010; Stotzer, 2014). Crime victims and survivors may also experience re-traumatization due to victim-blaming, dismissive attitudes, or being forced to confront their abusers in court (Campbell, 2005; Epstein & Goodman, 2019; Katirai, 2020).
• Court professionals often face secondary trauma: Those working in the criminal justice system, such as judges and attorneys, experience some of the highest levels of secondary trauma among service professionals due to their frequent interactions with trauma survivors and the need to uphold confidentiality, which limits their ability to process these experiences (Jaffre et al., 2009; Levine et al., 2011).

Research Initiatives

​The Institute and its research team have engaged in three primary approaches to investigate trauma-informed practices in the North Carolina courts:

• Data Collection from Judges: The team interviewed judges who participated in a pilot trauma educational program. Read Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice from the Judges’ Perspective from Judicature Vol. 106 No. 2 (2022) to learn about judges’ views of trauma education and trauma-informed judicial practice. Further details on these interviews are also published in Applying a trauma-informed care framework to courtroom practice: An analysis of judges’ perspectives, in the Juvenile and Family Court Journal (full text available upon request). The team additionally surveyed nearly 100 district court judges about their perspectives on trauma-informed care and administered an evaluation survey to judges following a trauma education program. The results of the survey are published in Judges’ Attitudes and Experiences Related to a Trauma-Informed Approach: An Exploratory Study, in the journal Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy (full text available upon request).
• Court Observations: The team traveled around the state to observe the use of trauma-informed practices in juvenile delinquency courts, observing 201 hearings across 35 court visits and 16 judges in 7 counties. The observations offer a wealth of data on courthouse environment, demographics of participants, and judges’ interactions with parents and children, among other measures.
• Surveys about Youth Experience: The team surveyed youth who appeared before the judges observed and court personnel who worked with those youth to get a sense of their experiences in court. We linked this survey data with observation data to assess the relationship between judge in-court behavior and youth experience in court.

Dr. Eva McKinsey, a social and community psychologist whose work focuses on trauma-informed practice in the criminal legal context, served as the primary research consultant on the project. She has served as a trainer and consultant for various educational programs as well.

It is also supported by a team of dedicated students working under a grant from Duke’s Bass Connections, a program that allows an interdisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students to work with professors on cutting-edge, socially oriented research projects.