Like many Chicagoans, Latoya Winters was stunned by the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Shamiya Adams at a sleepover in July. Shamiya and several friends were in the bedroom of a home in West Garfield Park. They were circled around a pretend campfire, about to microwave s’mores, when a bullet fired at some boys outside came through a window. It struck Shamiya in the head; she died the next morning.
We’re in an office at Marillac House, the 100-year-old social service agency near Jackson and California, where Winters works with children in summer- and after-school programs. Some of the younger kids in the summer program have had questions about the sleepover shooting, she says. “They want to know, ‘Why was that girl killed at that party? She wasn’t doing anything wrong.’” Since there isn’t a good answer, Winters mainly listens sympathetically.
She was talking recently with a friend who’d lost both parents to cancer. “Time heals all wounds,” the friend said. Winters politely disagreed. “I have some wounds—time has passed and passed, and they’re still open,” she told the friend. “There are things that happened to me years ago that still feel as if they happened yesterday.”
Drug dealers worked the street corners. Her brothers and cousins were among them. Several were in gangs, so she overheard stories about fights and drive-by shootings.
“Toxic stress” in childhood can create a stress-response system that is “overly reactive or slow to shut down,” Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child observed in a working paper, written in 2005 and updated in January. “As a result, children may feel threatened by or respond impulsively to situations where no real threat exists.” In poor neighborhoods, childhood trauma can thus be part of a vicious cycle, predisposing victims to perpetrating violence that exposes yet more children to trauma.
