Glossary Of Terms

Assessment:

The evaluation of an individual's development, behavior, intellect, interests, personality, cognitive processes, emotional functioning, and/or social functioning for the purpose of identifying needs. Assessment methods include interviewing, systematic observation, and testing.

Disaster:

A disaster is defined as any natural catastrophe (e.g. tornado, hurricane, earthquake), or regardless of cause, any fire, flood, or explosion that causes damage of sufficient severity and magnitude to warrant the intervention of local, state, or federal agencies and disaster relief organizations.

Domestic Violence:

Domestic Violence is sometimes referred to as intimate partner violence, domestic abuse, or battering and includes actual or threatened physical or sexual violence or psychological and emotional abuse between adults in a child's home environment.

Medical Trauma:

Medical trauma includes trauma associated with an injury or accident, chronic or life-threatening illness, or painful or invasive medical procedures.

Neglect:

Child neglect involves the failure to provide needed age-appropriate care, although financially able to do so, or offered financial or other means to do so. This includes physical neglect (e.g. deprivation of food, clothing, shelter), medical neglect (e.g. failure to provide child with access to needed medical or mental health treatments or to consistently administer prescribed medications), and educational neglect (e.g. withholding child from school, failure to attend to special education needs).

Physical Abuse:

Physical abuse refers to actual or attempted infliction of bodily pain and/or injury, including the use of severe corporal punishment. Physical abuse is characterized by physical injury (e.g. bruises and fractures) resulting from punching, beating, kicking, burning, or otherwise harming a child.

Posttraumatic stress disorder:

An anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or experience in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. To meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, an individual must exhibit a certain number of symptoms, for a duration of more than one month, and experience clinically significant distress or impairment.

Psychological Maltreatment:

Sometimes called emotional abuse, psychological maltreatment includes acts or omissions by parents or caregivers that have caused, or could cause, serious behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorders. Examples include verbal abuse (e.g. insults, belittling, threats of violence), bullying and the use of coercive control, emotional neglect (e.g. shunning, withdrawal of love), and intentional social deprivation (e.g. isolation, confinement).

School violence:

Indicators of school violence include fatal and nonfatal student victimization, nonfatal teacher victimization, students being threatened or injured with a weapon at school, fights at school, and students carrying weapons to school.

Trauma reminders:

People, places, activities, internal sensations, or other things that trigger memories of a trauma experience. Trauma reminders can cause feelings of fear or distress or put people “on alert”. Trauma reminders can “restart” posttraumatic stress reactions or behavior even years after a traumatic event has occurred.

Traumatic grief:

Childhood traumatic grief occurs following the death of a loved one when the child objectively or subjectively perceives the experience as traumatic. The cause of death can be due to what is usually described as traumatic, such as an act of violence, accident, disaster, or war, or it can be due to natural causes. The hallmark of childhood traumatic grief is that trauma symptoms interfere with the child's ability to navigate the typical grief process.