Trauma-Informed Juvenile Justice Systems: A Systematic Review of Definitions and Core Components (2017)

The U.S. Department of Justice has called for the creation of trauma-informed juvenile justice systems in order to combat the negative impact of trauma on youth offenders and frontline staff. Definitions of trauma-informed care have been proposed for various service systems, yet there is not currently a widely accepted definition for juvenile justice. The current systematic review examined published definitions of a trauma-informed juvenile justice system in an effort to identify the most commonly named core elements and specific interventions or policies … The extant literature offers relative consensus around the core domains of a trauma-informed juvenile justice system, but much less agreement on the specific practices and policies (p. 635).