The Washington-based news service Children’s Express this month published a harrowing account of violence among young people.
The book, Voices From the Future: Our Children Tell Us About Violence in America, is a collection of interviews conducted by the Children’s Express teenage editors with children and adolescents who had been perpetrators or victims of violence. Included are portraits of gang members, skinheads, abused children, foster children, and others who have suffered violence.
It also includes a roundtable discussion with Children’s Express editors on how young people can help break the cycle of violence and build a better society tomorrow.
For many of the youths interviewed, school was a place that reflected the culture of violence and drug abuse they faced daily in their homes and on the streets.
But others stress in the interviews that school offered them stability and a chance to escape to a better life. “School was my church, it was my religion,’' said 17-year-old Naomi. “It was a constant, the only thing that I could count on every day.’'
Jonathan Kozol, the author and social activist, calls the book “an oral history of poverty and violence in the United States, in which the questions have been posed and answers given by young people.’'
Copies of the book, published by Crown Publishers, are available in bookstores for $19 each.
To respond to growing reports of racial tension and violence here and abroad, the American Counseling Association has published a book that may help educators and school counselors deal with racial intolerance in schools.
The book focuses on “transcultural counseling,’' a relatively new specialty in the field that helps individuals examine their own assumptions about diversity so they can understand and respect people from other cultures.
The book’s editor, John McFadden, a professor of educational psychology at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, notes that world events are increasingly being shaped by racial, ethnic, and cultural issues.
The book includes a theoretical discussion, individual chapters on counseling from different racial and ethnic viewpoints, and a number of case studies.
“Counselors cannot be expected to solve the greater problems of the world,’' Mr. McFadden said, “but they cannot be exempted from seeking new and unique solutions to problems of clients that emanate directly from the greater struggle.’'
Copies of Transcultural Counseling: Bilateral and International Perspectives are available for $24.95 each for association members and $28.95 each for nonmembers. To order, call (800) 347-6647.--G.B.
