Kim Thuy Seelinger, research associate professor, has been appointed as the Special Adviser on Sexual Violence in Conflict by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Seelinger is the director of the Center for Human Rights, Gender and Migration.
Special Advisers to the Prosecutor are persons with outstanding professional credentials and expertise in their fields. They provide advice to the Prosecutor within their respective mandates and may assist in training initiatives of the Office.
The appointments, drawn from different regions of the world with cultural, linguistic and gender diversity, bring on-board rich expertise and experiences from different legal systems and specializations. These appointments form part of Interim Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan’s vision to build on what has been accomplished to date and strengthen specialization on a wide range of issues: public international law, sexual violence in conflict, crimes against and affecting children, and slavery crimes.
“I am delighted to welcome such an outstanding group of experts and I am grateful for their willingness to serve as my Special Advisers. I have no doubt that with their enormous experience and hugely impressive credentials, they will significantly contribute to the work of the Office and the cause of international criminal justice. I very much look forward to working with and learning from them,” said Prosecutor Khan.
Khan created various new posts of Special Advisers for the first time, including portfolios on the Crime of Aggression; the Darfur, Sudan Situation; Gender Persecution; Genocide; International Criminal Law Discourse; Islamic Law; Knowledge Transfer; Slavery Crimes and Public International Law.
Learn about the other Advisers on the ICC website.
A virtual conference, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability, will be held October 6 – 10, sponsored by six institutions in the St. Louis region. Seven brief conference sessions, led by nationally recognized Native scholars and other specialists, will address topics such as indigenous models of sustainability and Native foodways. The sessions are open to all, free of charge – registration is required.
The Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies will sponsor Electa Hare-Redcorn to examine how Native women are changing policy in land stewardship by acknowledging and implementing just transitions in agricultural development. Her virtual talk, Pari In Perpetuity: Peeling Back The Layers Of Agricultural Policy In A Prayerful Way, will be held on October 7, 2021, from 12:30-1:30 CT.
Headlining the conference is the Harris Conservation Forum, hosted by the Whitney R. Harris Center for World Ecology at the University of Missouri-St Louis. A featured speaker is Robin Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi), a plant ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor who serves as the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs that draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. She will present “Restoration and Reciprocity: Renewing Relationships with the Land.”
“Repairing ecosystem structure and function must be complemented by restoration of a reciprocal relationship to land. Synergy between indigenous and scientific knowledge can guide the process of healing both land and relationship, through biocultural approaches, leading to reciprocal restoration and justice for the land,” Kimmerer said.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the Kathryn M. Buder American Indian Studies Center at Washington University in St. Louis, the Saint Louis Zoo, Missouri Botanical Garden, the Native American Studies Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability at SIUE.
Learn more and register at the Harris World Ecology Center website. For information, contact Greg Fields, SIUE professor of philosophy (gfields@siue.edu or 618-650-3246).
The Brown School is partnering with the city of St. Louis in “Social Workers for St. Louis,” an innovative new program aimed at hiring social workers and public health professionals to intervene in non-violent situations such as mental-health crises as an alternative to the criminal justice system. The city plans to hire 20-30 social workers beginning next month. The Brown School will help recruit workers, provide professional development for them, and partner in the ongoing planning of the program.
“I believe that social workers are miracle workers,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said in describing the initiative during a panel discussion on Aug. 25 that was part of the Brown School’s Open Classroom series. “I was excited to find ways to partner with Washington University to bring more social workers into our city government.”
“I’ve often said we have to put the ‘public’ back in public safety,” Jones said. “This is an innovative program aimed at integrating mental and behavioral health into public safety.”
“Normal hasn’t worked for many of our residents for years,” she added. “We are looking to disrupt and transform our current public safety system to one that is outward-looking and helps people. The social workers will help the city by connecting people to the right resources and hopefully, fewer people will be involved in the criminal justice system.” She said the social workers will also support city services including public health, victim support, homeless aid and pretrial screening.
Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School, said social workers are trained to understand individual trauma and mental health issues, as well as root causes of problems that affect entire communities. “They’re going to bring a lens of ‘how do we help individuals’ but also ‘how do we also really change what happens to a population?’” she said. “Social workers are disruptive,” she added. They use their tools and skills to try to change the way programs are developed and delivered, and really change business as usual. That’s what you ran on,” she told Jones, “and that’s a very important match for our community.”
“Social workers are trained to tackle issues that are hard to talk about,” McKay said, citing racial equity as an example. “It’s important that we tackle issues that are incredibly important to our city and that are holding us back.” Universities can provide evidence-based approaches and test them, she said. She cautioned that finding the right approaches to make a difference in longstanding issues will not happen overnight. “We are trying to address an urgent, overdue matter,” said McKay. “To deeply understand the root causes and the contextual considerations that really need to inform something new, we have to take the time to really be sure that we understand.”
“These are solvable challenges,” she said. “There are a lot of us who are really wanting to work together in new ways.”
The Brown School will help develop a diverse pool of social workers and service coordinators from a wide variety of backgrounds, including the fields of social work, public health, human services, sociology, mental health, psychology, and criminal justice. The program design has not been finalized and the city will work with the School and other community partners to successfully integrate social workers to support different areas of city government.
Another panelist from the Brown School, Sean Joe, said well-trained social workers with broad expertise will help the city improve its public-safety response system. “We’re going to have a great reduction in criminalizing behavior health and mental health issues,” said Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development. “It makes a difference when you match the right provider to the need.”
Joe says the program will succeed by reducing the number of non-criminal issues that police have to deal with. “It frees up public safety officers to better address crime and people’s sense of personal safety,” he said. He echoed McKay’s observation that university partners will help by applying social science to find out what works, scale it up and sustain solutions over time. “Data-driven decisions are the cornerstone,” he said.
He added that he hopes the program will build multiple venues for the community to express their sense of fairness and concern for their personal safety. “We’re in a unique opportunity as a region … to support and extend the reach of care to young people,” said Joe, who called it “an opportunity to do something no other city has done.”
Serena Muhammad, deputy director of the St. Louis Mental Health Board (MHB), emphasized the importance of listening to community advocates to understand the causes and impact of violence. She serves with the St. Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission.
The initiative will be similar to the commission’s work identifying a proven strategy and then testing it in St. Louis with diverse communities. “People who live in neighborhoods where they’re hearing gunshots as a part of their normal daily noise, their solutions are different from those who go home to peace and quiet every night,” she said. Muhammad said the new program can help strengthen police legitimacy in the community, so residents believe police are honest and trying to protect them. She said the city’s Public Safety Department has committed to listening sessions with community members.
“We have to be very serious about listening to what the community is telling us and act accordingly,” she said. “Our focus has to be on those most vulnerable.” She added that a diverse group of social workers is key to the success of the project. “Lived experience is important,” she said. “We need licensed clinical social workers who are Black males. There are so many families who are hesitant to reach out for services because there’s no one who looks like them who’s going to be at the other end of the call.”
Jones noted that similar approaches to public safety have worked in Denver, where some 9-1-1 calls are redirected to mental health practitioners or social workers, or in Eugene OR, which has been using a similar strategy for over 30 years. “There’s plenty of data and resources that show this works across the country,” she said.
She said the city and Violence Prevention Commission will be having a series of public safety town halls beginning Sept. 23 to hear from city residents about how to reduce violence. “People closest to the problems are closest to the solutions,” she said. Jones added that the new strategy to include social workers has nothing to do with “defunding the police.”
“The changes we are proposing will free up our officers to do the work that they were trained to do and to get other training,” she said. “This is a way to disrupt but also to transform our public safety system for the better.”
Associate Professor Sheretta Butler-Barnes has received a three-year $697,914 National Science Foundation grant for a project titled “Collaborative Research: Black Parents’ Racial Socialization Competencies and Youth Outcomes in Response to Racial Violence.”
She will collaborate with researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on a longitudinal study following Black families over time to understand the impact of Black parents’ stressors and coping with racial violence and the effect on their child’s academic, well-being and activism outcomes.
“Our grant focuses explicitly on Black parents’ race-related experiences, parenting practices and socialization on adolescents’ developmental competencies in two states, Missouri and Virginia, which have both experienced nationally televised racist incidents,” Butler-Barnes said. “The regions were selected not only for feasibility but for the shared similar histories of racial violence. Both regions have experienced racial violence that ranges from racial hate groups (the alt-right movement) to police killings (Michael Brown). Although the racial incidents occurred some time ago, Black families in these regions are still being impacted.”
As tensions continue to run high in the Middle East, a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis finds that adolescents from the conflict-affected region who are residing in the United States have lower levels of resilience and a heightened risk of suicide ideation compared with their American-born peers.
“Given the collapse in Afghanistan and President Biden’s stated commitments, we need to be prepared to not only welcome refugees, but to understand how to support them,” said Lindsay Stark, associate professor and associate dean of global programs. “Our findings show that having a strong sense of hope for the future and a sense of school-belonging bolstered resilience and reduced risk of suicide ideation for students coming from the Middle East.”
Stark, an internationally recognized expert on the protection and well-being of women and children, is lead author of the article “Correlates of Suicide Ideation and Resilience Among Native- and Foreign-Born Adolescents in the United States,” which was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“Our study suggests a need for targeted, culturally responsive interventions to destigmatize mental health and psycho-social well-being, bolster sources of resilience and encourage help-seeking,” said Ilana Seff, research assistant professor at the Brown School and co-author on the study. Stark and her co-authors analyzed quantitative data from the Study of Adolescent Lives after Migration to America in Detroit and Harrisonburg, Virginia.
More than 40% of the sample was born outside the United States, with the majority born in the Middle East and North Africa. The authors modeled outcomes of resilience and suicide ideation using measures of hope, school belonging, stressful life events and being born outside the United States. Adolescents with greater hope and school belonging showed higher resilience, while lower levels of school belonging were correlated with higher levels of suicide ideation. More stressful life events and being born outside the U.S. were both associated with suicide ideation, while those from the Middle East and North Africa regions faced a significant increase in the risk of suicide ideation.
Although Open Classroom, the Brown School’s innovative digital forum for learning, was born of a pandemic, its success appears to ensure that it will continue to exist well after the crisis that spawned it. The program has featured dozens of presentations by faculty and community leaders on current topics in social work and public health and has been attended by thousands of participants from around the U.S. and the world.
“Open Classroom is fulfilling a need I don’t think anyone anticipated,” said Janet Gillow, the Brown School’s director of Professional Development, who oversees the free, lunch-hour Zoom events that are recorded and available on the school’s YouTube channel. “We’ve found a tremendous appetite for learning events that don’t require driving to campus and parking in the garage in the middle of the day. It’s also an open portal that could connect us with prospective students, colleagues at peer institutions, and others all over the world.”
The initiative began early in the pandemic after the office of Dean Mary McKay got requests from community organizations the school had partnered with. The organizations had to send clients home during the initial lockdown but wanted to make good use of their staff’s time. McKay and Gillow developed a series of 10 webinars, and asked for faculty volunteers to lead them.
The program’s first offering on March 30, 2020, was about the pandemic’s impact on older people and was led by Nancy Morrow-Howell, the Betty Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Social Policy. The reception for the inaugural session of the fledgling program was an eye-opener: 170 people attended live and the recording was viewed more than 1,200 times. Another, about the disparate impact of COVID-19 on people of color, was attended by more than 300 and has been viewed on YouTube over 2,000 times.
“Everyone on our faculty stepped up so beautifully,” said McKay, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. “Although the pandemic prevented us from hosting large gatherings in Hillman Hall, Open Classroom has enabled us to offer our local community and communities around the world our expertise and that of other leaders to build understanding and promote evidence-based change, which is the essence of the Brown School’s mission.” She noted that Brown students were engaged to find other providers of free training and created a library of resources.
Open Classroom has offered more than 140 programs and attracted 40,000 viewers from all 50 states and 12 foreign countries, Gillow said. Faculty, professional development instructors and alumni have been among the leaders of the lectures and panels, which have included a mix of scholarly experts, community practitioners, and other community voices. Initial topics were related to COVID-19 but went on to include presentation/discussions on varied subjects, including:
- Africa Speaks, a series of programs sponsored by the university’s Africa Initiative, that promotes collaborative research and learning among faculty and students from WashU and Africa.
- A discussion about social workers in city government, featuring St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones.
- Inclusive Perspectives, a monthly webinar series organized by a group of faculty and staff led by Jean-Francois Trani, associate professor, to raise awareness and advance the goal of full inclusion of people with disabilities.
Cynthia Williams, assistant dean for community partnerships, helped develop Open Classroom and has served as the moderator for many of the sessions, including several that dealt with COVID-19 and race. “Our COVID & Race series has been among our most-viewed programs,” she said, and included local experts such as Dr. Alex Garza, who led the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force; Angela Fleming Brown, CEO of the St. Louis Regional Health Commission; and faculty such as Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development.
“It has been a real pleasure for me,” Williams said. “Those voices helped to give clarity around the science and practice put in place during COVID to keep the community safe and informed in real-time.” She said the virtual classes were as or more impactful than in-person events might have been. “The big difference was the audience could be expanded, easily accessible, and helped us ensure we could get voices of leaders who didn’t have to worry about traveling, parking, and fitting [it] into their packed schedules.”
Williams is particularly proud of the Black History Month classes in 2021 that featured weekly panels and drew large audiences.
As a moderator, Williams said the virtual sessions make it easier to synthesize audience questions. “We get to the facts faster, and get the most out of an hour,” she said. “It makes things much more efficient.”
The efficiency and convenience were appreciated by the audience as well.
“I thought it was a wonderful idea,” said Peggy Keilholz, MSW ’84, a retired social worker who found out about Open Classroom through mailings from the Brown School and so far has attended 28 classes. “I was attending so many I bought notebooks. I had notes flying everywhere. And it had the right price tag: Free.”
She particularly liked the classes that featured public health experts like Timothy McBride, Bernard Becker Professor at the Brown School. “It was information that was extremely useful, and not available in the media,” she said. Most impactful for her was Joe’s reflection that “race” and “racial” were often artificial constructs. “There is only one human race,” she said. “I’ve used that over and over again.”
Perhaps the largest audience for an Open Classroom event was one in which Mark Rank, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare, launched his new book, “Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty.” More than 1,000 people signed up and 500 hundred attended, with many more watching the recorded event later – numbers that Rank said were far more than those he typically receives at in-person book events. “It was a great turnout,” said Rank, who talked for 30 minutes about the book and then opened it up for questions and discussion.
“It was different because when you do stuff in front of people, you get a sense of the crowd and make a connection,” he said. “The great advantage of Open Classroom is I can do it from my office and people from all over can attend. I’d compare it with my virtual teaching. The advantage is I can see everybody and their name, and the discussion tends to be better.”
“I don’t think virtual events will replace in-person learning, but will be another important tool for us to use in the future.”
The disparity of location of the participants can make for some unscripted moments. Rank said he participated in one Open Classroom event with Brown alumnus Stephanie Krauss, who had written a new book and was participating from her hotel room in Florida. Halfway through, the audience could hear a frantic knocking on her door, telling her there was a fire in the building and she had to evacuate (she did), leaving Rank to finish the hour. “I had to wing it,” he said. “It was crazy.”
Carol Klukaczewski, who lives in Wisconsin, heard about Open Classroom from her daughter, Grace Newton, MSW ’21, who recommended an April 2020 class led by Melissa Johnson-Reid, Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work Research, on protecting children during COVID-19. “The information was very current and relevant because COVID was just expanding and people were concerned about kids,” said Klukaczewski, a retired social worker who has attended more than 20 classes.
“Besides providing a window into the world of what my daughter was experiencing (Newton is now a social worker in Madison, WI), the sessions have kept me abreast of cutting-edge research, programs, and strategies that deal with health, poverty, diversity and equity, child welfare and more. Through these extremely accessible programs, I have become even more aware of the need to continue to be active as a citizen. They are a great reminder that we all have a role to play in making this a better society.”
Gillow said Open Classroom has opened previously unimagined doors for the school. “We’re been able to do things we’ve never dreamed of before,” she said. “It’s been a surprise and an adventure. It felt meaningful to do something people found value in, especially when so many people were feeling so much pain.”