Meditations on a Bullet: Violently Injured Young Men Discuss Masculinity, Disability and Blame
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Meditations on a Bullet: Violently Injured Young Men Discuss Masculinity, Disability and Blame R. Noam Ostrander
Published online: 6 February 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract Violently-acquired spinal cord injury (VASCI) has recently emerged as a significant disability category. Identity formation following such a serious injury is important for psychosocial recovery. However, research examining individuals with VASCI is largely limited to epidemiological work prior to the injury and rehabilitation outcomes following the injury. This article details the results from a qualitative study to understand how young men with violently-acquired spinal cord injuries integrate the injury into their sense of self, as well as how the disability interacts with other aspects (e.g., racial/ethnic, gender, etc.) of their identity. Eleven men in this study were all former or current gang members, paralyzed because of their activities. Throughout the interviews four major themes emerged: environmental effects, making sense of the injury, living life on a split-screen, and challenges to masculinity. For the men in this study, the negative associations between disability and dependency affected their ability to integrate their injury positively into their identity. Keywords
Disability Violence Masculinity Spinal cord injury
In 1989, United States Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop wrote that violence was an emergency health care issue in America (Koop and Lundburg 1992). A decade later, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared violence to be the number one public health concern in the world (Krug et al. 2002). Since the WHO’s declaration, overall rates of violence in America have declined, yet homicide remains the leading cause of death for African-American, Hispanic, and Latino males between the ages of 15 and 24 years (National Vital Statistics Reports, 2000). For every violent death, countless violent injuries occur, which has led to an emerging R. N. Ostrander (&) DePaul University, 990 W. Fullerton Ave. Suite 0134, Chicago, IL 60614, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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disability category of individuals with violently-acquired spinal cord injuries (VASCI) (Seelman and Sweeney 1995). Interpersonal violence, defined by the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistics Center (NSCISC, 2003) as gunshots, assaults and other penetrating injuries, increasingly accounted for a larger percentage of spinal cord injuries throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Dijkers 1999; Nussbaum 2004). Since 1990, violence has been the second leading cause of spinal cord injury, accounting for 24.5% of all new spinal cord injuries (Nussbaum 2004). Demographic data indicate that members of the VASCI population generally share at least four similar characteristics: (1) age, (2) race/ethnicity, (3) socioeconomic status, and (4) location (Groce 1998). Although a national average age for the VASCI population is not published, individuals paralyzed due to interpersonal violence are generally between 10 and 29 years
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