Wounds of the Gut, Wounds of the Soul: Youth Violence and Community Healing Among Oromos in Toronto

In this article, I tell the story of a community-initiated and youth-led participatory action research project, which was designed and carried out in the Oromo community of Toronto against the disturbing backdrop of youth violence throughout the city. Although the authorial privilege of this article is given to me, this is a project where youth took ownership of the research and turned a community-initiated project into a youth-led initiative. In telling this story, I alternate between the ‘we’ of the project and my individual voice. I discuss the overview of the findings, particularly highlighting the stories of three critical incidents and the role each played in galvanizing the community, in fragmenting the research team, and in facilitating a more profound understanding of the research findings. I also provide a brief overview of the youth healing project that emerged from the research findings. In the concluding section, I analyze implications for social work policy and practice in relation to broader public discourses surrounding the settlement and integration of newcomers in the era of globalization, a term coined to describe the unique local effects of global processes.

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Categorised in: Academic Literature