What Does It Mean for Your Work to be Trauma-Informed?
It’s no secret that your hosts are history and pop culture nerds, not mental health professionals. In our latest episode, we read chapters 31-35 of Sense and Sensibility through the lens of trauma, using the principles of trauma-informed care to guide our reading. Because we used the work and research of many other people to figure out what on earth it means to be trauma-informed, we wanted to take a moment to give a brief primer on what that research is.
In short — don’t take our word for it, listen to the experts!
Origins of Trauma-Informed Care
The idea of trauma-informed care actually goes back to the 1970s, when veterans of the Vietnam War began returning home. The soldiers needed care for both the physical and mental traumas they had experienced. While physical traumas like injuries and missing limbs were easy to see and diagnose, the language around mental trauma was still developing.
There was no name for PTSD yet. Soldiers who had come home traumatized from earlier wars were told they had “shellshock,” “neurosis,” or just not treated or diagnosed at all. The care that veterans received in the 70s led directly to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder being added to the DSM-III in 1980.
Slowly, our understanding of trauma expanded to women and children. Five years after PTSD was officially recognized, the International Society for Traumatic Stress was founded in the United States. It wouldn’t be until 1998 that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) sponsored a study on the trauma experienced by women, and it was 2001 when they worked with Congress to establish the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative.
The research of the nineties and early 2000s gave us a better understanding of how childhood trauma in particular can affect our physical and mental health decades down the line, and trauma-informed care has been developed in response.
What Is It?
Here’s the Spark Notes version, so to speak — trauma-informed care, or a trauma-informed approach, recognizes that you need to have the full picture of a person’s life in order to get them the care that they need. It means you recognize the impact of trauma, can identify the signs, and use that knowledge to form guiding policies, procedures, and practices.
Here are the core principles, according to SAMHSA:
Safety
Trustworthiness & Transparency
Peer Support
Collaboration
Empowerment, Voice & Choice
Cultural Context
Where Trauma-Informed Care Is Used
You’ll mostly find people putting this into practice (or using the term at all) in healthcare. It helps patients identify and address trauma, build more trusting relationships with their healthcare providers, and improve their long-term health outcomes.
However, it’s not just in the medical field. Trauma-informed care shows up in all human services — social work and education especially.
In education, for example, a trauma-informed approach might look like a district creating additional programs and resources for children who are acting out, instead of punishing them. In social work, it helps ensure that someone seeking out services isn’t retraumatized.
How Do I Read Through a Lens of Trauma?
However you want to! There is no right or wrong way to read or analyze a book. The way we went about it was by applying the core idea of trauma-informed care — asking what happened to someone instead of what’s wrong with someone — to how we understood the characters in Sense and Sensibility.
Instead of asking what’s wrong with Lucy Steele, for example, we asked ourselves what might have happened in her past to make her constantly seek validation or envy from other people. And when we discussed the reveal of Colonel Brandon’s story, we took into account how the trauma in his past affected his personality as shown in the novel.
You might go about it totally differently — and if you do, please tell us how! Drop us a comment below, or listen to us perform our own reading.
How Many Black People Were in the Regency Aristocracy, Anyway?
Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Netflix’s Bridgerton series.
With the success of Netflix’s Bridgerton — it’s quickly become the platform’s biggest original series ever — people naturally have questions about what that era actually looked like. For people who are used to homogenous (read: white) period dramas, Bridgerton was probably more than a little shocking. The showrunners set out to create a diverse cast and hired Black actors and actresses for some of the show’s major roles, like Queen Charlotte (above) and, of course, the swoon-worthy Duke of Hastings.
Cue the thinly-veiled outrage. It’s not that we don’t want to see Black people in period dramas, it’s just…that…it’s not period accurate! There we go.
People protesting diversity in the name of historical accuracy have a bit of a rude awakening in store. In honor of Black History Month, our episode on race and the Regency, and our latest episode on Regency-era class, let’s take a look at the Black upper-class in Britain during Jane Austen’s time.
Black Population in England
First, let’s make it clear — there were Black people in England before World War II. There were Africans in Britain before the people we know today as the English made it there.
Most people are familiar with Hadrian’s Wall, a relic of the Roman Empire. What you might not know is that “a division of Moors” from North Africa helped to guard it in the 3rd century AD. They were listed in an official Roman register, giving us strong historical proof that Black people were in England approximately…1200 years before most people believe Black British history begins.
As you fast forward through the years, you have Black people represented in famous plays like Othello, serving in the British Navy, and entering the public sphere as writers. The population was small, but it was present. By the Regency Era, the time period in which Bridgerton is set and when Jane Austen wrote most of her novels, Black people were a normal part of British life.
Most sources agree that there were about 20,000 Black people living in England at this time, most of them concentrated in industrial areas or port cities.
Black Representation in the Aristocracy
Here is where Bridgerton did take some historical liberties — the majority of the Black population in England at this time was working class. To have a TV show without the specter of racism lurking just out of frame, the writers had to create an alternate universe where racism didn’t affect our heroes’ storylines.
It let the show still be soapy and fun without getting too serious, and people of color could just enjoy seeing themselves on screen without race-related stress. It’s nice to watch people who look like you dealing with petty problems like who’s in love with who and not “my love interest doesn’t think I’m fully human.”
However, even though the real-life “Ton” was not a magically accepting and diverse place, there were actually Black people dotted throughout Britain’s upper-class.
One of the most famous examples is Dido Belle, whose story was most recently adapted for the big screen by Amma Asante in 2013’s Belle. She was born into slavery to an African woman and an English gentleman, Sir John Lindsay. However, she was raised with her cousin in the house of Lord Mansfield, a judge whose decisions helped move the country closer to abolishing slavery.
Later in the century, in the Victorian Era, Sara Forbes Bonetta was born a Yoruba princess, was sold into slavery, and through a wild sequence of events ended up sent to England, where she met the queen. Queen Victoria was so impressed with her that she raised her as her goddaughter. When Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice was married, Sara was there as a guest.
Sara Forbes Bonetta in 1862. Image via Wikimedia Commons
And at the highest level, there’s been some debate over whether or not Queen Charlotte herself had enough African ancestry to be considered Black.
A small number of free Black families owned property and were wealthy enough to send their children overseas to receive an education. While Bridgerton's representation of the aristocracy might be a fantasy, the idea of Black people in the upper-crust of historical British society is not.
Why Didn’t I Learn This in School?
Racism.
But if you want to keep learning, check out Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer or Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, which is available for free from Dartmouth.
If reading a book isn’t in the cards for you right now, this BBC video is a great primer under eight minutes.
Final Takeaways
Casting Black people in a period drama isn’t a symptom of PC culture, it’s not necessarily historical revisionism — it’s actually getting closer to how the past truly looked. At the same time, fans of color finally get to see themselves represented on screen in a way that feels affirming instead of demeaning.
Black history hasn’t been taught as exhaustively as it deserves to be, but with shows like Bridgerton, Sanditon, and other period pieces that have decided to get creative with casting, more people are excited to start learning. That’s a win, no matter how you look at it.
Craving more content like this? Subscribe to Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins. New episodes are released every other Wednesday.
How We Chose Our Premiere Date
The idea for Reclaiming Jane came about in August 2020, after Lauren texted Emily out of the blue with an idea. This admittedly happens about once a week, but this time, the idea actually went from brainchild to reality.
It took some time to come up with a name and a podcast structure, but both were settled by September. By October (with lots of help from LaTasha Bundy, who told us what to buy to sound semi-professional), we’d secured all the equipment necessary to start recording. When to start was completely up to us. So, naturally, we picked the nerdiest premiere date possible.
December 16, 2020 is Jane Austen’s 245th birthday. We can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by sharing our first episode with you.