When you’ve traveled around the world and seen the things Amy Brown has seen – grinding poverty in war-torn Armenia, orphans in Central Africa whose parents died of AIDS, villagers in Cambodia who measure wealth by pots of rice – you gain some perspective on the challenges faced by troubled youth and their families back home in South Carolina.
You realize that, no matter how tough of a hand some of these kids have been dealt, there are children in less-developed nations who have virtually nothing – not even hope for the future.
When Brown, an aspiring social worker, looks into the eyes of a child in Charleston who has committed a nonviolent crime, she doesn’t see a statistic in a never-ending cycle of incarceration and recidivism. She sees a person who made a mistake and who, by showing genuine remorse, can turn his or her life around. Unlike children in some parts of the world, these kids have options. They have hope.
Brown entered the College as a nontraditional student in 2012 and plans to graduate this spring. A double major in sociology and religious studies, she recently completed an internship with the Juvenile Arbitration Program in the Charleston County Solicitor’s Office. The diversion program works to keep children who have committed nonviolent offenses out of the adult criminal justice system.
Because of her internship, Brown also received the inaugural Haddad Internship Award, established by Richard ’75 and Shannon Withrock Haddad ’78. The award is given to a sociology major who has worked with troubled youth in previous volunteer experiences, activities or research and has an interest in pursuing a career to help troubled youth. Rich Haddad, who majored in sociology, was inspired to establish this award from his own experience as a college student when he studied in a South Carolina juvenile detention center.
Brown was destined to work in the American criminal justice system. It just took a while for it all to work out. She started out studying criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte before getting hired as a police officer cadet with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. At the age of 21, she was eight weeks into her training at the academy when she learned she was pregnant. She stayed on with the department as a civilian employee for two years before taking an administrative job in the shipping industry, which eventually brought her to Charleston and to the College.
Along the way – through church mission trips to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Armenia (where she helped build a day-care facility, which became an orphanage when no one came back for their kids) and a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam through a study-abroad program at the College – she’s gained valuable insights about the challenges that some children face.
Even the youthful offenders she has worked with through the arbitration program in Charleston have stories that will break your heart. Their opportunities in life have been limited, their views of the world narrowed to their own neighborhood streets. But Brown sees in these children something that she didn’t see in the children of the developing countries she visited. Something they may not even see in themselves yet. She sees a future. And she will do her part to help them see it, too.
