Community Violence and the Affects on Children

Large U.S. cities that the rest of the world used to look at in envy are now being transformed into gang-infested hellholes with skyrocketing crime rates. There are several factors fueling this trend. Unemployment among young people is at an epidemic level, about one out of every three U.S. children lives in a home without a father. When I read stats such as these, I am able to apply lived experience to fill in the gaps. What the information does not say, is when a young child experiencing poverty in a gang infested neighborhood is without a father, or someone to guide, nurture, and lend positive support, what happens more often than not, is the gang becomes the nurturer. The gang member takes the place of the father. And the child is lost to the streets, a vicious cycle. Our young are now un-recognizable street soldiers. ..into-gang-infetheeconomiccollapseblo.com/archives

Hopelessness, a negative principle that our children are able to sense, read in our expressions, and are aware of it. Once upon a time, the United States was a place where free enterprise thrived and the greatest cities that the world had ever seen sprouted up from coast to coast. Good jobs were plentiful and a manufacturing boom helped fuel the rise of the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the planet. Now, you may ask, what does this have to do with community violence. Let me share some statistics with you. Did you know that Detroit once actually had the highest per-capita income in the United States? The exact same thing that is happening to Detroit is happening all over America. As stated in the text “Clinicians who work with young children living in neighborhoods in which violence is prevalent relate similar com...

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...n lead to: Low Self-Esteem, children targeted by bullying often suffer from lower self-esteem. They may believe the bully’s insults and feel humiliated. Depression and Anxiety: when children suffer bullying they may experience post-traumatic stress disorder. Community Violence is a serious issue, we grow our best and brightest future adults out of the communities we create today. I am happy to say that today I promote a community free of negative destructive violence.

Many times parental violence and child abuse is kept secret, however, community violence is discussed openly resulting in a ripple effect. Thus, even children who do not directly witness community violence often have knowledge of violent events within the community, or hear repeated accounts of a specific incident, and may form their own mental imagery of the violence. Studies show that in