Children in Crisis / Crisis Reports

Crisis Reports

• AIDS
• At War
• Child Labour
• Girls
• Inner Cities
• On The Street
• Sexually Exploited

Inner City Children

The boys--ages 9 to 15--walk the school's empty halls.
They are the 'Baby Gangsters', a subset of the Los Angeles gang "18th Street''. Most members of the Baby Gangsters are still in junior high. The youngest, "Lil' Man" is just nine years old. They look forward to the day when they will be hanging with the "older guys". The boys boast about their exploits: stealing cars, beating a rival gang member unconscious, ripping off car stereos for party money. The Baby Gangsters say they protect 18th Street from young challengers in the neighborhood. If they need help, they summon the older homeboys.

Fourteen-year-old Casper carries a tiny pit bull puppy in his arms. They call him Capone, after the big gangster Al Capone. Like the boys, the puppy is in training for trouble. They want a fighting dog, with a big 18th Street tattoo on his soft underbelly. The kids share a joint and take turns exhaling streams of marijuana smoke into the puppy's mouth. When they put him down, he staggers along.

They laugh. "Silent", 13, who says he gets a kick out of setting fires, is trying to ignite a patch of dry grass. He joined 18th Street after his mother died. His father started drinking, Silent says, and was "not taking good care of us". Although his father stopped drinking and is doing better, Silent says "it's too late" because he has found another family--18th Street.¹

Statistics

Gangs in the United States: 

• The Department of Justice estimates there are approximately 30,000 gangs, with 800,000 members, impacting 2,500 communities across the U.S..²
• Violent street gangs are active in 94 per cent of all medium- and large-sized cities in America.³
• On average for each year, gang members committed about 373,000 of the 6.6 million violent victimizations.⁴
• In one survey, 78% of female gang members reported being involved in gang fights, 65% reported carrying a weapon for protection, and 39% reported attacking someone with a weapon.⁵
• Of the more than 40 million Americans that live below the federal poverty line, half of them are children and 60 per cent are non-white.⁶
• 85% of all teenage crime occurs in groups.¹³

| Top |

Children & violence statistics

Crime statistics in the US:

• Homicide is the second leading cause of death among young people ages 10 to 24 overall. ⁷
• In 2004 12.1% of violent crime clearances nationwide involved only juveniles.⁸
• In 2003, 21% of students aged 12-18 reported that street gangs were present at their school during the previous 6 months.
• In 2003, 7% of students aged 12-18 reported that they had been bullied (for example, picked on or made to do things they did not want to) at school during the previous 6 months.
• In 2003, 33% of students in grades 9-12 reported having been in a fight.
• In 2003, 17% of students in grades 9-12 reported they had carried a weapon.⁹
• In 2003, students aged 12-18 reported being victims of serious violence at a rate of 12 crimes per 1,000 students away from school and 6 crimes per 1,000 students at school.
• In 2003, students aged 12-18 were victims of about 740,000 violent crimes and 1.2 million crimes of theft at school, 29% of students in grades 9-12 reported that drugs were made available to them on school property, and 9% of students were threatened or injured with a weapon on school property.¹⁰
• In 2003, 18 per 1,000 juveniles were victims of serious violent crimes - that is, homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery - and 15 per 1,000 juveniles were reported by victims to have committed such crimes.¹¹

America is at war--on the streets of the inner-cities. The soldiers are children and youths.

Children & the drug trade

To meet the growth in demand for crack and marijuana, the drug industry has recruited young sellers, many of whom saw this as their only viable economic opportunity. Drug dealers become symbols of success. At the same time the increasingly harsh criminal penalties imposed on adult drug dealers has led drug traffickers to recruit juveniles. Where once children started dealing drugs only after they had been using them for a few years, today the sequence is often reversed. Many children start using drugs only after working for older drug dealers for a while. Two-thirds of all inner-city male youth, both black and white, believe that they can make more money from crime than from legitimate work.¹²

References:

¹L.A. Times, November 17, 1996
²US Department of JUstice - www.usdoj.gov/
³Journal of American Medical Association
⁴Bureau of JUstice Statistics Crime Data Brief June 2005 Violence by Gang Members, 1993-2003
⁵www.safeyouth.org
⁶FBI
⁷Centres for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov/
⁸FBI
⁹North American Transnational Youth Gangs: Breaking the Chain of Violence by Stephen Johnson and David B. Mulhausen, PhD, Backgrounder #1834 March 21, 2005
¹⁰Indicators of School Crime and Safety 2005 NCES
¹¹National Criminal Justice Reference Center http://www.ncjrs.org/index.htm/
¹²Teen Violence, www.teen-violence.com/stats.html
13ibid.