A report from the University of New Hampshire says there has been an increase in juvenile murders nationwide since the 1970's. The report was released today, and says kids of different ages face different risks.
NHPR's David Darman has more.
The report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, says kids in the United States are murdered 3 times more often than children in any other developed country. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH, says the study found young children can be most at risk inside the home.
06 30 there are many young kids who are murdered by stepfathers and boyfriends, you know, some of the most recent cases here in nh, the Jeffrey Trudeau case, the tiffany bortner case in dover. These are not at all untypical of kids who are killed by fathers and boyfriends in kind of unstable family situations�.06 100
The report says kids beyond the toddler stage are less at risk inside the home. When they get older, they begin to face danger on the streets. Finkelhor says teens are murdered most often by other teens, or fall prey to drug or gang violence. Finkelhor says the media often focuses on one type of teen murder to the exclusion of other causes, which does little for kids who may face great risk in their neighborhoods, or in streets and parks outside their schools.
04 102� for a couple of years in the late 1990�s we got very concerned about homicides in schools. There had been a string of those kinds of things. Turned out that even in 1999 when columbine occurred, there were only 30 kids who were murdered in schools altogether a sort of drop in the bucket of the 1800 or so who were murdered nationwide. 04 134
The report points out that kids in urban areas are more likely to be murdered than kids in suburban or rural places. It also indicates that race is a factor in who is murdered. African American kids are killed more often than kids in other ethnic groups. But Jill Ward of the Children�s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. says the mortality statistics for all teenagers are disturbing, because of an interesting twist in the grim data of teen deaths.
19 226 I think minority youth in urban areas, we have found consistent with what others have found, are more likely to be victims of homicide, and sort of on the flip side of that, which is interesting, is that the same age range of kids in rural areas are more likely to be victims of suicide ..19 252
Ward says families, private organizations, and government should focus more on the specific threats children face at different stages of their young lives.
