Baltimore, located in the world’s richest nation and just 40 miles from the White House, children exhibited considerably high rates of mental health issues, substance abuse, sexual risk-taking, sexual violence and teen pregnancy.
This, compared to adolescents in New Delhi exhibited far fewer of those behaviors and outcomes, despite residing in a much less prosperous nation, a disturbing new report shows.
When a teenager from East Baltimore was asked to describe his neighborhood, he spoke of “big rats going around in people’s trash, vacant houses full of squatters and needles on the ground.”
A young woman in New Delhi, asked the same question, described the dirt and the “dirty water found lying on the roads,” while a young man in Ibadan, a large city in Nigeria, spoke of the smell of urine and streets “littered with paper and other refuse.”
“When you look at how they perceive their environments, kids in both Baltimore and Johannesburg are fearful. They don’t feel safe from violence,”
“This is something we didn’t really see in other cities. In Shanghai, for example, there wasn’t a great deal of violence. You’d ask kids about their safety concerns, and they would say something like, ‘I’m afraid of crossing a busy street.’
“This is something we didn’t really see in other cities. In Shanghai, for example, there wasn’t a great deal of violence. You’d ask kids about their safety concerns, and they would say something like, ‘I’m afraid of crossing a busy street.’”
“When you think about poor adolescents, you may instantly think of a child in Africa because there are poorer countries there, but it’s not really the country that is important,” Mmari says. “Right here in Baltimore, we have kids who are much worse off than those in African cities. The inner-city kids who are exposed to all this violence are who we should be thinking about.”
Study via: Journal Of Adolecent Health
