Adolescent Exposure To Deadly Gun Violence Within 500 Meters Of Home Or School: Ethnoracial And Income Disparities

Racial Disparities in Child Exposure to Firearm Violence Before and During COVID-19

“…An additional advantage of GVA data is timeliness, compared with government data sources with lags that approach 1 year. 20 For similar reasons, prior studies have used GVA data to study neighborhood effects 10 , 21 , 22 and COVID-19 effects 12 on firearm violence.…”

“… 8 These exposures disproportionately burden children of color, especially Black children. 9 , 10 A study of fifth graders in 3 U.S. cities found that the rate of witnessing a threat of injury with a firearm in the past year was 20% for Black youth, 11% for Latinx youth, and 5% for White youth. 11 These racial disparities in exposure further reinforce disparities in other adverse child outcomes.…”

Inequities in Community Exposure to Deadly Gun Violence by Race/Ethnicity, Poverty, and Neighborhood Disadvantage among Youth in Large US Cities

“…We characterized the prevalence and intensity (or dose: number of incidents) of community exposure to gun homicides 1 across cross-classified categories of distance and recency as follows: living within 600, 800, and 1300 m of an incident in which an individual was killed with a firearm as a result of interpersonal violence in the 14-, 30-, and 365-day periods before youth were interviewed at Year 15. Distance measures correspond to the approximate radius of census block groups (600 m), subjective perceptions of a typical neighborhood (800 m), and census tracts (1300 m) [ 36 ], and the time periods are consistent with those used in prior research of the effects of community violence exposure on social and health outcomes [ 21 , 27 , 28 ]. Because some youth (19% of the study sample) were interviewed in 2014 when less than 1 full year of GVA data were available, we do not include them in our estimates of past-year exposure.…”

“…Household poverty status was measured as the ratio of total household income to the prior year poverty thresholds established by the US Census Bureau and categorized as follows, consistent with past research [ 27 ]: low (200% or more of the poverty threshold), moderate (100–199% of the poverty threshold), and high poverty (less than 100% of the poverty threshold).…”

“…Most scholarship that has adopted this broader perspective on community exposure to violence has relied on small or geographically restricted populations, due in part to the absence of a harmonized national database of violent incidents in the USA [ 26 ]. A handful of studies using population-based samples of children and families have increased the knowledge base on exposure to violence in broader community context and the generalizability of its consequences: one study found racial-ethnic and income inequalities in past-year exposure to deadly gun violence occurring within 500 m of youths’ homes and schools [ 27 ], and two studies have documented negative impacts of these exposures on youths’ mental health and behavioral outcomes [ 28 , 29 ]. However, detailed information on the distribution and determinants of this problem is still lacking.…”