Community Violence and Psychological Distress in South African and U.S. Children

Abstract

This study compared the relation between exposure to community violence and psychological distress in children in the United States and the R.S.A. (South Africa). Interviews were conducted with 247 children (49% male) between the ages of 8 to 13 years from five Cape Town township schools, and 162 children (49% male) ages 7 to 13 in a summer day program in St. Louis, MO. The Nadel, Spellman, and Alvarez-Canino Victimization Scale ( H. Nadel, M. Spellman, T. Alvarez-Canino, L. Lausell-Bryant, and G. Landsberg, 1996 , The cycle of violence and victimization: A study of the school-based intervention of a multidisciplinary youth prevention program, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vol. 12, pp. 109–119) was used to measure exposure to violence and Richters, Martinez, and Valla’s (1990) instrument ( J. E. Richters, P. Martinez, and J. Valla, 1990 , Levonn: A cartooned-based structured interview for assessing young children’s distress symptoms. Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health) was used to measure psychological distress. Reported exposure to community violence was generally higher in the R.S.A. sample than in the U.S. sample. However, children in the St. Louis sample reported more psychological distress. Interactions revealed that for young children and for low levels of witnessed school violence, U.S. children reported greater distress, with no sample differences at older ages, or at high levels of witnessed school violence. We suggest that children in the R.S.A. sample are experiencing less psychological distress because community violence is more normative in the R.S.A.

Children's exposure to community and war violence and mental health in four African countries

“…In terms of the role of context, Shields et al (2013) find an interaction effect in the association between children's neighborhood victimization on symptoms of psychological distress across countries in a comparison of children in South Africa and the USA. In a plot of the interaction, they found at low and high levels of victimization in the neighborhood, children had higher levels of psychological distress in the USA than South Africa.…”

“…In support of path a indicating the structural socio-demographic correlates of children's exposure to violence, studies show an older age, male gender, and mixed race and Black race/ethnicity are associated with more violent victimizations and exposure to violence in Africa (Fincham, Altes, & Seedat, 2009; Kaminer et al, 2013; Martin et al, 2013; Shields et al, 2013; Shields et al, 2009a). As per studies in the U.S., some patterns support higher levels of female exposure to rape (e.g.…”

“…In studies of children in South Africa, 32.5% to 40.3% have seen someone killed or a dead body in their neighborhood (Kaminer et al, 2013; Martin, Revington, & Seedat, 2013; Shields et al, 2013). War-related violence exposure is also notable where in Sierra Leone, having faced a civil war between 1991-2002, Betancourt, Borisova et al (2010) found almost 90% of children had witnessed war-related violence (e.g., massacres, raids on villages).…”

“…In South Africa, for example, the homicide rate is 5 times the global average (Kaminer, Hardy, Heath, Mosdell, & Bawa, 2013), and in Cape Town specifically the homicide rate is 88 per 100,000 compared to the estimated global rate of 28.8 per 100,000 (Ward, Martin, Theron, & Distiller, 2007). In another comparison, the homicide rate is estimated at 34.1/ 100,000 in 2009-2010 in South Africa compared to 5/100,000 in US in 2009 (Shields, Nadasen, & Pierce, 2013). In East Central Africa, many children in Rwanda were exposed to war-time violence during the 1994 genocide, where as many as 1 million people of all ages of a total population of 7.5 million were killed (Dryegrov, Gupta, Gjestad, & Mukaboheli, 2000; Neugebauer et al, 2009).…”

“Everything Happened So Quickly” Living Through Events Immediately Before and After Initial Breast Cancer Diagnosis: An Exploratory Study of the Experiences of a Group of Women in Cape Town, South Africa

“…The areas in which these women reside are predominantly mono-racial and are also plagued by high levels of community violence, gang activity [5], drug and alcohol abuse and economic marginalization [6].…”