The impact of gun violence on the mental health of children and adolescents is multi-faceted and individualized.
A fortunate finding was that the trauma aftereffects in young people resolve within a year in 85 to 90 percent of the cases. But the other 10 percent of those young people who experience long-term damage from a single violent incident are generally those whose lives have already been disrupted and otherwise traumatized.
But what about those chronically traumatized children who live in communities where violence is a regular part of daily life, rather than a single traumatic incident? Garabino observed that rarely do those children who live in such “war zone” communities receive the same “psychological first aid” or “therapeutic intervention” as the single-incident children.
“Having served as a psychological expert witness in murder cases for 30 years, I have witnessed the challenges faced by such chronically traumatized young people,” said Garbarino, “as they undergo post-traumatic stress (PTSD) development.” He has also interviewed many prison inmates convicted of murder.
“They are left largely on their own,” he continued, “and any ‘therapy of reassurance’ is not credible: it does no good to tell them ‘It’s OK, things are back to normal,’ because ‘normal’ is the problem.”
Such high exposure to “normal” community violence, Garbarino says, “can lead to hypersensitivity to threat and validation for preemptive assault,” such as that seen in Palestinian children in chronic war zones, like those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In the context of such communities where “poverty, racism, cultural support for extreme corporal punishment (beating of children), and a history of armed street gangs” are often found, these young children (mostly boys) become more prone to perpetrating gun violence themselves. Such young boys often report finding a “sense of family acceptance” in gangs, something that is lacking in their homes. Many, perhaps most, have never had a father living at home. Garbarino noted that where fathers are absent, young boys are at a greater risk of being influenced by chronic violence in their communities.
In speaking of “contamination of consciousness,” Garbarino shared that children and adolescents who have never personally witnessed gun violence can also be vulnerable to the portrayal of gun violence. This manifests in terms of “the audience effects” or “homicidal leakage,” where adolescents pretend that they are the victims of violence in these imagined plays.
Garbarino says that (mostly fatherless) boys who don’t live in neighborhoods with chronic violence can also be negatively influenced by what they read and see. He noted the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado as an example of “the audience effect” on some adolescent killers.
An anthropological investigation showed that young Americans with a mental health diagnosis of schizophrenia are generally more likely to be victims, rather than perpetrators, of violence. However, when images of violence are regularly inputted into the minds of these individuals who are thought to be “out of touch with reality,” patients with schizophrenia can become violent themselves, especially when the implements of violence are readily available.
Garbarino recalls that 25 years ago, he asked a group of suburban 10-year-olds if they could get access to a gun “if they needed to,” and virtually all of them said yes. He says that has not changed today.
He considers these multidimensional aspects of violence—exposure to chronic violence in their communities, fatherless homes, exposure of mentally-challenged young people to constant reports of violence, coupled with the easy availability of weapons—to be “particularly worrisome” as Americans deal with increasing violence in our culture today.
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