[Alex3917]

"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time."

That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf

N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.

[napoleond]

1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have

No I wouldn't, because:

a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds.

b) I doubt the system is stochastic. It's probably more likely for the 1 in 20 from year 1 to see another few of the 7 shots in those 7 years (due to geographic and socio-economic factors) than it is for the other 19.

In other words, even for a country where gun violence is rampant, a study population where 35% of children below 7 have seen someone get shot is far from average.

[Alex3917]

Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that, "Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2 percent) had witnessed a shooting."

So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.

[rlanday]

What the hell!? One in five teenagers has witnessed someone being shot? I must live a sheltered life…

[jvm]

> E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%.

This is insane logic. Think about your 20 closest friends. Do you think that 7 of them saw somebody get shot by the time they were 7? I don't know where you grew up but that is definitely not my experience! Continuing the same reasoning, 60% of all 18 year olds should have seen someone be shot. Again, not where I come from.

[Alex3917]

Supposedly it is at least 22.2% by ages 14-17 though, so perhaps 25% by age 18. So it is the same order of magnitude at least as the naive assumption. My point is just that exposure to violence isn't especially rare across the entire population.

[ims]

The average is misleading here. Where do you think those 1 in 20 kids mostly live?