Assignment 16- Madison Underwood- Speech

August 3rd , 2019. a normal Saturday morning for most, but one the citizens of El Paso Texas will never forget. At 10:30 a.m., a gunman armed with an AK-47 assault rifle opens fire in a local Walmart leaving 22 dead and 26 injured. Jordan and Andrei Anchondo, both victims of the El Paso shooting, died shielding their two-month old son who now has the fear of his surroundings ingrained into his mind, replacing any memory of his parents (Danner). (PAUSE) News of the shooting spread like wildfire thanks to today’s social media. A video depicting a mother and her children running from the gunman, who can be heard in the background, went viral on Snapchat (Graber). Becoming the top video on the Discovery page, over 93.6 million snapchat users, including almost 70% of teenagers, had access to this video literally at their fingertips (Wade). But is the youth’s awareness of such devastating events a good thing? In 2007, 55% of adolescents reported exposure to community violence. This same year, homicide was the second leading cause of death for young adults ranging from 10-24 years of age (Dierkhising and Guerra). Moreover, according to the Youth Risk Behaviour Study, almost one-third of highschool students claimed to have engaged in at least one or more physical fights between 2010-2011 and over 70% of students in 2004 reported witnessing said fights (Center for Disease Control). These findings are startling since perception of danger positively correlates with weapon carrying, academic performance, and school behavior and attendance. But instead of focusing on how to prevent violence on any and every scale, which has been a lasting problem nowhere near being solved, let’s focus on how to better equip the minds of adolescents to handle such trauma. This thinking prompts my research question: How can the understanding of the perception of danger among our youth be used in order to promote a more safe environment in public school systems?

In order to answer this question, we must first analyze the factors that contribute to child perception of danger. Researchers at the University of North Carolina conducted a study that compared the effects of macrosystems, direct relationships with friends and family, and exosystems, indirect relationships with the community,  on perceptions of school danger. They found that the most potent factors in the macrosystem were the peer and parental relationships and school experiences while exosystem factors included criminality and exposure to community violence. Additionally, for rural areas in particular, where schools often have fewer resources, there is generally less social working. This creates a disconnect between the student, parents, and faculty. Thus, rural areas are hindered substantially more by the macrosystem factors. Similar trends were also found in urban, low-income neighborhoods by researchers at Loyola University. They found a significant correlation between neighborhood danger and psychological distress among African American middle school students and when predicting coping mechanisms in youth, perceptions of danger had a greater impact than did parental monitoring. The researchers recommended emphasizing the role of parents as “informants,” especially for younger children, who according to the researchers, are more likely to internalize their distress (Goldner, et al). This solution of educating the youth while simultaneously improving students’ relationships with their macrosystem and exosystem effectively combats the negative perceptions held by children regarding their surroundings and enables them to deal with their surroundings in a positive way. 

Furthermore, the union between students and adults is effective in creating a sense of security. Rev. Jeffrey Brown in his TED Talk given in March of 2015 explains how he was able to decrease youth violence by 79% in a low-income neighborhood in Boston. He claims that the city of Boston as a whole can attribute their decreasing youth crime rate to the increased sense of community that he and his colleagues had worked to enforce for many years. His method of working with the youth instead of preaching to the youth created a community with interdependent members who grew to rely on one another for safety. The most influential way to reach children is to create a sense of community, allowing children to be able to trust their environment and not grow up in fear. Especially for low-income and rural neighborhoods where children sense the most danger, just a positive mentality alone can change the thoughts, behaviors, and actions of the youth. 

So, having proved the community's immense impact on the mental state and behaviour of children, the next step is to find the best solution to take action to promote safety in schools and because of this research, I propose that increased social working and community involvement be implemented in schools as to better the community as a whole. By mandating that schools focus more on involving parents, not in the grades of their children but in the well-being of their children, schools would be inviting the child’s exosystem to unite in their macrosystem. This unity would create a sense of belongingness among our youth that is unprecedented. Moreover, if schools worked to provide more resources to social workers and committed to utilizing these social workers, the positive perceptions that children hold of their environment would evolve like never before. 

Conclusively, with the rise of mass-media disseminating the ever-present dangers of the real-world, shielding children from the harsh reality of danger until they have reached full maturity is out of the question. Not only do they resort to internalizing any fears and distress this may cause, but the effects on their education hinders their ability to succeed in the future and correlates to increased acts of youth violence such as gun carrying and partaking in physical fights. These children feel alone in the world. They need to know that they have a support system of surrounding peers and adults and upon strengthening those connections, our future generations can grow up in a world that is no longer intimidating, but inviting.