CINCINNATI -- Dr. Victor Garcia has seen a 300 percent increase in the number of children with gunshot wounds since he started work at Cincinnati Children's Hospital's trauma ward, he said at a City Council committee meeting Tuesday.
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Garcia and others worry that, without help and community support, these young victims could be so scarred by their experiences that they someday hurt someone else.
"Much of what we see as far as gang violence, at least when it's studied, is a consequence of post-traumatic stress," Garcia said. "(Existing programs) aren't dealing with the root cause, and I think that there has to be a balance."
The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (then known as "shell shock") entered popular consciousness in the aftermath of World War I and still refers mostly to the psychological disturbances experienced by veterans of military combat, but anyone who has experienced a traumatic event can develop it.
Those events range from being the victim of violence to witnessing it to spending prolonged periods in poverty or starvation, but they can all lead to the same outcome: Long-term emotional disturbance, feelings of panic and helplessness, and -- sometimes -- aggression and violence as attempts to regain control over the world.
A 2012 study published in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law found that more than half of subjects with PTSD had been arrested or incarcerated; around 20 percent of them had specifically been charged with a violent crime.
In Cincinnati, Garcia said the city can fight these outcomes by encouraging its anti-poverty initiatives to collaborate with one another and with the neighborhoods most affected by violence and poverty. According to Garcia, just five percent of people born into poverty in Cincinnati ever escape it. When they remain trapped, they become more vulnerable to violence and trauma.
"I think it's really important that, as we begin to look at our neighborhoods as places ripe for development, we understand what those developments have to be, how they're going to affect those neighborhoods and how very important it is for people to have a voice in what's going to happen there," Councilman Wendell Young said.
Garcia agreed.
"Neighborhood matters more than we ever realized," he said.
