The findings of recently concluded research in the United States revealed that a murder in the neighbourhood significantly lowered a child’s score on an IQ test and that the effects lasted for about a week to nine days. This was the case, the research found, even when the child did not directly know the victim or witness the killing. According to a report on the research published on Reuters’ website, New York University professor Patrick Sharkey who conducted the study said that the findings had implications both for crime control efforts and for the US’s heavy reliance on standardized tests. The study was conducted in Chicago, a high-crime city in Illinois in the US and researchers collected details of 6,000 murders and the results of two surveys of children and families.
Death itself invokes trauma. When someone we love or know dies, regardless of the cause, it affects us mentally and/or emotionally. Sometimes even when we know beforehand that the person is close to death; suffering perhaps, and we should feel relieved, there is still a sense of loss, some sadness or distress. When the person is one of our peers, we are reminded of and forced to consider our own mortality, because although death is certain, the average person does not often consider it until and unless s/he is faced with its reality. No one but the terminally ill, or perhaps those on the frontlines of a battle, truly lives each day thinking it might be the last.
Tragic death, whether by happenstance or intent, heightens the trauma; the more gruesome the tragedy, the more traumatic it is. Persons far removed, physically that is, from murders and fatal accidents, who might only read of them online or in the newspapers or hear of them on the news and who have absolutely no connection to the victims, have been known to experience grief, rage or fear. Actual witnesses, relatives and friends would therefore have much stronger emotions to grapple with.
For children it is 1,000 times worse. Perhaps because of their innocence, children tend to feel that bad things only happen to people far away. This shows in their carefree play, in the way they take risks, in the way they would trust strangers if they were not told constantly not to. Children who have parents believe that their parents – whether one or two – can protect them from any and everything. A murder close to home – whether of a parent, sibling, relative, friend or just someone in the neighbourhood – shatters that confidence and innocence. Normal reactions are anger, fear, confusion and shock, and while children are processing the tragedy and experiencing the gamut of emotions, it usually is not possible for them to switch off and deal with anything else. Counselling, immediately following the event, should be automatic, but this does not always happen. In Guyana, it rarely does.
A murder in the neighbourhood is fast becoming a common occurrence in this country. And if the current pace is not slowed, it will not be long before every one of us, or worse yet every child, will know someone who was murdered. Most adults have coping mechanisms, but what of our children? What of the children whose mothers, fathers, siblings, relatives and friends are being murdered or killed? Are we not, by the continued exposure to killing conditioning our children to violence? Are we not by our silence, by our lack of sensitivity to what they are experiencing, destroying cultural mores and, perhaps unknowingly, setting up a value system that embraces violence and killing as a way of life? Isn’t it time for a reality check?
