Sandra L. L. Bloom, co-author of 'Bearing Witness: Violence and Collective Responsibility' shares her thoughts on young people and violence.

Sandra Bloom, MD
Linda Rich, MA
Theodore J. Corbin, MD
John A Rich, MD, MPH
The Center for nonviolence and Social Justice
Drexel University School of Public Health

With the number of killings reported in the news, it can be easy to lose sight of all the young people in the inner city who make up the “walking wounded.” Violence is contagious. Community violence affects everyone in the community - and that means all of us. Many young people in the inner city have been victims of nonfatal violence - shot, stabbed or assaulted. Many others have witnessed violence against their friends or family, endured graphic, daily news reports about neighborhood violence or been treated as perpetrators, even when they are not.

Sometimes the trauma that these young people go through leaves them feeling raw and unsafe and even threatened by their own peers. We now know a great deal about the science of trauma. Over the past 20 years the scientific community has accumulated a vast store of knowledge about how the brain and the body are negatively affected by repetitive violence. In many ways, urban youth become like the traumatized veterans who return from Afghanistan and Iraq whose bodies and minds are stressed to the point where they cannot distinguish between real and imagined threat.

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Watch CNN's David Mattingly report on Blair Holt, one of 28 Chicago school kids murdered last year.

David Mattingly
360° Correspondent

I first met Ronald Holt about a year ago. He had recently lost his young son Blair, to a wave of violence that was tearing through the streets of Chicago’s southside. Blair Holt was an innocent bystander caught in a gang-related shooting on a city bus. He was killed while pulling a classmate out of harm’s way. His death became a rallying point for neighborhoods demanding tighter gun laws, more economic opportunity for young people and better parenting.

Ronald Holt was one of the people leading the charge. Instead of becoming consumed by grief, he turned it into a weapon. He lobbied the state legislature hoping to restrict gun sales and he has since attended hundreds of public rallies and memorials. I returned to Chicago to find Holt at one of these rallies and I learned he has a new enemy…despair. The past year has produced very few victories.

Holt tells me he finds strength by talking to his departed son and imagines the teen encouraging him to keep going. He needs the pep talk often. So far this school year 24 students from Chicago Public Schools have been killed. That is a rate even faster than what we saw last year.

Program Note: Watch David Mattingly’s report Friday 10p et on 360°

Enough desks to fill a classroom sat empty in a downtown plaza Tuesday, each bearing a pair of sneakers and representing one of 20 Chicago Public Schools students killed by gunfire this school year. (AP)

On Monday morning, March 31, I visited Simeon Career Academy in the wake of another senseless shooting of a teenager. This one took the life of Chavez Clarke, a young man who on March 29 was attending Saturday classes at Simeon to try to work toward graduation. He was gunned down in the school’s parking lot shortly after finishing classes.

As I talked with students on Monday, I was struck by their sense of outrage over the prevalence of guns in their lives and by their passion to do something about it. Led by Simeon junior Ronnie Mosley, the school quickly organized 10 busloads of students to attend an anti-violence rally that was being organized for the next day in downtown Chicago by Father Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina Church who has been a tireless advocate for stronger gun-control laws.

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