Our Centers for Ethics:

Youth Violence

---

Statistics

• In 1933, 75% of deaths among youth between 15 and 19 stemmed from natural causes. Sixty years later, in 1993, 80% came from homicide and unintentional injury. [AMA, Youth and Violence, December 2000]
  
  
• Among boys, 42% of high schoolers and 32% of middle schoolers believe it is okay to hit or threaten a person who makes them angry. One in five (20%) of the girls agrees. [Josephson Institute, 2006 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth]
  
  
• An even higher percentage resorts to violence: 88% of all boys and over 76% of girls surveyed said they hit someone in the past 12 months because they were angry. [Josephson Institute, 2006 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth
  
  
• In study after study, about 30-40 percent of boys and 15-30 percent of girls reports having committed a serious violent offense by age 17. [Youth and Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General, January 2001]
  
  
• In 2004, 5,292 young people ages 10 to 24 were murdered -- an average of 15 each day [Youth Violence Facts at a Glance, Summer 2007, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)]
  
  
• A quarter (25%) of high school boys and 12% of middle school males took a weapon to school at least once in the past year. [Josephson Institute, 2006 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth]
  
  
• In the United States, almost 16 million adolescents -- including 70% to 95% of children in our inner cities -- have witnessed some form of violent assault, including robbery, stabbing, shooting, murder, or domestic abuse. [AMA, Youth and Violence]
  
  
• Persons under the age of 25 accounted for nearly 50 percent of those arrested for murder and 62 percent of those arrested for robbery in 2005. [Youth Violence Facts at a Glance, Summer 2007, CDC]
  
  
• Nearly 60 percent of boys who researchers classified as bullies in grades six through nine were convicted of at least one crime by the age of 24. Even more dramatic, 40 percent of them had three or more convictions by age 24. ["Bullying Prevention is Crime Prevention," Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, 2003]
  
  
• Though gun use and lethal violence among young people has declined since the peak year of 1993, nonfatal violence has not. [Youth and Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General]
  
  
• The proportion of students injured by a weapon at school has not declined since 1993. [Youth and Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General]
  
  
• The number of youths involved with gangs has not declined and remains near the peak levels of 1996. [Youth and Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General]
  
  
• Handguns are used in 80 percent of homicides, nearly 70 percent of suicides and nearly all accidental shootings. [Prevention First]
  
  
• Children in adult jails commit suicide eight times as often as their counterparts in juvenile facilities. In addition, children in adult facilities are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and twice as likely to be beaten by jail staff. [Children’s Defense Fund, 1998]
  
  
• In 1992, handguns killed 33 people in Great Britain, 36 in Sweden, 97 in Switzerland, 60 in Japan, 13 in Australia, 128 in Canada, and 13,200 in the United States. [Handgun Control Inc., cited in The Washington Post, 1998]
  
  
• Large cities claim that 72% of their school violence is attributable in part to gang activity. [National League of Cities 1994 survey of 700 U.S. cities]
  
  

---