RTA global study of adolescents from low-income neighborhoods revealed that teenagers from Baltimore, a city located just 40 miles from the US capital, are faring worse than their counterparts in Nigeria.
Many people tend to associate child poverty with desperate scenes out of Africa or India. But according to a recent WAVE study, an international survey that examined the living conditions of 15-19 year olds in poor areas in Baltimore, Shanghai, Johannesburg, New Delhi and Ibadan (third largest city in Nigeria), the problem is much closer to home than many people realize.
In the five neighborhoods examined in the study, poverty was the common thread that linked these culturally diverse locations. Differences among the teens in these urban areas became obvious, however, when it came to how they perceived their state of well-being.
Teens from Baltimore and Johannesburg, South Africa, viewed their communities more negatively than the other locations in the study.
The two cities showed the lowest number of teenagers who felt safe in their neighborhoods (percentages ranged from 43.9 percent among males in Johannesburg to 66.1 percent of females in Baltimore), as well as the highest averages for witnessing violence (8.9 percent for males and 7.0 percent among females in Johannesburg; 7.0 percent among males and 6.3 percent among females in Baltimore).
These two cities also showed “poor perceptions about their physical environments, their sense of social cohesion, and their sense of safety within their neighborhoods.”
In Baltimore, teenagers exhibited high rates of mental health problems, drug abuse, sexual violence and teen pregnancy. In comparison, teens in New Delhi, despite residing in a much poorer country than the United States, showed fewer signs of such social behavior.
The lead author of the study, Kristen Mmari, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, said the perception teenagers have of their communities plays a large role in how they behave.
“For example, a young man in New Delhi and a young man in Baltimore may both live in neighborhoods with poor living conditions and little opportunity, but because the teenager in New Delhi is able to see his environment in a more positive light, he is less likely to experience to adverse health problems,” Mmari told Vocativ. “He paints a different picture.”
Also, the prevalence of violence and weak social cohesion, which ranks higher in Baltimore and Johannesburg than in the three other cities, also has an impact. In Baltimore, a high number of teenagers from impoverished homes grow up in single-parent homes, in many cases with the father in prison, while many adolescents in Johannesburg have lost a parent to HIV/AIDS.
“When you look at how they perceive their environments, kids in both Baltimore and Johannesburg are fearful. They don’t feel safe from violence,” Mmari said. “This is something we didn’t really see in other cities. In Shanghai, for example, there wasn’t a great deal of violence. You’d ask kids about their safety concerns, and they would say something like, ‘I’m afraid of crossing a busy street.’”
The study indicates a connection between the prevalence of violence and weak social bonds with issues of a sexual nature. Fifty percent of adolescent girls in Baltimore, and 29 percent in Johannesburg, had been pregnant, while more than 10 percent of teenage girls in both cities said they have been raped or assaulted by someone in the previous year.
The study tends to show that the issue of poverty, together with its many disturbing social symptoms, is a worldwide phenomenon. The results also show that the total wealth of a nation is not necessarily linked to the social circumstances of a large portion of its population.
The study concluded that individuals from Baltimore and Johannesburg give their neighborhoods the lowest ratings, while people from Ibadan and Shanghai recorded the highest ratings. Citizens from New Delhi ranked in the midrange.
“It is worth noting that in spite of its location in a high-income country, the Baltimore neighborhood had some of the lowest ratings,” Freya Sonenstein, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in the study’s introduction. “In contrast, Ibadan with its high ratings is located in a lower middle-income country with substantially fewer resources.”
I relate the problem to a shortage of goats. You can go into the poorest area were people substance farm and live on below poverty level income. You meet them and there children are in school trying hard. Or learning a skill they can sell in the city. As they know the small farm will suport no more people. Thse kids look out the window and see the less learnable herding goats and planting rice by hand. They will be left behind on the farm. But you also hear the parents complain that once those who advance leave. The brain drain to there comunity. So a 2 edged sword there. Then you go into the big city. High wages and jobs. Then go to the slums. Parents work 12 hours a day. Children skip school to set in ther door and look out at the street. No example there to see. But they make more in income than those back on the farm. So something has to motovate these children. They need know that parents have a job. And they need be in a school wre they can look out the window. Were they see others working at hard labor jobs for very little. And make up there own minds that they are not going to work that hard. And the job in the city in a airconditioned building become there dream. And there is adults outside that window that know them setting the example of hard work. From low skills. That can tell there parents who they know there child is acting up. And the parents corecting there kids. This is why Baltamore needs street sweepers and sewer cleaners. Broom in hand and pushcart on the street setting a example of what happens if you drop out. And there 15 year old kids who did drop out cutting the grass in the park with hand shears in the rain or sun. Motivate them.
Sorry to say, but the condition American blacks find themselves in is their own fault for being led to believe they were entitled to something because of the suffering of their ancestors. A number of black writers and commentators have been saying this for years, but since hardly anyone in the ghettos reads anything their words are wasted.