In Englewood on Friday night, two women who volunteered with Mothers Against Senseless Killings were shot to death on the very corner where moms and kids regularly gather to claim a space for food, games and friendliness. It was a drive-by shooting. Each woman, Chantell Grant and Andrea Stoudemire, was hit several times in the chest. Each woman had four children, the youngest of whom just turned 1 year old.
Two days later, a sister, brother and two cousins walked to get a pizza in East Garfield Park, hours before dark. A car circled around and shots blasted out, grazing three of the children. None was badly hurt by bullets. But there were psychological wounds.
“I was scared and I was crying,” said Nylia, 12, who was not injured in Sunday’s shooting. Her 10-year-old brother “came running to me and told me he was hit,” their grandmother said. “He was shaking and scared.” Their cousins, 15 and 14, also had minor injuries, reported Alice Yin in the Tribune.
These mothers and children were among at least 47 people shot in Chicago over the weekend, eight of them fatally.
Chicago’s intolerable violence presents problems of grief, terror and multiplication. Each shooting expands the number of traumatized Chicagoans: family and friends of victims, neighbors, schoolmates. They include the eight children of Grant and Stoudemire who lost their mothers. And Nylia and her brother and cousins. Even children too young to understand are busily absorbing the chaos around them.
While homicides in Chicago dropped in the last few years, the number of children younger than age 5 living in high-homicide areas grew. About 60% of Chicago’s youngest children lived in communities where 91% of homicides took place, according to a new analysis by the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, which focuses on early child development. This suggests that the problem of children exposed to violence, and cared for by adults who also suffer because of it, will have a deep hold on many of Chicago’s next generation.
Services and support haven’t kept up with science on childhood trauma. Researchers know that early exposure to violence can have lifelong effects, especially before age 5, when the brain is growing rapidly. Children exposed to chronic violence can become fearful, demonstrate aggression, anxiety, depression, sadness and have difficulty feeling secure, according to the Erikson Institute.
This is a “dire, urgent situation with children whose minds are forming every day,” said Geoffrey Nagle, president and CEO of the institute.
Nagle talks about a child’s first 1,100 days: those early years when negative experiences can have a lifelong impact on the brain. Yet there are few programs addressing the emotional needs of children younger than 5. Child psychiatrists and mental health services are in short supply. Interventions at school age are too late to offer maximum benefit. Caretakers may discourage children from dwelling on violence, while in fact, kids may need to express and work through their feelings.
MASK founder Tamar Manasseh called the killings of Chantell Grant and Andrea Stoudemire “one of the saddest nights of my life.” Now multiply that agony by eight motherless children and a full neighborhood of kids who deserve hopscotch and juice boxes, not police tape and memorials.
Gun violence in Chicago is an epidemic in more ways than one.
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