Could YOLO cure youth gun violence?

6/27/2022

One if those efforts is Christiana's You Only Live Once(YOLO), the education program that middle schoolers to the Newark hospital one day last month.

At the heart of the program is Brandon Lee Brinkley, a young man who was planning to become a barber when he was shot multiple times Dec. 6, 2008, three days after his 25th birthdays. He died at Christiana. You Only Live Once is his story.

Hospital staffers have made it their story, as well.

"I don't want to have to tell anyone's parent or grandparent or brother or sister that you're never coming home," Amy Whalen, Christiana's emergency department assistant nurse manager, told the George Read students.

"I do this", she said, "because I don't to have to do this anymore."

Health experts long ago declared violence in general and gun violence in particular to be among the nation's most pressing public-health crises, advocating that it be addressed like a disease to be eradicated, not an inevitability of life.

No Child Allowed Outside: Urban violence surrounds children in Wilmington

6/27/2022

In pockets all around Wilmington, gun violence routinely finds children where they live and play, leaving some to struggle with the aftereffects of trauma. This report, the first in a three-part investigation, looks at the ways in which chronic violence has become a part of children's everyday lives. The series was produced in conjunction with the USC/Annenberg School of Communication, which awarded a 2011 National Health Journalism Fellowship to reporter Kathy Canavan.

When Courtney White goes on sleepovers, she totes the blanket that a funeral home gave her to commemorate her big brother, who was shot to death.

The eight-grader says she didn't feel out of place when 25-year-old Brandon Brinkley became Wilmington's 24th homicide of 2008. After all, at least 20 of her friends have lost a family member to violence.

6/27/2022

No Child Allowed Outside: Urban violence surrounds children in Wilmington

6/27/2022

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In pockets all around Wilmington, gun violence routinely finds children where they live and play, leaving some to struggle with the aftereffects of trauma. This report, the first in a three-part investigation, looks at the ways in which chronic violence has become a part of children's everyday lives. The series was produced in conjunction with the USC/Annenberg School of Communication, which awarded a 2011 National Health Journalism Fellowship to reporter Kathy Canavan.

When Courtney White goes on sleepovers, she totes the blanket that a funeral home gave her to commemorate her big brother, who was shot to death.

The eight-grader says she didn't feel out of place when 25-year-old Brandon Brinkley became Wilmington's 24th homicide of 2008. After all, at least 20 of her friends have lost a family member to violence.

Courtney, a peer leader and middle-school band member, is just one of countless children touched by gun violence in Delaware's largest city-violence that will affect those children for years, if not the rest of their lives. For examples:

• Six of the children who run track for West End Neighborhood House have a parent who was murdered.

• Four young children had to get over their father's body to exit their Northside apartment after a gunman shot him in the face as he opened the front door on a sunny morning last June.

• At dinnertime one night last April, gunmen fired six shots into Jamar Brown as he shot hoops on crowded basketball court frequented by children.

• Dominique Helm stood on the flagstone steps leading to his Brandywine Village row house when a gunman opened fire on him in September. As his teen cousins stood nearby, Helm's blood sprayed the white trim on the front door. The 19-year-old stumbled inside and died on the living room stairs as his mother Nicole Helm, ran to him.

"If a kid lives in the City of Wilmington, they almost always either have been witness to or in some way experienced violence," said Phil Arendall, executive director of Clarence Fraim Boys and Girls Club.

With Wilmington averaging 12 shootings a month in 2010 and almost 8 shootings a month last year, children have  become collateral damage in the city's gun wars. Conversations with children, parents, teachers, ..."

West End Neighborhood House

Friendly, smiling staff members at the West End Neighborhood House practice what they call "reality therapy" with 50 to 75 children and teens who attend the facility's drop-in activities program on a typical night. They take time to listen to kids and explain how one person's behavior affects others.

Kids walk in the door in knots of two or three, says program coordinator Artwain M. Flowers. He says he rarely sees children walking alone in the neighborhood, where last year two boys get their bikes to thieves wielding two-by-fours. "They have that mentality that I'm Mr. Brave, but you rarely see them walking by themselves."

"These kids hold so much in, and, when they finally let it out, you hear them being scared." Flower says, "When kids get to the level where they're telling an adult something, even a trusted adult, they're truly, truly scared."

Delaware Hospice

Courtney White says that after her big brother Brandon Brinkley was shot to death in 2008, Delaware Hospice's free school program for bereaved children helped her process the grief.

"I didn't want to believe it, but it really hit me when we went to the funeral and the viewing of the body," the eight-grade peer leader and band member says. "I got emotional sometimes, and the other kids knew how I feel because some of them lost someone in their family for the same reason. They'd help me out and talk to me," she says. "My friend told me that she lost her friend by the same reason of violence, and I helped her through it because she didn't want to be here anymore."

Many city programs are, in therapist parlance, "trauma-informed environment"-places where staffers have academic and in-house training to pick upon cues form children who may show few outward signs of problems. Parents or teachers might not realize what's going on with a child exhibiting signs of flashbacks or fight-or-flight response.

"If the folks in the community are going down Fourth Street and they don't like what they see, reach out to the agencies that are doing the work "- the Boys and Girls Club and West End Neighborhood House and all those other places. Get involved, Don't just stare at the problems," Arendall says.

"We can help these young people. We can save them," he says. "It's hard. And we might not be able to save them all, because kids make choices. Sometimes, the wrong choice can get you killed."

Also in series:

No Child Allowed Outside: Urban violence surrounds children in Wilmington

A look at the ways in which chronic violence has become a part of children's everyday lives.

No Child Allowed Outside: Urban violence surrounds children in Wilmington

Medical research shows chronic can change the architecture of a child's brain, causing long-term damage to social and thinking skills and permanently turning on the fight-or-flight response.

Kathy Canavan wrote the stories in this series while participating in The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.