(NewsNation) — Children are committing fewer violent crimes than they were a decade ago, but increasingly, they’re victims of violent offenses.
Children accused of violent crimes make headlines, including last week in central Florida, where three children — one as young as 12 — were identified as suspected killers.
After an increase from 2012 to 2018, the juvenile murder rate fell in 2019. The decline was significant, reaching 80% less than the peak of juvenile murders in 1993.
Juvenile violent crime arrests overall reached a new low in 2020, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Justice.
That data shows no change in the rate of murder arrests from 2019 to 2020, but the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reported the number of homicide victims of lone juvenile offenders jumped by 30% in 2020, citing FBI data.
That year, the most recent data available, the number of juvenile violent crime arrests including murder, robbery and aggravated assault was half that of 10 years earlier.
The decadeslong decline in violent crime arrests involving youth has outpaced that of adults, according to the DOJ. Although juvenile violent crime arrests are down, the number of youth homicide victims recently saw its largest one-year increase since at least 1980.
Yvonne Vissing, the chairperson of the Department of Healthcare Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts, said adults should take both child victimization and the perpetuation of crime more seriously.
Adults are often behind the scenes orchestrating events such as gang activity and/or abuse at home. It’s also, therefore, adults’ responsibility to make children’s safety a national priority, she said.
“Instead of looking at kids as being out of control and it’s their fault and blame (them) no, that’s the wrong unit of analysis.”
In fact, children are increasingly the victims of violent crimes, according to the DOJ.
There were an estimated 1,780 youth victims of homicide in 2020 — 30% more than the year prior and 46% more than in 2013, which saw the fewest youth victims, according to the DOJ.
One study by the Pew Research Center found that gun deaths among U.S. juveniles swelled from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.
Vissing said a lack of access to basic needs creates what she called systemic problems, which resources including school counselors are unequipped to address.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a 250-to-1 ratio of students to school counselors. The national average for the 2021-2022 school year, however, was 408-to-1.
“The school counselors … aren’t really having an opportunity to talk to the children about things that are bothering them unless things escalate and they’re really bad,” Vissing said.
Children also have less autonomy over the care they receive, she said. That means, in some cases, youth might need their parents’ consent to receive certain medical or mental health care.
“We act like we’re so surprised when bad things happen,” Vissing said. “We are cultivating the bad things that are happening that are making children act in ways to hurt themselves, or potentially someone else.”