Confronting the Reality of American Child Soldiers

"Death is a lot for a kid to contend with," wrote Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, with David Ritz, in her autobiography, Grace After Midnight. "The Smurfs are the opposite of death. Smurfs never die. Smurfs live forever in a dreamland where I want to be ..."

The book clarifies in a gripping afternoon read the core experience of children living with criminal violence in the United States. Last night, while procrastinating from my work writing on foreign affairs, I came across Pearson's pages in a bookstore. She had played the role of a killer without empathy in the Baltimore inner city in a favorite realist TV series of mine, The Wire.

Despite loving The Wire and knowing a few gory, tragic details of the American inner-city dilemma from visits with my mother in a rough part of Cincinnati, I realized I continue to deny that there is a terrifying conflict going on in American inner cities. We Americans have all encountered the American divide, crossed it, even celebrated it in entertainment culture. We are very conscious of it. Yet we still have millions of miles to go before we accept it as part of our circle of life and step in to help heal the divide.

According to the FBI, the U.S. crime rates are estimated to have gone down across the board in 2009, but the challenges for inner city violence among youth remain. In 2008, the FBI counted 14,180 homicides across the U.S. Although African Americans are roughly 17 percent of the U.S. population, they experienced 48% of homicides. Of all homicide offenders, 951, or 7%, were under 18.

Based on this, we could extrapolate roughly -- don't quote me -- that between 1,000-3,000 people are likely killed in gang violence each year, perhaps about 500 under the age of eighteen. That's more violent deaths than Chechnya and Karabakh chalked up last year. That's 9/11 every year. We are long overdue for an enhancement of peacebuilding efforts in American cities.

Many of us may avoid writing or thinking on the inner city issue in America because it is alien to us or because it was so overwritten in the 1960s. But still others of us -- and I include myself here -- may avoid discussing it because it hits so close to home. Interviewing the pastor in my mother's Cincinnati neighborhood about the many, many shootings at the store I pass or stop in when I visit will irrevocably shatter my belief in American dreams, will shake the foundations of my understanding of the rule of law, and worse, will make me feel like a hypocrite having consulted foreign governments about "best practices" in youth protection when we still haven't figured it out at home.

What is a considerate person to do? Well, for starters we have to break the bubble. We have to realize that the divides we imagine between us and those on the other side are a social construct, that there are just as many cold-blooded selfish types on our side of the line as we think there are on the other side. Read this book, which hits a little lower than The Wire, and have your high school kids and friends read it, too. Then consider learning about relationship building community programs near you. Often, kids -- just like in Sierra Leone or Chechnya -- are getting into gang violence because they don't see other options. As a community, we can cultivate more options. I'll leave you with more highlights from Pearson's book.

A baby as small as a doctor's palm, fed with an eye dropper ... Later, "'Can I bring her to my house? can I be alone with my daughter?' she asked Mrs. Simms. 'Mrs. Simms said, 'Maybe. Maybe next time...'"

"Money made people jump, duck, hustle, and hide. Big money made you big. The lack of money made you little. Your money could be dirty or clean. Didn't matter. Your money could be soaked in blood. That didn't matter either. What mattered was having it ..."

Photo credit: Bigod