CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

Thousands of children in the US city of Richmond hear or see shootings near their schools each year, yet there is little support to help them navigate the stress caused by exposure to day-to-day violence

- Abené Clayton

IT WAS JUST BEFORE 11AM ON A FRIDAY AND THE HALLWAYS OF STEGE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL in Richmond, California, were quiet save for the muffled sound of children's voices coming through the classroom doors.

Behind the heavy doors of Hannah Geitner's fifth-grade classroom, 26 students were seated at small tables and on a cosy green rug. It was sunny and warm out, but inside, it was impossible to tell; the room's windows had yellowed over the years.

I was there to talk to the 10- and 11-year-olds about gun violence, a topic I suspected many of them had been personally affected by.

"How many of you have heard a real gunshot by your house?" I asked. Twenty-four arms went up in the air.

"How many of you know someone - a family member or friend who has been shot?" Eighteen students raised their hands.

For more than six months, I had been researching gun violence near elementary schools in my home town of Richmond. By analysing police department data, I found that 41% of the 2,300 shots fired in the city over the past decade happened within 800 metres, or about a 10-minute walk, of one of the city's 33 public schools. More than 80% of the shootings that took place near schools occurred within 800 metres of an elementary school. Stege elementary has seen an average of six shootings nearby each year since the beginning of 2013.

Some of those shootings were homicides, some were armed robberies, some happened during the school day and some outside it. The campuses with the most incidents nearby were those in neighbourhoods with lower median incomes than the rest of the city, census data showed. This means that for the past decade, thousands of Richmond kids, many of whom are Black and Latino, were exposed to a violent incident before they turned 13.