Study raises questions about U.S. teen violence

Adolescents in the United States are no more violent than their counterparts surveyed in four other countries, but are more likely to die a violent death, researchers reported Monday.

The difference may involve the availability of lethal weapons in the United States or perhaps varying attitudes about life and death, the report said.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study analyzed data from a World Health Organization survey. The analysis zeroed in on data involving 10,610 boys and 11,530 girls aged 11 to 15 in Ireland, Israel, Portugal, Sweden and the United States during the 1997-1998 school year.

It found that about 60 percent of the Americans had not been involved in a fight during the previous year, a figure also the average for the five countries. Similarly, 89 percent of U.S. youths had not carried a weapon in the previous year, identical to the average for all five, and more than 84 percent said they had not been injured in a fight, also similar across the board.

Of the youths involved in fighting, most fought only occasionally, a rate similar in all of the countries studied.

“Even though our youth are no more likely to fight than are youth in the other developed countries in the study, they’re still more likely to die of violent causes” said Duane Alexander, a director of the child development institute.

Access to guns may play role
The report, published in the June issue of The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, said, “An important question raised by our findings is why violence-related mortality in the United States is substantially higher than countries in which the rates of nonfatal violent behaviors (fighting, weapon carrying, and injuries from fighting) in young adolescents are extremely similar.”

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A possible explanation, it said, is that U.S. youngsters have greater access to lethal weapons.

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The report also cited an earlier study which found that American youngsters are more likely to believe it’s appropriate to kill to protect their property than were youth in Estonia, Finland, Romania, and Russia. In addition U.S. adolescents in that study were more likely to approve of war than were youth in any of the other countries.

In the five-country study published Monday, statistics on bullying varied. Israeli students were the most likely to have been bullied in the last school term, at 42 percent, while Swedish students were the least at 14 percent. Forty-one percent of U.S. student said they had been bullied.

The authors said educational campaigns in Scandinavia had targeted bullying -- perhaps important information given that one earlier study had found bullying or ridicule was the most common cause behind deadly school shootings in the United States.