Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas - 19 children and 2 adults dead

Good but Sad article
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Bullets strike thousands of people in front of kids every year, but for the often-overlooked victims present when their moms and dads are gunned down, the trauma is unique and immense. In Chicago, the experiences of Kaniya and two other child witnesses reveal the depths of sadness and anger, guilt and dread that they endure afterward.

It’s the fear that Kaniya has never shed, though her trauma is seldom obvious. She doesn’t tremble at the sound of loud noises or cry when movies turn violent. She gets along with both her younger brother and an older one who didn’t witness the attack. She makes A’s and B’s at school, enjoys playing violin and wants to try out for basketball in high school. Among her friends, she’s considered the cheerful one.

She almost never talks about the nauseating feeling in her stomach when a car slowly passes or a man in a hoodie walks by. She keeps private, even from her mom, the recurring dream about the dark figure who chases her, night after night, until she wakes up. And then there’s the persistent anxiety that the gunman will show up again one day and kill the rest of them.

Kaniya, a first-grader when her dad was shot, has begun to forget the man who called her his “princess.” The TV shows they watched and the games they played, the color of his eyes and the smell of his skin. It’s all faded from her memory. About his death, though, she recalls nearly every detail..........

No one knows how many children in America witness their parents being shot to death.

In the nation’s capital alone, at least seven children saw it happen over the first three months of this year. Among them: A 4-year-old girl and her 2-year-old sister who were sitting in the back seat of a car when someone shot their pregnant mother; a 5-year-old boy who was walking down the street, holding his father’s hand, when a man approached and fired several rounds; an 8-year-old boy who was riding in an SUV with his mom when a stray round struck her in the head and she slumped into his lap........

Like almost every aspect of the gun violence epidemic, its effects on child witnesses are seldom researched. One of the first studies to explore the phenomenon, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry in 1986, analyzed the experiences of 16 kids, including a few whose parents did not die in shootings. Every one of the children developed post-traumatic stress disorder and experienced intense flashbacks. Fifteen of them had profound problems in school the year after the assaults. Fourteen experienced nightmares. Half began to lash out.

But almost none were given treatment when they needed it most.

“It is significant how few of these children receive psychiatric attention subsequent to such a trauma,” the study read, noting that before the kids finally did receive treatment, “no one asked them about what happened.”.........

Nearly four decades later, many young witnesses remain unseen and unsupported.

“It’s crazy the extent to which we ignore these kids, and that they fall through the cracks of our system, because we just don’t have any systematic way at all of identifying them, assessing them and making sure that they’re getting whatever help and services they need,” said Sherry Hamby, a psychology professor at the University of the South whose research has examined the deep and lasting trauma children experience when they see a parent attacked.

Jaranilla doesn’t know what she’ll do if her kids one day need trauma therapy. Kaniya is bracing for the hard moments to come — father-daughter dances, learning to drive, her eventual walk down the aisle on someone else’s arm — and Eman’s outbursts have only become more frequent.

Jaranilla hopes to someday get a degree in psychology or maybe make a living through social media but, for now, she works at Dick’s Sporting Goods and struggles to earn enough to pay for her kids’ school trips or the Christmas gifts they want. Kaniya, Eman and their half brother share a three-level bunk bed in a small bedroom across from hers..........


https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-m...b9225743f8ec|42E730F6C5F01223E0530100007F1ADF