Researchers at the University of Missouri-St. Louis last week released the results of the second-phase of a long-term study on the depths of violence visited upon young people residing in some of St. Louis’s toughest neighborhoods.

Updating a project that started ten years ago, Lois Pierce, the director of UMSL’s School of Social Work and Nancy Shields, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, interviewed 162 children between the ages of seven and 10. The research was released at a symposium hosted by the school’s Community Partnership Project.

Of the children interviewed, 12 percent  — 20 — had witnessed a murder in their neighborhood, 22 percent had seen a robbery, 16 percent had been exposed to someone when they were threatened with a gun and 36 percent reported they had happened upon an assault.

Thirty-five percent told researchers they were victimized by assault, two percent were attacked with a knife or sharp weapon, five percent threatened with a gun, 12 percent robbed and four percent said they’d been shot at.

As a result, say Shields and Pierce, 72 percent of the children reported “repetitive and intrusive thoughts, especially when trying to sleep” and 74 percent said they are afraid of the dark or suffer from nightmares. According to the report, the trauma also leads to  separation anxiety, “phobic levels of avoidance,” “behavior disorders” and depression leading to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And PTSD, Pierce noted in a story published earlier this year in the Post-Dispatch, is a distraction that hampers the concentration necessary to learn and achieve in the classroom.

Larry Shockley, the family services coordinator for the Neighborhood Houses — a non-profit consortium of St. Louis community centers that address health, educational and social issues –  called the research a wake-up call that St. Louis ignores at its own risk.

“The violence affects all of us because these are the very kids we see on the streets,” Shockley told the symposium. “If we don’t do something, we’re going to wind up meeting the young people (exposed to the violence) at the wrong time and the wrong place.”