By Melissa Schorr

NEW YORK, Mar 20 (Reuters Health) - According to a survey of inner-city youngsters in the US, by 6 years of age 60% had witnessed someone being shot, stabbed, beat up or threatened with a knife.

The survey was originally designed to find out if children of drug-using mothers were more likely to witness violence than other children were. However, the researchers at the University of Maryland in Baltimore found that most children--regardless of their mother's drug use--were exposed to violent scenes.

"Surprisingly, we found no difference between the children living with drug-using moms and non-drug-using moms," developmental psychologist Dr. Maureen E. Schuler, told Reuters Health. "What was amazing was the amount of violence all the children were exposed to. It's part of growing up in the inner city."

Schuler found that children witnessing violence showed significantly higher amounts of aggression, anxiety, depression, delinquent behavior, attention problems, social problems and stress.

"Witnessing violence is leading to a lot of behavioral problems," Schuler said. "We wonder if this will lead them to be involved in more violent acts themselves. What are we going to see in a couple of years? We'd like to keep following these children."

The study, which was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Thomas Wilson Sanitarium for Children in Maryland, is published in the March issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Schuler interviewed 40 inner-city women with a history of drug abuse who had been tracked since the birth of their child. The women were predominately African American, single and unemployed.

Each woman was asked whether her child had witnessed violence, whether there was a history of violence in her household, and whether it had affected her child's behavior. These results were compared to responses from a group of similar women who reported they did not abuse drugs.

Although there were no differences found between the two groups of children with and without drug-abusing mothers, 47 of the 75 children in the study reported witnessing violent acts either inside or outside of their homes.

About 40% of the 6-year-olds had observed someone being beaten up, 9% saw someone being threatened with a knife, and 7% had witnessed someone being stabbed or shot.

The youngsters also witnessed other types of violence, including organized dogfights. In another example, one child watched a neighbor "jumping naked out the second-story window with her infant in her arms when drug dealers burst into her house."

However, much of the violence witnessed occurred within the home: 25% of the mothers reported they had used major violence against their partners during the last year and 23% of their partners had used major violence against the child's mother in the past year.

"The first step is to try to work on reducing violence in the home," Schuler said. "We need to get parents into parenting classes and counseling. Then, it becomes a community-wide issue, in terms of getting the drug dealers out of the neighborhood."

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