How Safe Do CA Youth Feel? Gangs, Bullying and School Safety Data Offer Insights
Kidsdata.org’s statewide expansion continues with new data for school districts statewide from the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) specific to gang involvement, bullying, and school safety.
All three measures of youth safety play a crucial role in students’ overall health and well being. Safe school environments foster social and intellectual interactions required for a student’s academic achievement. Being bullied can cause extreme anxiety, and is linked to depression and thoughts of suicide. Gang members are responsible for the majority of serious violent crimes committed by youth, and they are more likely to be involved in selling drugs.
Insights from these newly posted data data:
- Race/national origin is the most common reason cited for bullying in schools. About 15 percent of female students and 20 percent of males in 2006-08 reported at least one incident of being bullied in the year prior to the survey for this reason.
- About 30% of California 7th graders in 2006-2008 say that at least one time in the year prior to the survey, they were afraid they would be beaten up at school.
- According to these 2006-08 data, Caucasian students in California feel safest at school (64 percent said they feel safe or very safe), and African American students are least likely to say they feel safe (50 percent).
- In California in 2006-08, about 8% of 7th, 9th, and 11th grade boys said they had brought a gun to school at least once in the year prior to the survey, and 3% said they brought a gun to school four or more times.
- In California in 2006-08, about 11 percent of boys in grades 7, 9, and 11 considered themselves a member of a gang; roughly 6-8 percent of girls said the same.
Tags: New Data, Statewide Expansion
Posted by kidsdata.org
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 4:30 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Do you have data on children abused in affluent neighborhoods?
We have data on substantiated cases of child abuse by county. We also have more local data for bullying and harassment, at the school district level. Marin County’s Children and Family Services Department also offers information on reporting cases of child abuse.