Study focused on 5 cities in the world.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: A global research project, Wave study, headed by a professor at Johns Hopkins, that examined the health and well-being of poor teenagers between the ages of 15-19 years old in five cities globally, came to the startling conclusion that the teens in New Delhi, India were better off than their counterparts in Baltimore, Maryland, in the US.
The study was led by Dr. Kristen Mmari, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. It assessed health challenges faced by 2,400 teenagers between the ages of 19 and 19 from impoverished areas in Baltimore (US), Shanghai (China), Johannesburg (South Africa), Ibadan (Nigeria) and New Delhi (India), as well as their perceptions of their environment.
The researchers found many similarities—in all five cities, adolescents were exposed to unsanitary conditions, substance abuse and violence—but the differences between each area were especially compelling, reported Vocativ, on the findings of the study.
Overall, teenagers in Baltimore and Johannesburg, despite being located in comparably wealthy countries, had far worse health outcomes and tended to perceive their communities more negatively.
In Baltimore, which is located in the world’s richest nation per capita and just 40 miles from the White House, adolescents exhibited considerably high rates of mental health issues, substance abuse, sexual risk-taking, sexual violence and teen pregnancy. In comparison, adolescents in New Delhi exhibited far fewer of those behaviors and outcomes, despite residing in a much less prosperous nation.
The reason for this, Mmari discovered, is rooted in the way teenagers interpret their surroundings.
“How kids perceive their environments is really important,” she says. “That’s what’s driving many of these behaviors.”
For example, a young man in New Delhi and a young man in Baltimore may both live in neighborhoods with poor living conditions and little opportunity, but because the teenager in New Delhi is able to see his environment in a more positive light, he is less likely to experience to adverse health problems, Vocativ said.
“He paints a different picture,” said Mmari.
The reasons for it is a combination of environmental and social factors, including the exposure to violence and a lack of social support, which were found to be less prevalent in the three other cities, according to the study.
“When you look at how they perceive their environments, kids in both Baltimore and Johannesburg are fearful. They don’t feel safe from violence,” says Mmari. “This is something we didn’t really see in other cities. In Shanghai, for example, there wasn’t a great deal of violence. You’d ask kids about their safety concerns, and they would say something like, ‘I’m afraid of crossing a busy street.’”
Community violence was a major concern for girls in Baltimore and Johannesburg, many of whom didn’t feel safe even in their own homes. Violence was also found to predict comparably higher rates of pregnancy and sexual assault in the two cities. A staggering 50 percent of 15- to 19-year-old girls in Baltimore, and 29 percent of those in Johannesburg, had been pregnant in their lifetime, and more than 10 percent of girls in both cities report being raped or assaulted by someone other than their partner in the previous year.
Adolescents in Baltimore and Johannesburg also had relatively lower levels of “social cohesion,” a phrase used to describe the emotional support provided by one’s family and neighbors. In Baltimore, many poor teens grow up in single-parent homes and have a father in prison, while those in Johannesburg tend to lose their parents to AIDS.
“In those cities, kids were much more likely to live in a one-parent household,” Mmari says. (Or, as a youth in Baltimore described it, “The kids are being raised by themselves.”) “Whereas in Delhi, most of these kids are still living in two-parent homes, so they are getting much more support.”
She added: “When you think about poor adolescents, you may instantly think of a child in Africa because there are poorer countries there, but it’s not really the country that is important. Right here in Baltimore, we have kids who are much worse off than those in African cities. The inner-city kids who are exposed to all this violence are who we should be thinking about.”