The Main Lockdown Casualties: Children
By The Editorial Board June 16, 2023 6:54 pm ET Photo: tomas ovalle/Shutterstock The evidence keeps piling up that children were the biggest casualties of the government’s response to Covid. The latest comes from a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that youth homicides and suicides hit a 20-year high in 2021 following lockdowns and the turn to progressive policing. Suicides among adolescents and young adults have been increasing more or less steadily for two decades. But the new data show that, after a small decline between 2018 and 2019, youth suicides climbed in 2020 and 2021. The two-year increase among the college-aged (20 to 24) was the largest in at least two decades.
Photo: tomas ovalle/Shutterstock
The evidence keeps piling up that children were the biggest casualties of the government’s response to Covid. The latest comes from a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that youth homicides and suicides hit a 20-year high in 2021 following lockdowns and the turn to progressive policing.
Suicides among adolescents and young adults have been increasing more or less steadily for two decades. But the new data show that, after a small decline between 2018 and 2019, youth suicides climbed in 2020 and 2021. The two-year increase among the college-aged (20 to 24) was the largest in at least two decades.
The rise in mental-health problems among young people during the pandemic has been widely chronicled. One CDC survey found about half of 18-to-24-year-olds experienced anxiety or depression during the summer of 2020. Lockdowns and college closures no doubt drove some into depressive funks and down social-media rabbit holes.
The spike in homicides has drawn less attention, though the numbers are even more striking. Between 2019 and 2021, the homicide rate among those age 10 to 24 increased 37% and even more in those 15 to 19 (44%) and 10 to 14 (56%). The CDC doesn’t attempt to diagnose the culprits, but they aren’t hard to identify.
Early in the pandemic, governments released scores of criminals from jail putatively to reduce the spread of Covid. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of people in custody of state, federal or privately operated prisons declined by 215,800 between February 2020 and February 2021. San Francisco reduced its jail population by 40%.
At the same time, protests after George Floyd’s death in May 2020 precipitated a backlash against law enforcement and movement to “defund police.” Progressive district attorneys around the country stopped prosecuting so-called victimless crimes like shoplifting and drug use even when offenders had a history of violence.
With schools shut down, some teens no doubt turned to anti-social behavior. The victims of rising violence hasn’t been only young men, but also children caught in the cross-hairs of gang violence. As political leaders obsessed over protecting children from a virus that presented little risk to the young, they ignored far bigger dangers.
In 2020 suicide was the second, and homicide the fourth, leading cause of death among adolescents age 10 to 14. Covid wasn’t in the top 10. There were 13 times as many homicides as Covid deaths among those age 15 to 24. The virus has receded, but destructive policing policies haven’t.
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