An overview of current research on the short- and long-term impacts of media coverage of tragedy on children, as well as aggravating risk factors and suggestions for future research.
Thirty years since April '75—good grief. It seems almost too trite to say, but it doesn't seem that it could possibly have been that long ago. Every April reminds me of the end of the Vietnam war, this one more than most, not just because of the round number but because of an encounter with the past that I had just a couple of weeks before the actual anniversary. The following ruminations are longer than I intended, but here they are anyway.
Reporters may have felt they didn’t want to intrude, but far from a closed and hushed house between Sheona’s death and her funeral, it was literally an open house.
The story of a 15-year-old girl raped by a popular classmate and of the devastating aftermath for her, her family, and her town. Originally published in the Providence Journal (Providence, RI), in 2003.
The life expectancy in Zambia plunged from 49.7 years in 1970-75 to 32.4 years in 2000-05, according to the Human Development Report for Zambia by the United Nations Development Programme.
An article depicting the unhappy life of a Siberian boy whose violent death is told against the larger story of his birth parents, the orphanage that briefly shelters him, and his abusive adoptive parents in America. Originally published in the Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), on October 28, 2001.
A two-part series from The Baltimore Sun on the lives of six women serially victimized by one man's extremes of physical and psychological abuse.
David Handschuh, staff photographer for the New York Daily News, had just returned to his office when his editor told him to go to Littleton, Colorado. Six hours after watching the event unfold on television, he was at Columbine, covering the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.
One by one, students ran from Columbine High to escape the terror caused by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As teen-agers wandered outside the building, some appeared dazed and confused — shocked by the killings of their teacher and friends. Others cried and wept, unable yet to comprehend the horror of what they or others had witnessed.
A four-part series about a Colorado family whose only son was murdered in the Columbine High School shootings, coverage that explored the long-term effects through survivors in Peducah and Jonesboro. Originally published in the Denver Post in June, 1999.