Dr Katie Donnelly, an emergency medical physician at National Children's Hospital, likens gun violence to a chronic illness that eventually proves fatal and says it is endemic in parts of Washington DC.

"We have lots of families, who will say to us, every one of my children has been shot, or I still have my bullets in my body or his father was killed on the same street corner where he was shot," she told the BBC.

Katie Donnelly醫(yī)生是一位在國家兒童醫(yī)院就職的急救醫(yī)生。她將槍械暴力比作一種致命的慢性病，并表示它正在侵染華盛頓的部分地區(qū)。

“我們遇到過很多會對我們說家里每一個孩子都被射傷過的家長。另外一些人會說，自己身體里還有沒取出來的子彈。還有些時候，他的父親就死在和他們中槍的街角。”她告訴BBC。

Last year, she launched the hospital's first youth violence intervention program. Instead of treating gunshot wounds as isolated incidents, the programme takes that horrific moment in a young person's life and turns it into a starting point for change.

去年，她推出了醫(yī)院首個青少年暴力干預計劃。在該計劃中，他們并不把這些年輕人們中槍的創(chuàng)口當作單獨的事件來進行治療，而是將那一整個駭人聳聽的瞬間變成他們?nèi)松械霓D(zhuǎn)折點。

Yvonne Doerre, a social worker in DC for nearly 30 years, says there are many reasons behind the rise in youth gun violence. Guns are relatively easy to access, but there are also the lingering effects of the pandemic.

"When you go back to when Covid started, these kids were in fifth or sixth grades [ages 10-12], which are very volatile times in people's lives," she says. Without the structure of having to attend school in person, many young teens stopped attending online classes, and even failed to enrol in secondary school when the time came, she says.

在華盛頓工作將近30年之久的社會工作者Yvonne Doerre表示，在青少年槍支暴力背后潛藏著很多因素。當然，槍械很容易拿到手是原因之一，然而這其中還有疫情帶來的揮之不去的影響。

”如果把時間倒回新冠疫情開始前，這些孩子正是上5或6年級的年齡（10-12歲）。而這段時間是人生中極為不穩(wěn)定的時期。“她說。由于不再用親自到學校參與課堂，許多年輕的少年少女們連網(wǎng)課都不再參加，而這使得一部分人甚至無法在該進入中學的時候去讀中學。

"If you enrol then don't show, they'll look for you, but they never enrolled. You're just persona non grata. You don't exist," Ms Doerre says.

Getting youths enrolled and attending schools is one of the programme's key goals, but keeping them in school is not the only consideration. There is also the question of keeping young people caught up in gang violence away from the environment that made them a victim in the first place.

”如果你報了名進入中學但沒在學校里出現(xiàn)，他們會來找你。但這些孩子根本沒有報名進入中學，那么他們就是不受歡迎的人，根本不存在?！癉oerre女士說道。

讓青少年報名并到校上課是這個項目的關(guān)鍵目標之一，然而他們要擔心的并不只有保證這些孩子們呆在學校里。他們還還需要解決防止青年人被卷入遠離這個環(huán)境的黑幫暴力，而這恰恰是讓這些孩子們成為受害者的根本原因。