Exploring the link between the risk of violent injury in adolescents and historic redlining practices

Abstract

Violent injuries tend to cluster together geospatially. The discriminatory housing practice of redlining undertaken by the United States federal government in the 1930s has been repeatedly linked with various contemporary community-level disparities. However, no known work has explored the association between historical redlining and the risk of violent injuries among adolescents. To this end, we utilized surveillance data of adolescent patients (N = 401) who presented to a Level I trauma center in Richmond, VA, for violence-based injuries across 2 years (2022–2023). Our analyses revealed significant spatial clustering of violence events using Moran's I after controlling for population density. High violence clusters (N22 = 9, N23 = 12), and low violence clusters (N22 = 9, N23 = 10) were identified across both years. Historically redlined neighborhoods comprised most of the high-violence regions identified (i.e., 85.71% of hot spots were in redlined areas). Our findings suggest that the legacy of historic redlining practices in Richmond, VA is observable in the current-day risks of violent injury for adolescents. Interventions aimed at reducing community violence should consider how such efforts may address the extant effects of past policies (e.g., redlining) as one means of reducing violence.