The number of teenagers from the Rotterdam region admitted to hospital with gunshot or stab wounds has risen sharply. From 2010 to 2020, a total of 98 children up to the age of 19 were admitted on these grounds, in 2021 and the first half of 2022 there were 23. The youngest victim was 7 years old.
They usually had to stay overnight in the hospital. The number of victims who come to the emergency room with a stab or gunshot wound is even higher because children who were allowed to go home immediately from the emergency room are not included in these figures.
In 2021, a 15-year-old boy died from his stab wounds in the Erasmus MC. He had been stabbed with a knife in several places. 90 percent of the victims are boys. Most were stabbed in the chest.
This has emerged from research by the trauma surgery department of the Erasmus MC. One of the researchers, doctor of surgery Begüm Pekbay, calls the growth very worrying. “The type of weapons also changes. They are not small knives, but sometimes very large ones.” She suspects that ‘drill-rap’, in which feuds are fueled and magnified via social media, is one of the reasons for the growth.
Gun violence
Eighteen months ago, trauma surgeon Oscar van Waes of the Rotterdam Erasmus MC already established that the number of serious shooting and stab wound victims under the age of 19 had grown in ten years from an average of 8 per year to 13 in 2020. The youngest victim was 8 at the time. year. That research continued for a year and a half.
At the time, Van Waes and his colleagues had the impression that they increasingly had to treat young victims of violence. This impression was confirmed in a major study at the Erasmus MC. They reviewed the records of all patients they had admitted from 2010 through 2020 as a result of gun violence. 782 of the 945 patients were deliberately stabbed or shot, the remainder were suicide attempts, for example. Of the 782, 98 patients were at most 19 years old.
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Similar to London
Rotterdam is a violent city by Western European standards. “Hospital trauma records across Europe show that about 5 percent of all traumatic injuries result from shootings and stabbings. In Rotterdam that is around 10 percent.” Those figures cannot be compared with South Africa or the United States, says Van Waes, but they can be compared with London, for example.
According to Van Waes, the stabbings and shootings among young people are not always drug-related. Nor are they primarily nighttime, like most stabbings and shootings. “Sometimes it happens in the schoolyard. Then they have agreed to fight and, for example, a big brother comes along, who has a knife with him.”
The number of young victims of street violence is not recorded in other cities, as ErasmusMC does. The number of young offenders is. According to the Public Prosecution Service, the number of young people coming into contact with the law has been declining nationally for years, but street violence by minors has been increasing since 2019.
Usually a stabbing weapon
In 2020, 1,960 minors nationwide were suspected of a serious violent crime, in 2019 1,633. These are suspects of aggravated assault, theft with violence, extortion or serious threats, sometimes in groups. In 2021, the Public Prosecution Service registered 1,920 new violent cases against underage suspects. “Increasingly, a suspect has a weapon, usually a stabbing weapon, with him,” reports the Public Prosecution Service.