At the root of violence

Recently, there have been an unusually large number of robberies near campus. Most of us were probably warned by our families to be extra vigilant at night.

But one incident stood out to me. Three 13-year-old girls were arrested last Tuesday after allegedly attacking a woman at 40th and Baltimore with a hammer. It wasn't very late at night or far from campus. The scariest part of this isn't that it could easily happen to me, but that 13-year-old girls are attacking people with hammers.

When most of us were 13, the worst thing we might have done was shoplifting. The children I work with in West Philadelphia schools are about the same age. From what I know of their lives, I can't imagine them doing this, either. But I also know that, as different as their lives are from mine, they are the luckier ones.

Poverty is a big, but hidden, problem in Philadelphia. According to a report released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, 23 percent of people in Philadelphia are living in poverty, as are 31 percent of children.

The level of poverty also varies greatly in different areas of the city and along racial and ethnic lines. For example, in Frankford, overall poverty is 29.7 percent, but it is 37.5 percent among African Americans and 46.5 percent among African-American children.

Poverty doesn't excuse criminal actions, especially violent ones, but it does help explain why they occur. And although increased numbers of police and security guards may make us feel better within the Penn bubble, they do nothing to make conditions better for people in the rest of the city.

Penn does make significant efforts to develop West Philadelphia, but for most students, anything past 42nd Street is a no man's land. In fact, most Penn students know very little of Philadelphia aside from campus, Rittenhouse Square and trendy Old City bars.

If anyone were to see only those select parts of the city, that person would never see the whole picture.

It's not a big step to compare Philadelphia to Paris. Both have a center surrounded by a poorer ring inhabited by people who generally come from different ethnic backgrounds. And as many Parisians have never set foot in the northern suburbs, many Philadelphians only see West and North Philly from the train or the highway.

Penn students studying abroad reported not feeling affected by the recent rioting in Paris. This is not surprising, but nevertheless it is disappointing.

When Rosa Parks died in October, our country reflected on her legacy as a leader of the civil rights movement.

Important strides have certainly been made by African Americans, but we're very far from any tangible kind of equality. Racial profiling and the disproportionate number of African Americans in jail show that we are not even truly equal under the law.

The same kind of problems exist in France. The experience of French Muslims is quite similar to that of African Americans; both suffer from discrimination that makes it impossible for them to achieve the promise of equality they've been offered.

Racism and discrimination have been a problem in America since its beginnings. The conditions in the banlieues have been festering for more than a generation. These are not new problems, but despite their persistent character, they have not been addressed.

Alleviating poverty and improving the conditions of the poor is not easy. If it were, these problems would long since have been eliminated.

There's no panacea for reducing poverty. It will take deep structural changes and sustained political will. But in the long term, it is necessary for the continued success of both countries.

Extensive coverage of the recent French riots is seen as retaliation for European coverage and criticism of the unrest in post-Katrina New Orleans. But a media game of tit-for-tat does nothing to solve the problem except bring it to the public's attention.

Maybe this will be a wake-up call for the developed world to realize the severity of these social problems and finally work toward a meaningful solution.

I hope that here in Philadelphia we won't have to reach the point of large-scale rioting and destruction to take our own inequality problem seriously. We should see attacks on students as part of the larger problem and deal with it now before it gets worse.

Edith Mulhern is a senior French, international relations and history majorfrom Ardmore, Pa. Voice of the Sparrow appears on Fridays.

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