When American Violence Becomes Too Much for Families [View all]

[ancianita]

More examples and analysis at https://archive.ph/eknAF

The one group in the United States most interested in leaving the country and permanently living somewhere else is American women ages 15 to 44. According to Gallup, 40 percent of women polled in my age bracket expressed this desire, double the rate of all U.S. adults...

I asked readers who were considering moving what was driving them out.
While the responses were varied (the rollback of rights for women, immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people was mentioned by several), the most common reason cited was gun violence in the United States. Whether at the hands of fellow citizens or militarized law enforcement officers, this particular form of violence and its unremitting nature is just not a significant problem in our peer nations...

I also spoke to a couple — the husband is a veteran who works for the federal government and the wife is a professor — who live outside a major West Coast city. (They asked that I not use their names for fear of retaliation.)
The family, which includes a school-age child, spent several months of a sabbatical living in Europe.
The wife described the “underlying hum of anxiety” that just went away when they were living outside the United States.
The lack of threat from gun violence was part of that. But it was bigger than just the guns. The husband told me that children were given so much more freedom in Europe...His wife said it wasn’t just the absence of fear she felt when living abroad; it was also the presence of care. “I realized that I felt held there by the culture, by the society, by people.”....