Inflating balloons is one of the most fun things my kids know.

Tension grows in their eyes as they try to punch holes in the balloon.

When it finally says "bang!"

they howl with happiness.

When a balloon exploded at a children's party in Flemingsberg this summer, the children were instead scared to death.

They thought someone was shooting at them.

The reaction is as incomprehensible as it is reasonable.

Just a few weeks earlier, a girl and a boy in the area had been hit by past bullets in what appears to have been a criminal settlement.

Both siblings, who are of preschool age, were hit in the legs and survived.

But the father tells SVT that they are very scared and no longer want to go out. 

Ties in the stomach

It ties in my stomach when I think of the children in Flemingsberg.

But the knot gets even harder when I look at the map of the last three years' shootings that SVT has produced.

There, it becomes black and white how hard affected certain areas are.

In the municipality where my children go to children's parties, there has been a shooting for three years, no one has been injured or died.

In Tensta, a few kilometers away, on an area that is barely a tenth as big, there have been 35 shootings in the last three years.

Ten people have died, six of them this year alone.

16 have been injured.  

SVT Stockholm meets the hairdresser Haval who works in Tensta.

He has three children but they are never allowed to accompany him to work.

It's too dangerous, he says. 

In Agenda, the mother Fatima Mohamed says that she does not let her nine-year-old daughter play alone outside and that all her daughters are traumatized by the shooting violence.

As children, they played on the farm and went to school with the boys who now shoot and kill each other.

Risk of mental illness

As a parent, it is not possible to defend oneself against testimonies about children who are doing badly.

Not only are today minors often shooting at each other, the children around them are at risk of stress and anxiety.

Something that in the long run risks leading to poorer school results and mental illness.  

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states in Article 38 that "every State shall ensure the protection and care of children affected by an armed conflict". It's not without me wondering if we're there now? Where Sweden must ensure that the children who live in the shadow of gang crime have a safer life.