Ethnicity, Race, Class and Adolescent Violence – 2 pages

• In the United States today, African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics are much more likely to be victims and perpetrators of lethal violence than are people of European or Asian ancestry.

   

• Substantial evidence also exists to support the accuracy of the belief that higher rates of lethal aggression are found among the economically marginal than among the more economically privileged sectors of all ethnic and racial groups.

   

• The available evidence is inconclusive with regard to whether substantial and significant race and class differences exist in the rate of involvement with nonlethal forms of violence.

   

• Class, race and ethnic bias still exists in the way that violence in conceptualized by researchers and the public and in the way that the criminal law is formulated and enforced.  

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Youth & Violence: Colorado Students Speak Out for a More Civil Society – Summary of the major findings of the first study to ask the state’s young people what they think can be done to stop the violence.

 

In response to this question:

 

 If you could make one change that would help stop the violence that young people experience today, what would that change be?”  Here are the answers from Colorado’s youth:

 

• Stop the emotional violence (bullying, teaching). It hurts and it triggers more extreme violence.

   

• An inescapable culture that celebrates sameness – Young people feel they need to join in to protect themselves.

   

• Relationships are important – Young people with better relationships with families and friends are less likely to experience violence, either as victims or as aggressors.

   

The study found few differences between the responses of Colorado youth and children around the country. 4 pages. Pdf.

 

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  World Report on Violent and Health

 

 

WHO, the World Health Organization, has just released a report and violence and health worldwide that examines violence as a public health problem. It is the first comprehensive review of the problem of violence on a global scale. The report cites these statistics:

• Violence kills more than 1.6 million people every year.
• On an average day, 1424 people are killed in acts of homicide, almost one person every minute.
• Violence is among the leading causes of death for people 15-44 years of age, 14% of deaths among males and 7% of deaths of females.
• In the 20^th Century an estimated 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of conflict and well over half of them were civilians.
• Research shows that fighting and bullying are common among young people and that drunkenness is one of the situational factors found to precipitate violence.

   

• Women often face the greatest risk at home and in familiar settings. Almost half of the women who die due to homicide are killed by their current or former husbands or boyfriends and in some countries it is as high as 70%.
• Data from selected countries about child abuse suggests that about 20% of women and 5-10% of men suffered sexual abuse as children.

   

• In some countries, up to one-third of adolescent girls report forced sexual initiation.

   

The Summary of the report in pdf format is about 50 pages. The report Abstract is 12 pages. The complete report is available as an e-book and there is an order form on line too.

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Reducing Gun Violence: The Boston Gun Project’s Operation Ceasefire

This report is part of the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) Reducing Gun Violence series. Each report describes the implementation and effects of an individual local-level program designed to reduce firearm-related violence in a particular U.S. city. In this case the city is Boston.

From the report:

The Boston Gun Project was a problem-oriented policing initiative expressly aimed at taking on a serious, large-scale crime problem: homicide victimization among youths in Boston. Boston experienced an epidemic of youth homicide between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Homicide among persons ages 24 and under increased by 230 percent - from 22 victims in 1987 to 73 victims in 1990 - and remained high well after the peak of the epidemic. Boston experienced an average of 44 youth homicides per year between 1991 and 1995.

The project included the following elements:

Assembling an interagency working group of largely line-level criminal justice and other practitioners. 

Applying quantitative and qualitative research techniques to assess the nature of and dynamics driving youth violence in Boston. 

Developing an intervention designed to have a substantial near-term impact on youth homicide. 

Implementing and adapting the intervention 

Evaluating the intervention’s impact.

The two main elements of Ceasefire were a direct law enforcement attack on illicit firearms traffickers supplying youths with guns and an attempt to generate a strong deterrent to gang violence. 

Youth homicides decreased dramatically in Boston following the first gang forum in May 1996 and have remained low to the present. The report discusses several factors other than Operation Ceasefire that may have impacted the youth homicide rate, i.e., employment rates and changes in street level drug activity.

The report is 72 pages. It is downloadable in pdf format

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Off Balance: Youth, Race & Crime in the News

"The overwhelming evidence is that in the aggregate, crime coverage is not reflecting an accurate picture of who the victims and perpetrators are. The most consistent finding across media and across time is the gross distortion of the types of crime reported in the news."

If you’ve been around the juvenile justice community for very long you’ll have realized that actual juvenile crime rates and juvenile crime as it is perceived by the public and reported in the media are very different animals.

Building Blocks for Youth* has just published Off Balance: Youth, Race & Crime in the News. The report, released April 10, finds that news media unduly connect youth to crime and violence and that youth of color are overrepresented as perpetrators and underrepresented as victims of crime. The study is an examination of over 70 content analyses of newspaper and television crime coverage. From the report, these statistics:

• In the 1998./99 school year, there was less than a one in two million chance of being killed in a school in America, yet 71% of respondents to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll felt that a school shooting was likely in their community.
• Despite a 40% decline in school associated violent deaths between 1998 and 1999 and declines in other areas of youth violence, respondents to a USA Today poll were 49% more likely to express fear of their school in 1999 than in 1998.
• Although youth homicides declined by 68% between 1993 and 1999 and are at their lowest rate since 1966, 62% of the public believes that youth crime is on the rise.

Major findings from the report:

The news media report crime, especially violent crime, out of proportion to its actual occurrence.
• Newspaper and television emphasize violent crime.
• The more unusual the crime, the great the chance it will be covered.
• The rate of crime coverage increased while real crime rates dropped.

The news media report crime as a series of individual events without adequate attention to its overall context.

Studies spanning almost 100 years – 1910 to 2000 – were consistent in their findings that news reports describe what happened with little reporting about why the crime and violence happened or what could be done about it...The lack of explanations for crime and violence complicates the problem of exaggerated frequency in news stories by leaving the impression that violence is inevitable.

The news media, particularly television news, unduly connect race and crime, especially violent crime.

A disproportionate number of perpetrators on the news are people of color, especially African Americans, and the strongest evidence shows that people of color, again primarily African Americans, are under-represented as victims in crime news.

Few studies examine portrayals of youth on the news. Those that do find that youth rarely appear in the news and when they do, it is connected to violence.

Stories about youth in newspapers and on television news are scarce. When they do appear in the news, youth usually are in stories about education or violence. Relatively few youth are arrested each year for violent crimes, yet the message from the news is that this is a common occurrence.

• One study of newspaper coverage of youth in Minnesota concluded that youth "are presented as inevitably bad, and, if left untreated, they will inevitably go wrong."
• An analysis of Hawaii’s major dailies over 10 years showed a 30-fold increase in coverage of youth crime, despite declining rates of youth crime.
• A study of youth on local television news in 1993 examined 214 hours of local television news broadcast over 11 days on 26 stations throughout California. More than two-thirds of violence stories involved youth while more than half of all stories that included youth involved violence. One out of every two (53%) TV news stories concerning children or youth involved violence, while California crime data show that one out of every 50 (2%) young people in California were either victims or perpetrators of violence in 1993.

The study’s conclusion calls for balanced reporting by the media and the inclusion of context in their stories. "Crime stories need more depth, length and breadth to help the viewer make sense of why crime happens in a particular way, and to particular people".

The following elements of the study are readable and downloadable on the internet.

Off Balance Executive Summary (14 pages)

Off Balance Fact Sheet

Off Balance: Recommendations for the News  Media

Off Balance: Recommendations for Child Advocates, Youth Groups and Civil Rights Organizations

*Building Blocks for Youth is a multi-organizational initiative whose goal is to promote a fair and effective juvenile justice system. Partners in the initiative are the Youth Law Center, American Bar Association Juvenile Justice Center, Center and Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Juvenile Law Center, Minorities in Law Enforcement, National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and Pretrial Services Resource Center.  This report is the fourth of a continuing series of reports. 

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"In their own words, the boys who have killed in America's schools offer a simple suggestion to prevent it from happening again: Listen to us."  Bill Dedman, "Deadly Lessons: School Shooters tell why," Chicago Sun-Times, October 15, 2000

In spite of the numbers of children who have been killed or wounded by their peers in recent years, America's public schools remain one of the safest places for the children of America.

• Fewer than 1 percent of the more than 7,000 children who were murdered in 1992 and 1993 combined were killed at school.
• In the 1992-93 and 1993-94 school years combined, 63 students ages 5 through 19 were murdered at school and 13 committed suicide at school.
• Nation wide, during roughly the same time-frame, at total of 7,357 children ages 5 to 19 were murdered and 4,366 committed suicide, both in and out of school.  (Source: U.S. Departments of Education and Justice (1998). Annual Report on School Safety, Washington, D.C.)

There is no one type of youth who kills or wounds fellow students. The Secret Service reviewed data from 37 school shootings since 1974 and refutes the notion that certain students can be profiled to be a risk of performing targeting violence. According to the Secret Service report:

All 41 perpetrators over the last 25 years have been male, but otherwise were remarkably varied in background. They came from intact families and foster homes. They were socially isolated, popular, or in between. Some had no prior problems and others were disciplined frequently.

The report's authors recommend school professionals focus only on a student’s behavior and communications. The report also states, however, in almost every incident, the attacker acted in ways that cause others to worry about him. In over three-fourths of the incidents, an adult had expressed concern about the student before the attack. 

 More information and copies of the report are available and downloadable through the  Secret Service.  Bill Dedman of the Chicago Sun Times did a really fine series of articles on the kids in the Secret Service report. They're readable and loaded with good information. 

Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General, recently published, addresses myths about youth violence.  Here is one of them:

Myth: In the 1990s, school violence affected mostly white students or students who attended suburban or rural schools.

Fact: African American and Hispanic males attending large inner-city schools that serve very poor neighborhoods faced -- and still face -- the greatest risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of a violent act at school. This is true despite recent shootings in suburban, middle-class, predominantly white schools. 

The report notes in a special section on violence in school that "although the overall risk of violence and injury at school has not changed substantially over the past 20 years, both students and their parents report being increasingly apprehensive about their schools." 

In a related issue, a survey released Thursday, March 8, reports on bullying, discrimination and sexual pressures at school.  Children 8-11 years old say teasing and bullying (74%), discrimination and disrespect (43%), and threats of violence (38%) occur at their school. The survey was conducted for the Kaiser Family Foundation, Nickelodeon children's television and Children Now as part of a new public information partnership to help parents and kids talk together. Read about the survey at Children Now. At www.everythingnick.com parents can get age-appropriate guidance and tips for raising difficult topics with heir kids. 

You may also want to visit the following sites:

Keep Schools Safe: A Collection of Resources to Help Make Schools Safer -The site contains information about school safety and related issues for parents, teachers and school administrators, and law enforcement officers. Among the resources at this site: Discipline Codes that Work, Effective Prevention Strategies for Drugs and Alcohol, Gangs, Conflict, and Weapons. A joint project of the NAAG (National Association of Attorneys General) and NSBA (National School Boards Association). 

The Safety Zone: National Resource Center for Safe Schools  Visit NRCSS - Contains a number of downloadable documents on school safety issues and links to materials on such issues as bullying and harassment. The Recommended Readings section contains several downloadable and worthwhile documents although you should be warned that most of them are 200+ pages long. The short ones include Conflict Resolution Education, Annual Report on School Safety, 2000, and Preventing Youth Hate Crime: A Manual for Schools and Communities.

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Surgeon General’s Youth Violence Report- Using a developmental perspective this report identifies two general onset trajectories of violence: one in which violent behaviors emerge before puberty and one in which they appear after puberty. The early-onset trajectory shows stronger links between childhood factors and persistent, even lifelong involvement in violent behavior.

The report debunks ten myths about violence and violent youth and states that these ideas are intrinsically dangerous. It says, "Assumption that a problem does not exist or failure to recognize the true nature of a problem can obscure the need for informed policy or for intervention."  

Debunking Myths About Youth Violence

• Myth: most future offenders can be identified in early childhood
• Myth: child abuse and neglect inevitably lead to violent behavior later in life
• Myth: a new violent breed of superpredators threatens the United States
• Myth: African American and Hispanic Youths are more likely to become involved in violence than other racial or ethnic groups
• Myth: getting tough with juvenile offenders by trying them in adult criminal courts reduces the likelihood that they will commit more crimes
• Myth: nothing works with respect to treating or preventing violent behavior
• Myth: most violent youths will end up being arrested for a violent crime.

The report concludes that youth violence is not an intractable problem and that we now have the knowledge and tools needed to reduce or prevent prevent much of the most serious youth violence.

Finally, the report says that "the most urgent need is for a national resolve to confront the problem of youth violence systematically, using research-based approaches, and to correct damaging myths and stereotypes that interfere with the task at hand."

The Executive Summary is downloadable at the Surgeon General’s site and is 16 pages long. The full text of the report has not yet been published.