youth violence

Youth Violence

Presentation byAlan R. Brown, Ph.D.

Principal InvestigatorArizona Prevention Resource Center

Arizona State University

Source: Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Service, Department of Health and Human Services

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Key Messages

• Caution -- The youth violence epidemic is not over

• Optimism -- Success in developing knowledge and tools to prevent serious violence gives grounds for hope and optimism

• The Major Challenge -- To direct - and redirect - resources toward effective research-based prevention strategies and programs

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Focus AreasIntroductory Comments:

•Key Messages

•Focus Areas

•Major Research Findings and Conclusions

•Myths About Youth Violence

The Magnitude of Youth Violence

•Prevalence and Trends

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Focus Areas (Continued)

The Developmental Dynamics of Youth Violence

•Onset Trajectories

Risk & Protective Factors for Youth Violence

Prevention and Intervention: Strategies and Programs

•Model, Promising, and Does Not Work

A Vision for the Future

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Major Research Findings & Conclusions

Youth Violence Is Not An Intractable Problem

We Have Knowledge & Tools to Reduce/Prevent

Some Traditional/Innovative Approaches Have Failed To to Deliver

Must Use Research – Based Approaches & Correct Damaging Myths & Stereotypes That Interfere

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Myths About Youth Violence

• Myth: The epidemic in the early 1990s is over. Today, young people are much

less likely to commit violent acts.

• Reality: Violent acts are indeed less lethal and arrest rates for some violent acts have

declined dramatically. However, self- reported involvement in violence has not declined and rates of arrest for aggravated assault remain 70% above pre-epidemic rates.

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• Myth: Most future violent offenders can be identified in early childhood.

• Reality: Most violent offenders had no behavioral disorders or unusually high levels of aggression in early childhood.

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• Myth: Most children who are abused and/or neglected will become violent offenders.

• Reality: Physical abuse and neglect are weak predictors of violent offending.

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• Myth: A higher proportion of African American and Hispanic youth than white youth become violent offenders.

• Reality: There are no substantive differences in the self-reported prevalence of violent

offending over the life course. There are large differences in arrest rates

and some differences in career length.

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• Myth: A new breed of young super predators threatens the United States.

• Reality: There is little evidence that young people today are more frequent, vicious, and remorseless offenders.

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• Myth: Getting tough with juvenile offenders by trying them in adult criminal courts and sending them to adult prisons reduces the likelihood of subsequent criminal behavior.

• Reality: Youth sentenced to adult institutions have a higher rate of re-offending.

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• Myth: Nothing works with respect to preventing or treating violent offenders.

• Reality: A number of prevention and intervention programs have been

demonstrated to work; often reducing rates of onset or offending by 50% or more.

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• Myth: Most violent youth will end up being arrested for a violent crime.

• Reality: Most youth involved in violent behavior will never be arrested for a violent crime.

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Trends – Major Findings & Conclusions

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1. Young men--particularly those from minority groups--are disproportionately arrested for violent crimes. But self-reports indicate that differences between minority and majority populations and between young men and young women may not be as large as arrest records indicate or conventional wisdom holds. Race/ethnicity, considered in isolation from other life circumstances, sheds little light on a given child's or adolescent's propensity for engaging in violence.

2. Schools nationwide are relatively safe. Compared to homes and neighborhoods, schools have fewer homicides and nonfatal injuries. Youths at greatest risk of being killed in school-associated violence are those from a racial or ethnic minority, senior high schools, and urban school districts.

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Pathways – Major Findings & Conclusions

1. There are two general onset trajectories for youth violence--an early one, in which violence begins before puberty, and a late one, in which violence begins in adolescence. Youths who become violent before about age 13 generally commit more crimes, and more serious crimes, for a longer time. These young people exhibit a pattern of escalating violence through childhood, and they sometimes continue their violence into adulthood.

2. Most youth violence begins in adolescence and ends with the transition into adulthood.

3. Most highly aggressive children or children with behavioral disorders do not become serious violent offenders.

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4. Surveys consistently find that about 30 to 40 percent of male youths and 15 to 30 percent of female youths report having committed a serious violent offense by age 17.

5. Serious violence is part of a lifestyle that includes drugs, guns, precocious sex, and other risky behaviors. Youths involved in serious violence often commit many other types of crimes and exhibit other problem behaviors, presenting a serious challenge to intervention efforts. Successful interventions must confront not only the violent behavior of these young people, but also their lifestyles, which are teeming with risk.

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6. The differences in patterns of serious violence by age of onset and the relatively constant rates of individual offending have important implications for prevention and intervention programs. Early childhood programs that target at-risk children and families are critical for preventing the onset of a chronic violent career, but programs must also be developed to combat late-onset violence.

7. The importance of late-onset violence prevention is not widely recognized or well understood. Substantial numbers of serious violent offenders emerge in adolescence without warning signs in childhood. A comprehensive community prevention strategy must address both onset patterns and

ferret out their causes and risk factors.

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Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions

1. Risk and protective factors exist in every area of life--individual, family, school, peer group, and community. Individual characteristics interact in complex ways with people and conditions in the environment to produce violent behavior.

2. Risk and protective factors vary in predictive power depending on when in the course of development they occur. As children move from infancy to early adulthood, some risk factors will become more important and others less important. Substance use, for example, is a much stronger risk factor at age 9 than it is at age 14.

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3. The strongest risk factors during childhood are involvement in serious but not necessarily violent criminal behavior, substance use, being male, physical aggression, low family socioeconomic status or poverty and antisocial parents--all individual or family attributes or conditions.

4. During adolescence, the influence of family is largely supplanted by peer influences. The strongest risk factors are weak ties to conventional peers, ties to antisocial or delinquent peers, belonging to a gang, and involvement in other criminal acts.

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5. Risk factors do not operate in isolation--the more risk factors a child or young person is exposed to, the greater the likelihood that he or she will become violent. Risk factors can be buffered by protective factors, however. An adolescent with an intolerant attitude toward deviance, for example, is unlikely to seek or be sought out by delinquent peers, a strong risk factor for violence at that age.

6. Given the strong evidence that risk factors predict the likelihood of future violence, they are useful for identifying vulnerable populations that may benefit from intervention efforts. Risk markers such as race or ethnicity are frequently confused with risk factors; risk markers have no causal relation to violence.

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7. No single risk factor or combination of factors can predict violence with unerring accuracy. Most young people exposed to a single risk factor will not become involved in violent behavior; similarly, many young people exposed to multiple risks will not become violent. By the same token, protective factors cannot guarantee that a child exposed to risk will not become violent.

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Lipsey and Derzon’s Classes of Risk Factors

Personal CharacteristicsGender Male genderEthnicity Minority raceIQ Learning problems Low IQ Low IQ, nonverbal Low IQ, verbal Low language abilityMedical/physical Developmental history Medical conditions Medical examinations Physical development

School attitude/performance Dropped out from school Low interest in education Low school achievement Poor-quality school TruancyPsychological condition Behavior characteristics High activity level High daring Impulsiveness Poor eating habits Psychopathology Short attention span

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Family CharacteristicsAntisocial parents Criminal parent Parent psychopathology Parent violentAbusive parents Child emotional abuse Maltreated as child Neglected as child Physically abused as child Sexually abused as childBroken home Broken home Separated from parentsParent-child relations Discipline, mixed Discipline, punitive Low parent involvement Low supervision Low warmth Negative attitude Poor parent-child relations to child

Poor parental practices Severity in child trainingSocioeconomic status Low SES, family Low SES, juvenile Low-quality neighborhood Low-status job, parents Not employed, juvenileOther family characteristics Parent background High family stress Large family size Marital discord SocialSocial ties Few social activities Low popularityAntisocial peers Antisocial peers Peer criminality Peer normlessness

Lipsey and Derzon’s Classes of Risk Factors

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Media EffectsSerious Violence

• Experimental studies find a small but statistically significant effect of exposure to media violence on short-term serious violence (r = .13)

• Evidence for long-term effects on serious violence is mixed; the effect sizes are small (r = .00 -.22) and there is little evidence for any consistent long-term effect.

• There is little research to date on the effects of exposure to violence in the other media -- video games, music videos, and internet

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Media EffectsSerious Violence

• Experimental studies find a strong relationship (r = .32) between exposure to television and film violence and short-term aggression.

• Longitudinal studies find mixed evidence for long-term effects. When statistically significant effects were found, they were typically small.

• There is little research on the effects of exposure to violence in the other media. A recent meta-analysis on exposure to violent video games found a small influence on physical aggression (r < .20)

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Preventing Youth Violence – Major Findings & Conclusions

1. A number of youth violence intervention and prevention programs have demonstrated that they are effective; assertions that "nothing works" are false.

2. Most highly effective programs combine components that address both individual risks and environmental conditions, particularly building individual skills and competencies, parent effectiveness training, improving the social climate of the school, and changes in type and level of involvement in peer groups.

3. Rigorous evaluation of programs is critical. While hundreds of prevention programs are being used in schools and communities throughout the country, little is

known about the effects of most of them.

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4. At the time this report was prepared, nearly half of the most thoroughly evaluated strategies for preventing violence had been shown to be ineffective--and a few were known to harm participants.

5. In schools, interventions that target change in the social context appear to be more effective, on average, than those that attempt to change individual attitudes, skills, and risk behaviors.

6. Involvement with delinquent peers and gang membership are two of the most powerful predictors of violence, yet few effective interventions have been developed to address these problems.

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7. Program effectiveness depends as much on the quality of implementation as on the type of intervention. Many programs are ineffective not because their strategy is misguided, but because the quality of implementation is poor.

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Several major reviews of youth violence prevention and intervention programs have been published in the past decade.

• Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising. A Report to the United States Congress (Sherman et al., 1997)

• The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s A Sourcebook: Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (Howell et al., 1995)

• The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (Howell, 1995)

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Best Practices of Youth Violence Prevention: A Sourcebook for Community Action (Thornton et al., 2000)

• The American Youth Policy Forum’s Less Hype, More Help: Reducing Juvenile Crime, What Works—And What Doesn’t (Mendel, 2000)

• The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence’s Blueprints for Violence Prevention (Elliott & Tolan, 1999)

• "School-Based Crime Prevention" (Gottfredson et al., in press)

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Scientific Criteria: Programs

•Model–Rigorous experimental/quasi-experimental design–Significant deterrent effects on:

•Level 1: violence or serious delinquency•Level 2: strong risk factors (effect size >0.3)

–Replication with demonstrated effects–Long-term sustainability (1 year)

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Ineffective StrategiesPrimary Prevention: UniversalPeer counseling, peer mediation, peer leadersNonpromotion to succeeding gradesSecondary Prevention: SelectedGun buyback programsFirearm trainingMandatory gun ownershipRedirecting youth behaviorShifting peer group normsTertiary Prevention: IndicatedBoot campsResidential programsMilieu treatmentBehavioral token programsWaivers to adult courtSocial caseworkIndividual counseling

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Programs That Work

• Seattle Social Development Project

• Prenatal and Infancy Home Visitation by Nurses

• Functional Family Therapy

• Multisystemic Therapy• Multidimensional

Treatment Foster Care

• Life Skills Training• The Midwestern

Prevention Project

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Programs That Work

• PATHS: Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies

• I Can Problem Solve• Iowa Strengthening

Families Program• Preparing for the Drug-

Free Years• LIFT: Linking the Interests

of Families and Teachers• The Incredible Years

Series

• Bullying Prevention Program

• Good Behavior Game• Parent Child Development

Center Programs• Parent-Child Interaction

Training• Yale Child Welfare Project• FAST: Families and

Schools Together• Preventive Intervention• The Quantum

Opportunities Program

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A Vision for the Future

• Continue to build the science base• Accelerate the decline in gun use by

youth• Facilitate entry of youth into effective

intervention programs rather than incarcerating them

• Disseminate model programs with incentives for fidelity

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A Vision for the Future (Cont’d)

• Provide training and certification programs for intervention personnel

• Improve public awareness of effective interventions

• Convene youth and families, researchers, and private and public organizations for a youth violence summit

• Improve federal, state, and local strategies for reporting crime and violent death information

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About SuicideBe Aware of the Warning SignsTalks about committing suicideHas trouble eating or sleepingExperiences drastic changes in behaviorWithdraws from friends and/or social activitiesLoses interest in hobbies, work, school, etc.Prepares for death by making out a will and final arrangementsGives away prized possessionsHas attempted suicide beforeTakes unnecessary risksHas had recent severe lossesIs preoccupied with death and dyingLoses interest in their personal appearanceIncreases their use of alcohol or drugs

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About SuicideWhat to Do

Be direct. Talk openly and matter-of-factly about suicide.

Be willing to listen. Allow expressions of feelings. Accept the feelings.

Be non-judgmental. Don’t debate whether suicide is right or wrong, or feelings are good or bad. Don’t lecture on the value of life.

Get involved. Become available. Show interest and support.

Don’t dare him or her to do it.

Don’t act shocked. This will put distance between you.

Don’t be sworn to secrecy. Seek support.

Offer hope that alternatives are available but do not offer glib reassurance.

Take action. Remove means, such as guns or stockpiled pills.

Get help from persons or agencies specializing in crisis intervention and suicide prevention.

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About SuicideBe Aware of Feelings

Can’t stop the painCan’t think clearlyCan’t make decisionsCan’t see any way outCan’t sleep, eat or workCan’t get out of depressionCan’t make the sadness go awayCan’t see a future without painCan’t see themselves as worthwhileCan’t get someone’s attentionCan’t seem to get control

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