Youth Violence

1. Youth Violence Presentation by Alan R. Brown, Ph.D. Principal Investigator Arizona 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

2. 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

3. Focus Areas • Introductory Comments: • Key Messages • Focus Areas • Major Research Findings and Conclusions • Myths About Youth Violence • The Magnitude of Youth Violence • Prevalence and Trends

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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.

7. Myths About Youth Violence • 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.

8. Myths About Youth Violence • Myth: Most children who are abused and/or neglected will become violent offenders. • Reality: Physical abuse and neglect are weak predictors of violent offending.

9. Myths About Youth Violence • 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.

10. Myths About Youth Violence • 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.

11. Myths About Youth Violence • 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.

12. Myths About Youth Violence • 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.

13. Myths About Youth Violence • 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.

14. Trends – Major Findings & Conclusions

15. Trends – Major Findings & Conclusions

16. Trends – Major Findings & Conclusions

17. Trends – Major Findings & Conclusions

18. Trends – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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.

19. Pathways – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • Most youth violence begins in adolescence and ends with the transition into adulthood. • Most highly aggressive children or children with behavioral disorders do not become serious violent offenders.

20. Pathways – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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.

21. Pathways – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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.

22. Pathways – Major Findings & Conclusions

23. Pathways – Major Findings & Conclusions

24. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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.

25. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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.

26. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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.

27. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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.

28. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions

29. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions Lipsey and Derzon’s Classes of Risk Factors

30. Risk & Protective Factors – Major Findings & Conclusions Lipsey and Derzon’s Classes of Risk Factors

31. 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

32. 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)

33. Preventing Youth Violence – Major Findings & Conclusions • A number of youth violence intervention and prevention programs have demonstrated that they are effective; assertions that "nothing works" are false. • 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. • 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.

34. Preventing Youth Violence – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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. • 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. • 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.

35. Preventing Youth Violence – Major Findings & Conclusions • 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.

36. Preventing Youth Violence – Major Findings & Conclusions 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)

37. 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)

38. Preventing Youth Violence – Major Findings & Conclusions Ineffective Strategies Primary Prevention: Universal Peer counseling, peer mediation, peer leaders Nonpromotion to succeeding grades Secondary Prevention: Selected Gun buyback programs Firearm training Mandatory gun ownership Redirecting youth behavior Shifting peer group norms Tertiary Prevention: Indicated Boot camps Residential programs Milieu treatment Behavioral token programs Waivers to adult court Social casework Individual counseling

39. 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

40. 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

41. 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

42. 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

43. About Suicide • Be Aware of the Warning Signs • Talks about committing suicide • Has trouble eating or sleeping • Experiences drastic changes in behavior • Withdraws from friends and/or social activities • Loses interest in hobbies, work, school, etc. • Prepares for death by making out a will and final arrangements • Gives away prized possessions • Has attempted suicide before • Takes unnecessary risks • Has had recent severe losses • Is preoccupied with death and dying • Loses interest in their personal appearance • Increases their use of alcohol or drugs

44. About Suicide • What 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.

45. About Suicide • Be Aware of Feelings • Can’t stop the pain • Can’t think clearly • Can’t make decisions • Can’t see any way out • Can’t sleep, eat or work • Can’t get out of depression • Can’t make the sadness go away • Can’t see a future without pain • Can’t see themselves as worthwhile • Can’t get someone’s attention • Can’t seem to get control