Table of Contents

1. Youth Violence as a Public Health Crisis
2. My Role
3. Emergent Themes
4. Lessons Learned
5. Summary and Conclusions

Youth Violence as a Public Health Crisis

Youth violence is a public health crisis particularly in distressed neighborhoods across the country. Those of us looking to “change the odds” for youth at risk of being either a victim or perpetrator of violence face a daunting task. According to data from the Boston Police Department, 45% of all 2011 homicides were committed in Dorchester, a community predominantly comprised of individuals of color. And, violence overall is geographically concentrated – almost 100% of these murders were committed in only 3 Boston neighborhoods. The most recent mortality data from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, suggests that in Boston alone, the odds of being a homicide victim are 39 times higher for young blacks as compared to young whites. During the three year period spanning 2006 – 2008, out of the 96 youth killed in Boston, 79 were black. A simple calculation leads to a startling result with devastating consequences for our community: there was one young black homicide victim in Boston every two weeks, on average, over this three year period. The motivation for this book comes from my work with a major youth violence prevention initiative in Boston at a time when concentrated efforts were focused on understanding the large upsurge in youth violence since the so-called Boston miracle – a period during the 1990s when youth violence was at an historic low. The initiative had two primary goals, namely to reduce “risky and deviant” behaviors among disconnected youth; and to empower youth by increasing social relationships with supportive adults and through building soft skills necessary for sustainable employment. Accordingly, my work with the collaborative, which was initiated by both the State Street Foundation and the City of Boston, was to document the effectiveness of a comprehensive youth development program through employment in achieving these goals. We hypothesized that youth in the employment program would acquire the tools they need to make them less likely to traverse down one of several criminal trajectories or find themselves in a situation that was likely to result in their being a crime victim. Therefore, we measured changes in behavior known to be correlated to violence and victimization.

My Role

In my primary role as researcher, I approached the task with extreme skepticism. I set out to measure any observed changes in the youth during the time they were “exposed” to the program, and then if the program was successful, I would document the causal mechanisms responsible for that change. To my surprise, we did find a reduction in several risk-taking and deviant behaviors (having sex, drinking, weapon-carrying, authority conflict, physical fighting, feeling sad because there was nothing to do and not paying for something you should have). As I reflected on the importance of this work, it became apparent that I was only documenting what people in the community who work with youth already knew. The power of the research, then, was in capturing the stories of the youth that spoke to their oftentimes traumatic life experiences, their attitudes about the causes of youth crime, and most importantly what we can do to prevent it.

Since this was a mixed methods study, the voices of the youth brought the data to life. After hours upon hours talking to young people about their personal experience with the employment program, I was able to situate their experiences in a positive youth development framework and analyze their responses through the lens of public health. I came to understand how the program has helped them navigate the cruel world in which many of them by chance find themselves having to cope and consequently was able to make sense of the quantitative findings to derive the causal mechanisms leading to changes in risky and deviant behaviors.

No matter what adversity I might have had to deal with in my own life, I was completely unprepared to accept the circumstances in which some of these youth were living. The adversity that these youth have had to deal with is incredible, but what is even more incredible is their gracefulness in handling that adversity, an inexplicable acknowledgment that they can overcome it, their uncanny ability to cope when most would give up, their desperate longing for a better life and the perspicuity, intelligence, depth and ingenuity they possess for unraveling the inconsistencies of the social, political and economic world in which they have been marginalized, overlooked and largely forgotten. They are well aware of the fact that they cannot be completely forgotten, however. These are the youth society scapegoats when bad things happen – they are who we blame for any and all of societal ills such as teenage pregnancy, poverty, substance abuse, gangs and crime while at the same time giving other children a pass for the same behavior.

Read more about the benefits of putting teens to work here

Emergent Themes

Several themes emerged that characterized their outlook and contextualized their behavior that I elaborate upon in the rest of this book. These themes were often responsible for masking tremendous talent, skill and knowledge that ordinarily goes unnoticed by society at-large particularly among the few who are violent. Racism and discrimination, exposure to community based violence, and intergenerational poverty are just a few of the many reasons these youth are demonized and what’s worse is they know it. These social problems predictably and understandably lead to hopelessness, procrastination and an inability to plan for the future, school truancy and tardiness, exposure to violence, depression and ptsd, an inability to meet basic needs particularly with respect to food and shelter, and anger. And, while we must be honest about the fact that some of them engage in very bad behaviors, we must not – if we are serious about violence prevention – overlook their tremendous internal fortitude, desire to persevere in the face of adversity, loyalty to friends and family, and an uncompromised and unconditional desire to love and to be loved. Characterizing them as super-predators, proven risk, gang affiliated, disconnected, poor and even minority are ways in which society dehumanizes these youth and is evidence that we have failed to acknowledge anything positive about their personhood.

The major social problems in this country – homelessness, poverty, violence and broken families, for example – are often discussed by policymakers, politicians and academics as discrete and independent events. They are not, in fact, independent. Rather, they are all integral in defining the complexity that characterizes most adolescents, but particularly those living in highly distressed settings who, because they are forced to grow up way too fast, bypass traditional developmental trajectories that are necessary for optimal functioning and hence are at a lag as compared to other more privileged youth. This became clear after I asked some youth participating in an after school program how the employment program would benefit their in-school performance, and one of them commented, that it wouldn’t! He went on to explain that “problems at home prevent me from doing well in school.” I was left wondering what these problems were and spent the next year answering that question. Another chimed in that the power of the program is in giving us a forum for our voices to be heard, “we want people to listen to us, and hear our struggles.” Another youth opined that “I never make plans because things don’t really go as planned.”

In thinking deeply about these comments, the types of things needed to be in place in order to tailor a meaningful youth development program – one that would really be transformative – became clear. However, the solution necessitates a very large paradigm shift in the way we think. We must think in a somewhat counterintuitive way by flipping the script on the way things are usually done – a paradigm for academic persistence, for example, that is qualitatively different from the norm. Instead of forging a traditional education to employment “pipeline” that is clearly NOT working, why not use employment as a way to increase school engagement? This is only reinforced by the idea that things don’t go as planned. If things don’t go as planned, then why bother? Moreover, contrary to popular belief, youth tend not to associate the financial value of an education with academic persistence (i.e. going to class).

Youth development does not exist in a vacuum. Developmental outcomes do not depend exclusively on individual level factors such as personal characteristics and psychological makeup – as many people want to believe. Rather, developmental trajectories are guided as well by our institutions, such as schools, hospitals and the police, relationships with parents and teachers and community context. The multiple contexts of youth development are in disarray for many of these youth. I remember vividly how an administrator at a local elementary school told me that 300 of 700 families with children attending the school are functionally homeless. By the time these youth reach high school, many have already assumed a parental role themselves, either by having their own baby or by having to care for their siblings while their parents are at work. A large proportion of youth I spoke to are first generation immigrants who must overcome significant language barriers, while others still have been personally afflicted by violence or have witnessed violence first hand in their community.

I once asked them to reflect on how community violence has affected them and my thoughts still reverberate from a few of their responses: “violence is everywhere” one youth hauntingly told me, another said, “everybody dies, but not everybody lives.” The data confirmed the community based exposure to violence and the corresponding trauma it causes. Half of all youth reported being affected by violence in the community and 58% said they never or seldom feel safe on their commute to school. Nevertheless, 84% claimed they feel safe in school more than some of the time. School becomes a safe haven for many whether they are doing well or not. One factor that is consistently overlooked is that these youth did not choose the circumstances in which they were born yet as a society we continue to compare them to youth living in suburbia.

Read more about the initiative to fight violence and fund teen jobs here

Lessons Learned

As a consequence of hearing these stories repeatedly, I wondered why we keep asking the wrong questions and expecting the right result? Stop here and do a thought experiment: could you have managed to complete high school if none of your basic needs for housing and/or safety were met? As a 17 year old, were you capable of figuring out how to meet your basic needs? Indeed, some of these youth struggle under these circumstances as well. Almost 1 in 5 of these “at risk” youth were absent from school on 10 or more occasions. The question that is often asked, “Why are these youth failing out of school?” has a very clear answer. Nevertheless, like most questions we ask about things we have not experienced ourselves, it is misguided. The question we should be asking is, “How are youth who live in such circumstances even able to finish high school in the first place?” But to ask such a question requires an experiential component that most policymakers, researchers and educators simply do not have. It also forces us to focus on positive as opposed to negative characteristics, which seems to be anathema when it comes to this population.

In their ideal world, the majority of disconnected youth want to graduate high school and attend college. In fact, despite the fact that almost 70% of the youth surveyed claimed to be eligible for free or reduced lunch, more than 60% responded being fairly or very well off, and 90% stated that they would like to finish high school and go on to college. According to my colleague Andy Sum, this reality is that nearly 5 in 10 black male students attending Boston public schools will not complete high school (45%) and approximately 80% remain unemployed well into the future. The question becomes, why is there such a discrepancy between their aspirations and the reality in which they live?

If you have children, how do you think they would cope with these sorts of issues? The answer, I believe, is that your children would not fare as well. Yes, it’s true that some manifest anger and resentment towards institutions they grow to believe are inherently biased and untrustworthy, others resort to substance abuse, a few become criminally involved, but the overwhelming majority overcome the adversity to become model citizens. Many nights I lay awake thinking about how things would change immediately if these problems characterized the suburb in which I live – majority white, fairly well off, etc. Why is there not the outrage regarding how children are living?

We take for granted all the networks we have access to – including our parents. Many youth do not have the social networks they need to become connected in positive ways – social networks that are reinforcing and cumulative. Intermediary organizations such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, the Private Industry Council, Action for Boston Community Development and Youth Opportunities Unlimited provide social support and connect the disconnected to employment opportunities quickly and efficiently. The job prospect is merely a carrot, however; once the youth are enrolled in the program it is through the provision of educational support, job training and professional development, structure and incentive that promotes the acquisition of skills that supports these youth in achieving their own goals. Moreover, these programs expose youth to mentors and peers that they can identify with and who emphasize alternative choices to negative behavior. Employment programs such as these are one way to provide youth wih the key ingredients for positive developmental outcomes and are a first step towards creating a sustainable model for change.

Summary and Conclusions

A major take-away from this book is that we need to flip the script on traditional linear ways of knowing and understanding the world in which we live. Researchers must begin to think critically and outside of the box for solutions to complex social problems. One way of doing this is by engaging community in a participatory way in order to identify and solve problems that they feel are important to the betterment of their lives and hence society at-large.