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  • Getting Serious About Community-Based Approaches to Youth Violence Prevention
  • Dorothy L. Espelage, PhD and Lisa De La Rue, MS

In their paper "A Community-Based Systems Learning Approach to Understanding Youth Violence in Boston,"1 Bridgewater and colleagues demonstrate the complexity involved in reaching a deep understanding of the etiology and escalation of youth violence, especially in relation to gang membership and gang violence. Indeed, gang activity continues to be a prevalent issue in the Unites States. Recent national surveys have shown of all jurisdictions served by city and county law enforcement agencies, 32.4 percent reported experiencing gang problems.2 An additional concern is that a significant portion of gang members are youth, with members under the age of 18 making up approximately 37 percent of gangs.3 The Youth Violence Systems Project (YVSP) represents a unique attempt to understand the dynamic nature of youth violence and gang involvement with the explicit goal of determining where prevention efforts should be targeted. This is accomplished with a group model-building process in which community members and researchers enter into a "real" partnership at each stage of model development, evaluation, refinement, and simulation (through focus groups, neighborhood briefs, academic-community advisory board input). As I will briefly articulate in the following paragraphs, this community-based systems learning approach advances both theory and practice in the area of youth violence prevention, but also suggests the need for refinement and expansion of the models.

Continuum of Gang Involvement

Although considerable research has been conducted on youth gang involvement, an agreed upon definition of what constitutes a gang is still lacking. Different definitions are employed for researchers, theorists, and policy makers. However, it is universally agreed that gang involvement co-occurs with violent behavior even above and beyond youth who engage in delinquent behaviors.4 What is often missing from these investigations is the recognition that there are multiple pathways to gang involvement. Bridgewater and colleagues demonstrate convincingly that youth enter gangs and engage in gang-related activities in different ways. In Figure 4, the authors indicate how youth can be uninvolved, off the edge members, rookie members, and rogue members. These roles then cross with the level of organization of the gang and gun use. These models are generated from data that were gathered from the multiple methods of assessment, from interviews to focus groups. Transposed on this flowchart is the dynamic movement of youth across these gang member roles and the targeted interventions to reduce progression from uninvolved to more organized shooter gang involvement. From a prevention standpoint, these models offer communities multiple entry points of intervention, which is demonstrated through the 12-year simulation to "clear the streets." It will be imperative to determine the impact of targeted community-based interventions on the movement across gang roles. It would be equally important to determine whether efficacy varies depending on the extent to which individual youth are entrenched in the gang community.

Comprehensive Theory Building

Much of the earlier research on gangs focused on the activities of gang members and the negative consequences of gang involvement. Considerable research has also attempted to understand the motivation of youth to become involved in gangs. Bridgewater and colleagues drew upon multiple theories to develop their models, but their models appear to be heavily informed by the constructs of addiction or affinity to violence, community trauma, and the cycle of maintaining gang reputation and identity [End Page 3] through the use of violence. It would be important to expand these models to include other aspects of the youth's ecology more directly, including peer networks to assess deviancy and influence, family disruption, and community safety issues.5

Bronfenbrenner's classic ecological framework illustrates the system levels that exist within youth development. It explains the person-environmental factors that are organized in a contextual depiction where the levels of the framework consist of the microsystem or the immediate social environment, (e.g., roles, relationships, and activities); mesosystem or social environment impacting development indirectly (e.g., parental employment setting; school administration issues; peer group in school); exosystem (e.g., parents' friends; activities of teachers at school); and macrosystems, which focuses on broader societal factors (e.g., socioeconomic...

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