Youth Violence - Anthropology News

An Issue in Search of Anthropology

Youth violence has been a major cause of mortality, both globally and in the United States. According to a widely disseminated World Health Organization report, violence is ?one of the leading public health issues of our time? (World Report on Violence and Health, 2002), and this applies to youth violence in particular. Violence irrespective of age category is among the main causes of death for people aged 15?44 years of age, yet interpersonal violence among young adults aged 15?29 was responsible for 36.2%of that total (ibid). Recent data from the US show homicide as the second leading cause of death for young people ages 10?24 years old (CDC 2010). For African American youth, however, it is the leading cause of death; the second leading cause of death for Hispanic youth; and the third leading cause of death for Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native youth.

Consider these figures for a moment. Homicide? A leading cause of death for young people? From a human standpoint, that just does not seem to make sense.

When an inexplicable phenomenon such as youth violence is so widespread, it begs an explanation?the kind of explanation that contextualizes, frames it in terms of multiple, intersecting social forces, compared across settings. In the US, however, the inquiry into the causes and prevention of youth violence has largely been the province of law enforcement, criminology, sociology and social psychology, even though it is clearly a complex phenomenon, driven by structural, social, economic and cultural factors that shape individual agency. Where there has been ethnographic work, it tends to focus on gangs and gang-related violence, which is only part of the picture. Beyond a gang focus, ethnographic work has also, for example, described symbolic and behavioral codes (?street codes?) prevalent in violent urban environments, examined structural violence as manifested in urban contexts, described social ecologies of youth violence, and explored connections between adolescent identity development and violence in high poverty settings. But there are few anthropologists involved in the framing of causal models or practical intervention approaches.

So where are the anthropologists?

When an inexplicable phenomenon such as youth violence is so widespread, it begs an explanation?the kind of explanation that contextualizes, frames it in terms of multiple, intersecting social forces, compared across settings.

Current Social Science Approaches to Youth Violence Prevention

To illustrate the need, let?s take a very brief look at the state of the youth violence/youth violence prevention field within the social sciences, at least in the US (some of which has influenced global approaches). Current prevention models for youth violence typically overlap models for the prevention of other youth risk behavior. Most of these models are epidemiological in nature, falling under the risk and protective factor approach. This approach is based on a set of research-based, negative precursors to youth risk behavior in the domains of individual, peer, family, school and community (sometimes, a societal level) together with a smaller set of protective (positive) factors. Framed as a kind of algorithm, exposure to these risk factors is said to increase the likelihood of negative behavioral outcomes, whereas exposure to protective factors exerts the opposite effect. Therefore, reducing risk factor exposure and/or enhancing protective factors as a ?buffer? is the programmatic focus for preventing violence. There are other related approaches, including variants of this model focusing more on protective rather than risk factors, with resulting programs concentrating on enhancing protective factors and less on mitigating risk. There are also models and research that view violence as an outcome of a developmental trajectory lacking in social controls, or as an outcome of cognitive processes related to the interpretation of aggressive social cues.

While these epidemiological and developmental approaches have generated program models that have demonstrated some effectiveness within the limits of their intervention domains (eg, family, school) and with respect to specific risk factors, they have not necessarily reduced youth violence itself. It can be argued that such approaches do not adequately address the broader dynamics underlying youth violence that occur at the community, cultural or structural levels, and that they are analytically focused on targeted factors and outcomes that can be measured. Yet these broader dynamics play a significant role in the integration of multiple risk factors into an aggregated, syndemic phenomenon?a social ecology of youth violence.

Youth Violence and the Anthropological Lens

One example of a more anthropological lens applied to this issue is in recent work that gets away from the factor-based, epidemiological episteme and looks at underground street markets and other concentrated (urban) risk settings as a generative context related to youth violence (M Edberg M, P Bourgois, ?Street Markets, Adolescent Identity and Violence: A Generative Dynamic? in R Rosenfeld and M Edberg, eds, Youth Violence and Economic Conditions, forthcoming 2012). Once youth are in a marginalized or oppositional street culture setting?which may initially be the result of exposure to multiple risk factors?they are often negotiating a unique social world with its own calculus of risk, structure of social goals, and values related to behavior. That ?high risk? social world becomes the ?customary? or governing social context, in the sense of Bourdieu?s habitus and associated doxa. There, violence may have many positive and instrumental attributes. More important, violent behavior is an integral part of the setting ? not a ?risk behavior,? per se. Thus the characteristics of the context generate ongoing motivations and rationales for engaging in violence, and an incorporation of violence into the everyday. This perspective is qualitatively different from the risk exposure-behavior output model so common in social science discourse. In addition, violent behavior itself as a social practice is of course sanctioned (or admired) when in designated domains. The interplay between a behavior that is socially valued in society as a whole?at least in certain forms?and its interpolation within high-risk contexts where there are fewer behavioral options to place it in perspective, likely amplifies violence-related imperatives. These take on even more importance when considering that adolescents are also in a developmental stage that involves the construction of a self in which the elements of identity typically come from their surrounding social world.

What does this kind of anthropological lens mean in terms of preventive interventions or research agendas? Staying with the issue of adolescent development, for example, it would be highly useful to explore the dynamics of adolescent identity development and violent behavior in high risk contexts where violence is embedded in the social milieu. There are a number of other key areas where anthropological engagement could be significant. For example, research (and subsequent interventions) could productively flesh out the understanding of youth violence as a syndemic?an outcome of factors that create shared vulnerability to violence as well as substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, drug markets, and other phenomena. It would also augment the field if there were more work examining youth violence as part of culturally-shaped gender and social role development, and on the specifics of performance and the symbolic nature of youth violence in concentrated poverty settings or compared across settings. Although there has been considerable ethnographic work on gangs as noted earlier, additional work would be useful (in a global and comparative context) on gangs and gang violence in reaction to state suppression of marginalized groups, or on the often complex genealogies of gang cultures and histories. Another fruitful area would include anthropological research on connections between youth violence and media images, or potentially more unique, the role of virtual communities and the Internet on the creation of social units that support or hinder youth violence.

Addressing and understanding youth violence is not an empty field?considerable research and intervention development have already occurred. The problem is not the lack of work, but the dominance of specific disciplinary perspectives which have produced numerous results, yet left significant gaps that are inherent in the limitations and methodologies of those disciplines. Some of what is missing calls for the kind of work that anthropologists do best?adding the synthetic to the analytic.

Mark Edberg is associate professor of prevention and community health, anthropology, and international affairs at George Washington University. He has been principal investigator on a number of violence prevention efforts and has been working with UNICEF on the inclusion of a social-ecological perspective in youth and social development programs.

Source: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/09/01/youth-violence/

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