Youth Violence in Context

An Ecological Routine Activity Framework

Eileen M. Ahlin, Maria João Lobo Antunes

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429655098
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Criminology

This book places youth violence within a Routine Activity Ecological Framework. Youth violence, specifically youth exposure to community violence and youth perpetration of violent behaviors, occur within various contexts. Ahlin and Antunes situate their discussion of youth violence within an ecological framework, identifying how it is nested within four mesosystem layers: community, family, peers and schools, and youth characteristics. Contextualized using an ecological framework, the Routine Activity Theory and Lifestyles perspective (RAT/LS) are well suited to guide an examination of youth violence risk and protective factors across the four layers.

Drawing on scholarship that explores predictors and consequences of youth violence, the authors apply RAT/LS theory to explain how community, family, peers, schools, and youth characteristics influence youth behavior. Each layer of the ecological framework unfolds to reveal the latest scholarship and contextualizes how concepts of RAT/LS, specifically the motivated offender, target suitability, and guardianship, can be applied at each level. This book also highlights the mechanisms and processes that contribute to youth exposure to and involvement in violence by exploring factors examined in the literature as protective and risk factors of youth violence.

Youth violence occurs in context, and, as such, the understanding of multilevel predictors and preventive measures against it can be situated within an RAT/LS ecological framework. This work links theory to extant research. Ahlin and Antunes demonstrate how knowledge of youth violence can be used to develop a robust theoretical foundation that can inform policy to improve neighborhoods and youth experiences within their communities, families, and peers and within their schools while acknowledging the importance of individual characteristics. This monograph is essential reading for those interested in youth violence, juvenile delinquency, and juvenile justice research and anyone dedicated to preventing crime among youths.

Chapter 1 Understanding the Two Types of Violence

DOI: 10.4324/9780429025853-1

Much research explores youth exposure to violence and an even larger body of work examines youth perpetration of violence. These experiences can, indeed, occur independently. One may be exposed to violence and never engage in it. Alternatively, though less likely, youth may commit violent acts but never witness them in their communities. However, there is often a cycle of violence onboarding process that brings youth into the fold, such that they both experience exposure to violence and commit violent acts. The nexus of exposure to, and engagement in, violence often produces an interminable cycle: the victim becoming a perpetrator and the perpetrator becoming a victim. At which juncture a youth boards the cycle is not often clear, and many scholars choose to prioritize research attention on one type of violence over the other. These bodies of research have contributed to our collective knowledge, but they were primarily developed along siloed paths. We argue that understanding how these two distinct, though frequently overlapping experiences operate within a single framework provides a more holistic approach to the study of youth violence, one that is less frequently explored in the literature. This book’s crux aims to provide such a framework for examining exposure to community violence and youth perpetration of violence.

Before we outline the framework, we first focus on defining exposure to violence and the perpetration of violent behavior. Too often, the predicted consequences of exposure to violence will depend on the conceptualization of violence itself. For example, exposure to community violence can encompass victimization experienced while in the neighborhood, which is a most direct assessment of exposure to community violence. However, other researchers have included the media and home as additional locations where violence occurs. Further muddying definitional discussions, some have argued that exposure to violence should entail only direct victimization (see Gibson et al., 2009), even though research abounds regarding the detrimental impact of secondary exposure and from witnessing violent events. Even hearing of such events can lead to problem behaviors, emotional disturbances, and further long-term consequences. As described below, the same definitional issues are present among the concept of violent behaviors. We recognize that various definitions are possible, even beneficial, to the understanding of youth violence. We present one lens through which to assess how youth violence occurs and why it is important to take seriously the context in which exposure to violence and violent behaviors transpire.

After we present definitions of exposure to violence and violent behaviors, we describe the consequences of the two types of violence and illustrate how the two often coexist, reciprocally fueling each other. This sets a foundation for our call to approach the study of youth violence from a unified theoretical framework that seriously considers the multiple contexts present in the ecological framework. In the remainder of the book, we introduce how the two types of violence described in this chapter fit within an ecological framework, highlighting how scholars have addressed ecological framework components in their study of youth violence (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Ecological domains and sample measures for contextualizing youth violence

Domain	Measure
Community	Collective efficacy Structural characteristics Disorder
Family	Parental attachment Family management strategies
Peers	Deviance of peers Socializing habits School violence
Individual traits	Age Prior delinquency IQ Self-control Locus of control orientation Personality
Table created by authors

Exposure to Violence

Although the concept of exposure to violence is uniquely distinct from more general perspectives on experiences with violence, researchers conceptualize exposure to violence in a variety of ways drawing criticism from methodologists, intent on delineating and dissecting what is meant by violence, exposure, and what is really being measured when using the term “community.” One such critique was levied by Guterman et al. (2000), who dedicate much effort to scrutinizing past operationalizations of community violence, suggesting researchers have failed to achieve consensus regarding what is, is not, should, or should not be considered community violence. The authors further contend “the term ‘community’ connotes not only the where but also the ‘who’ of violent events experienced” (Guterman et al., 2000: 575). They also question whether threats of violence should be considered violence at all. Most research on exposure to violence in the community does not oppose such a definition of people’s experience with violence and welcomes, in fact, investigations of the role of peers in people’s experiences with violence. Thus, it is often dangerously reductionist to focus on direct experiences with violence only and not consider the broad spectrum of events that may contribute to exposure to violence. Because we do agree with Guterman et al. (2000) that exposure to violence has been defined in a myriad of ways, we address these definitional variations next, not because we think there should be a unifying definition, but rather we believe these are critical to understanding the nature of exposure to violence, particularly in the community.

It is evident that exposure to violence is more prominent among younger people when considering the proportion of the population (Figure 1.1). This broad conceptualization of criminal victimization lacks nuance about where victimizations occur and how they are defined. Tremendous research is dedicated to understanding the prevalence, predictors, and consequences of exposure to violence even if researchers do not fully agree upon the very definition of exposure.

Figure 1.1 Percent of population violently victimized by age group

Identifying the types of violence exposure is an initial but critical step to understanding exposure to community violence. The variability in definitions, conceptualization, and operationalization is likely to elicit harsh reactions from “Reviewer 2” if these are not treated with the merited depth and careful discourse on why exposure to violence should (or should not) include both direct and indirect experiences with violence. We struggle as a discipline with establishing boundaries when describing intangible terms like community and neighborhood, understanding that boundaries are often fluid and abstract even if they are derived to be ecologically meaningful. Further, as trolling and cyberbullying become, unfortunately, more commonplace and more communities are formed in cyberspace, the need for locating violence in context becomes more urgent as well as necessary. We argue that the threat of violence over these mediums can have equally devastating consequences, as does experiencing violence firsthand. Moreover, the very effect of violence exposure differentially impacts those who are exposed. There are, in essence, three distinct forms of violence that we employ in defining exposure to violence: direct experiences with violence, whether actual or threatened, witnessing violence perpetrated against others and hearing about violence.

The decision to highlight only direct violent victimization that results in injury or threats of violence, for example, can have serious repercussions and implications for advancing the field. Proponents of using only victimization as a measure of exposure to violence posit that exposure requires victimization, whereby an individual is the intentional target of harm by another or a group of others. In some instances, the very concept of violence “can take the form of shootings, muggings, street chases, gang violence and other acts of violence” (Foster et al., 2004: 59). The authors also propose that victimization incorporates whether an individual has been the target of violent acts, perpetrated with intent to harm, but do not differentiate between actual or threatened acts. In their investigation, interestingly, witnessing violence is tantamount to serving as an eyewitness to violence and, in this case, these acts include threats of violence and perpetrated violence.

The argument against a unitary measure of exposure to violence usually rests on the notion that direct and indirect exposure produce different consequences, with some contending that effects are stronger when experiencing direct exposure to violence (Fowler et al., 2009). Such arguments make sense in theory, as direct and indirect exposure are, presumably, qualitatively different. In practice, the sequelae of either do not bode well for children or youth, regardless of the type of violence that is experienced. Witnessing parental violence has dire consequences for children even if that violence is never turned toward the child (Franzese et al., 2014). Similar claims have been made concerning hearsay or hearing of violent events, also termed tertiary violence as defined by Gibson et al. (2009) and Buka et al. (2001). As Gibson and fellow authors suggest, the definitions of secondary or indirect experiences with violence are less stable across studies. Hearing of violent events tends to be less common and measures are usually derived from the Things I Have Seen or Heard survey (Richters & Martinez, 1990). Some have even suggested exposure to violence as a composite measure that must include media violence, witnessing, hearsay, and direct victimization (Cooley et al., 1995). Yet, studies illustrate the prevalence of secondary exposure to violence. Research is quite clear: a large swath of youth witness violence and while the prevalence of indirect exposure is believed to vary with some locations (particularly the inner-city) tending to foster more opportunities for violence, the impact of secondary exposure crosses borders, gender and racial lines. For example, studies have shown that Arab youth, in particular males, were more likely to experience secondary exposure to violence (Haj-Yahia et al., 2011). Butcher and colleagues (2015) report that close to 59% of teens have seen others assaulted, abused, or threatened, and this percentage tends to be even higher for children in the city (Cooley-Strickland et al., 2009).

One last point on defining exposure to violence, more specifically: locating exposure in space is indispensable to understanding the ecological ramifications of victimization. Total exposure versus subscales of exposure to violence like primary or secondary exposure reveals distinct differences, as does locating the exposure itself. Fowler et al. (2009: 248) conclude that “exposure to community violence appears to represent a unique form of trauma that is particularly associated with the development of PTSD symptoms, especially among children and adolescents.” Fowler and colleagues further argue that total exposure produces a stronger impact on behavioral problems. They also examine the influence of ETV on child outcomes but disaggregate the effects by home, school, and community. The researchers find that, while community violence exerts a stronger impact on hypervigilance, attention disorders and other difficulties, the cumulative effect of exposure had far greater consequences.

Community violence has proximal implications for teens, significantly predicting engagement in violence. The focus of this book is on contextualizing youth violence by placing it in a delineated environmental framework. Studies vary with respect to identifying where violence exposure occurs, whether neighborhood, home, school, or other, and we posit that the ramifications of exposure to violence differ depending on the context, and thus must be considered in discussions of victimization and exposure to violence. Frequently, differences in exposure to violence location emerge according to the selected methodological approaches and instruments used to operationalize exposure to violence. Researchers who use the Children’s Exposure to Community Violence Checklist (CECV) adapted from the Things I Have Seen or Heard survey (Richters & Martinez, 1993) include events within the home and in the community. For example, Martin et al. (2013) reported that scales developed from the CECV are highly correlated and yield results comparable to other instruments used in the field. Howard et al. (2002) also assessed the direct and indirect effects of exposure to violence on child distress, but use the Survey of Children’s Exposure to Community Violence. While the CECV provides some options for contextualizing violence exposure, Howard and colleagues preferred to construct a global measure of exposure to violence and not map the exposure events.

The methodological conundrum on how, when, and why to contextually place exposure to violence rests on what the goals of the narrative and study are: predicting exposure to violence versus examining the harmful consequences of violence victimization and exposure. Direct experiences with violence are undeniably harmful to youth. The literature is also very clear regarding the deleterious effects of witnessing and/or hearing about violent events (Gibson et al. 2009). How youth perceive their communities to matter, how they navigate contexts, witness events, and experience violence leaves deep marks that are not easily erased (Farver et al., 2000). Debates about whether to use a general measure of violence exposure or to deconstruct the scale into primary and secondary forms of victimization persist. But evidence supports the view that whether taken together or disaggregated, exposure to violence is a public health and criminological problem warranting continual investigation, focus, and interest from researchers and the public alike.

In our own work, we repeatedly make the argument that unraveling the causes and effects of exposure to violence requires an understanding of how systems at multiple levels inform risk and protective factors for violence exposure and function to clarify how they shape associated outcomes. We argue that risk and protective factors operate uniquely, but not exclusively, within each ecological context. Thus, examining exposure to violence occurring in the community must include relevant neighborhood characteristics believed to affect exposure, just like exposure to violence in the home needs thoughtful consideration of significant situational elements. In essence, we need a theoretical and methodological framework that provides a more inclusive foundation of how mesosystemic contexts (e.g., community, family, and peers) shape youth exposure to violence (Antunes & Ahlin, 2015).

Consequences of Exposure to Violence

There is substantial depth to the studies on the consequences of exposure to violence. The effects of exposure endure and frequently lead to the development of conduct problems and psychological and mental health challenges. The proximal and distal ramifications of violence experienced in the neighborhood are serious. Studies indicate that exposure to violence can lead to mental health challenges (Fowler et al., 2009; Zona & Milan, 2011) and conduct disorders, including externalizing (Antunes & Ahlin, 2014; Cooley et al., 1995) and internalizing behavior pro...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Understanding the Two Types of Violence
• 2 Ecological Framework and Theoretical Perspectives of Youth Violence
• 3 Community
• 4 Family
• 5 Peers and School
• 6 Youth Characteristics and the Individual
• 7 Applicability of Routine Activity Theory/Lifestyles Perspective to Youth Violence
• Bibliography
• Index