Preventing Teen Violence Before it Starts

by Murray BarnesFor years, gun, gang, and youth violence have plagued Chicago, but the city has been particularly hit hard this spring. Last week, Chicago experienced more than 30 shootings and seven Chicagoans were shot to death in one night. Many of those killed were teenagers.  This comes on the heels of Chicago teen Derrion Albert’s brutal killing last fall where Albert was beaten to death by peers while walking home from school. The incident was captured on cell phone video by witnesses and garnered national attention.  Overall crime and homicide rates have gone down in Chicago over the past several years, but teen murder rates are still high. A record 36 Chicago Public School students were killed in 2009, up from 31 in 2008.

In trying to understand the myriad reasons behind Chicago’s violence, I came across Heather MacDonald’s controversial article on why community organizing and government intervention have been ineffective in curbing the violence. Her argument is that Chicago youth crime is an issue tied to family structure. She suggests that the lack of two-parent homes has lead to a “culture of illegitimacy” in which individuals – not society or its institutions – are responsible. She writes:

 … 75% of Chicago’s black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

MacDonald’s approach is misguided because it assumes unproved facts, it does not provide solutions, and it uses language that perpetuates racial inequalities.

MacDonald’s article contains a flaw of assumption: there is no evidence that being born to a single parent causes a child to commit violent acts. Single-parent homes and youth violence may be related, but there is no proven causal relationship. Instead, research shows a causal link between youth development and parenting style. A traditional two-parent family structure is less important than having at least one parent who exhibits positive parental behavior. In his extensive study on youth violence and the role of parents/families, Laurence Steinberg concludes:

Children from homes characterized by negative parenting were at risk for problems regardless of their ethnicity or income and regardless of whether their parents were married, divorced, single, or remarried. In other words, the quality of the parent-child relationship matters much more than the social demographics of the household.

I sympathize with MacDonald’s attempt to use her intuition to draw conclusions. We can’t always trust research or assume that it’s up to date given how long it takes to conduct and publish studies, so it makes sense to rationalize based on what we know: in this case, that fatherless teens killed Derrion Albert, so there is a natural connection between their single-parent situations and their violent behavior. Let’s assume for a moment that she’s right. What, then, is the solution? She does not present one, and instead implies the issue's perpetual intractability:

In autumn 2009, one in seven girls at Chicago’s Paul Robeson High School was either expecting or had already given birth to a child. It’s not hard to predict where Chicago’s future killers are coming from.

Her language not only exhibits a lack of regard for teen pregnancy and youth violence, but also fails to recognize or suggest programs that address and solve these problems. I would bring to her attention CeaseFire, a successful University of Illinois-based non-profit that exhibits exactly the characteristics that MacDonald calls ineffective: CeaseFire works with the community and the government to curb gun violence. Amongst CeaseFire’s community outreach members are former gang members and faith leaders, and it has an active partnership with the Chicago Police Department. The U.S. Department of Justice recently evaluated CeaseFire’s programs and found that the organization is directly responsible for a 16-35% decrease in shooting in CeaseFire zones. (The statistics are even more impressive if you look at overall change in these areas.)

If CeaseFire is an example of established success, Chicago is also home to innovative new efforts to decrease school violence. Perhaps the most ambitious example is CEO of Chicago Public Schools Ron Huberman’s initiative, which will begin with $60 million of federal stimulus money over the next two years to target 10,000 Chicago youth deemed most vulnerable to become involved in violent behavior. Huberman has identified these students through a careful analysis of past violent perpetrators’ common characteristics including low school attendance, poor academic performance, and unstable family situations. These students will be provided with a one-on-one adult advocate and a paid after-school job. The program is particularly unique in its attempt to target potential violent youth instead of the traditional preventative approach of working with already violent youth.

So we’ve identified a community effort and a groundbreaking in-school effort. I would propose going a step further, and by that I really mean a step further back, targeting the problem of violence at its roots, early on. CeaseFire is admirably trying to reverse a trend, while Huberman is fighting the in-school fight. Why not address the problem before violent-prone kids are even born? Geoffrey Canada, education pioneer and founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, is doing exactly that. He is trying to transform the destructive behavior of an entire neighborhood through programming that starts before children are born and sees them all the way to college. Baby College, a set of workshops for expectant parents, teaches positive parenting techniques, from infant nutrition to the simple act of talking to one’s child to aid in their development. Baby College graduates are giving their kids a leg up. At an early age, if children do not grow up in a positive parenting environment, they tend to fall behind in school and exhibit poor behavior. It’s a problem that builds: the farther a child lags behind, the harder it is to make up the gap. Baby College creates a positive path for children from the day they are born. Baby College graduates' children are guaranteed enrollment in Harlem Children Zone’s successful primary and high schools. If MacDonald were thinking with a critical, solutions-based mindset, she would encourage Baby College-esque programming in Chicago as a way to prevent the “social breakdown” of the city’s south side. Instead, she has no hope.

I will keep my last qualm with MacDonald’s perspective brief, as it lies in my personal distaste with the language she uses. She implies that black children born out of wedlock are creating a culture that is illegitimate, uncivilized, and without a moral compass. The claims are vacant without taking into consideration structural issues such the fact that college-educated blacks have a harder time getting employed than their white counterparts. My belief is that MacDonald’s demeaning language will only further deepen our country’s angry racial divisions.

At the end of the day, though, my moral finger-wagging is as pointless as hers. Let’s instead devote our time to solving problems and diminishing racial “us” versus “them” lines from every direction.  On that note, I’ll end with a video produced by high-school students at Free Spirit Media, a media education organization targeting underserved youth on Chicago’s south and west sides (disclaimer: I worked at Free Spirit Media from 2007-2008). I know articles like this one get muddled with research, statistics, and politics, but this video gets to the heart of the issue. Produced in 2009, the year that the Chicago Public School system experienced an all-time high of 36 teen deaths, “Will I Be Next” explores gun violence from the perspective of those who face it every day, in their school hallways and on their front porches.