Youth violence:
UC's contributions to prevention

With a goal of connecting research to community solutions, faculty throughout the University of California are focusing on understanding the risks of youth violence and the best community actions to curb it.

The stakes are high in terms of both dollars and the futures of our children. The cost of youth violence has been pegged at $158 billion a year, according to the Children's Safety Network Economics & Data Analysis Resource Center.

Homicide was the second leading cause of death among 10- to 24-year-olds in 2005. And violent crime among young people is growing at a greater rate than in the general population. While total homicide arrests dropped 3.1 percent between 2005 and 2006, according to FBI statistics, arrests of suspected killers under 18 rose 3.4 percent. Robbery arrests rose 8.6 percent, but the number of under-18 suspects arrested jumped 18.9 percent.

UC Riverside and UC Berkeley are among the 10 national universities – the only two in California - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has designated as Academic Centers of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention.

UC faculty from a variety of disciplines including law, education, psychology and criminology, collaborate in the work of the centers. Here are a few of their research highlights.

Immigration policy may strengthen gangs

Cheryl Maxson, associate professor and director of Doctoral Program, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine

http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/cmaxson

Cheryl Maxson uses a comparative research approach when she takes to the streets to study gang behavior and migration patterns. An international expert in street gangs, Maxson is the co-author of the books Street Gang Patterns and Policies and The Modern Gang Reader, now in its third edition.

Her current project focuses on the effect the U.S. policy to deport gang members back to their homelands has had on gang crime in other countries.

"There is so much conversation about this with little actual research on it," she says. Specifically, she is studying Mara Salvatrucha, sometimes known as MS-13, a Los Angles gang started by Salvadoran immigrants. Since the mid-90s the United States has been deporting gang members back to El Salvador where evidence suggests they are only growing stronger and expanding.

Many of the deported gang members came to the United States as young children. They have no ties in El Salvador and in some cases don't even speak the language. When they arrive as deportees in Central America, they continue gang activities to survive. While it may seem like our own country is made safer with their departure that may not be the case, says Maxson. Departed gang members may have developed ties to international organized crime, expanding their reach into trafficking of weapons, drugs and human beings.

"That is what my work will explore," says Maxson, who is analyzing data from scores of interviews with law officers, social workers and current and former gang members here and abroad. Her hope is that policy-makers can gain a stronger understanding of how gangs function and make good decisions about how to deal with them.

"In the last two decades, California took a very sharp turn away from prevention and invested instead in prosecution and incarceration," says Maxson. "There is no evidence to suggest that's a good policy approach."

The prison experience only tends to aggravate gang behaviors, she says. She would like more resources to go into keeping young people out of gangs with prevention programs geared to middle school or younger children since the prime age to join gangs is 13 to 15. She's optimistic about Gov. Schwarzenegger's 2007 gang violence initiative.

"The dialogue is shifting so there is more support for intervention and prevention," she says. "Hopefully we'll be able to draw the extraordinary resources we put into incarceration into programs."

'Promotores' take prevention into homes

Nancy Guerra, professor UC Riverside Department of Psychology, principal investigator and director, Southern California Academic Center of Excellence on Youth Violence Prevention

http://www.stopyouthviolence.ucr.edu

On the poorest streets in Santa Ana, Calif., UC Riverside psychology professor Nancy Guerra is taking the fight against youth violence directly into the homes of at-risk Latino children. A research project launched in February will try to mirror the success of visiting nurse programs that send RNs into the homes of new parents to teach infant care.

Working with the nonprofit Latino Health Access, the project will train people from the community to serve as "promotores." These community lay health workers will visit families in their own homes to promote violence prevention and effective parenting.

"The idea is they'll learn more from a neighbor than an academic telling them how to parent," said Guerra, director and principal investigator of the Southern California Academic Center of Excellence on Youth Violence Prevention.

The center, with researchers from UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and the University of Southern California, works mainly with nonprofits, schools and public agencies in the cities of Santa Ana, Riverside and Perris. Those community connections provide both a testing ground for research theories and an avenue for translating academic research into practical uses.

The most recent project in Santa Ana targets low-income, Latino children 6 to 12 and will last two years. Participants will be recruited through the health nonprofit or through schools where kids at risk for violence are identified by behaviors such as early aggression, bullying, pushing and shoving.

"If you look at the research evidence, family–focused programs are among the most effective," says Guerra.

Rather than wait for parents to attend a talk at their child's school, she believes going into the home will prove more successful. Very little controlled evaluation of violence prevention has been done specifically in Latino immigrant families, she says. This project adapts prevention strategies to meet the needs of that community.

For example, multiple families may be living in one overcrowded household, so a child is exposed to many different styles of parenting in an often stressful environment.

"You get a level of chaos most people aren't used to living in," Guerra says.

During the home visits, "promotores" stress the importance of parents knowing where their children are and finding out about their best friends. They'll also talk about alternatives to harsh parenting and excessive discipline.

The "promotores" model is cost-effective, Guerra says, and can be adapted to different cultures and communities: "The common theme is parenting under stress."

Small changes produce big crime drops

Franklin Zimring, William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar, UC Berkeley School of Law, principal investigator and director, The Center on Culture, Immigration and Youth Violence.

http://www.yvpcenter.org

In the 1960s, Franklin Zimring was one of the first researchers to link the rise in U.S. homicides to the availability of handguns. A legal expert in juvenile crime and lethal violence, Zimring has spent the decades since his groundbreaking study deciphering crime trends and advocating for sound, research-backed criminal justice policy.

Zimring is director of the Center on Culture, Immigration and Youth Violence, the CDC's Northern California academic center of excellence based at UC Berkeley. The center's key projects involve youth violence prevention programs in Asian/Pacific Islander and Latino communities in Oakland.

In Zimring's latest book, "The Great American Crime Decline" he examines a 40 percent drop in U.S. crime during the 1990s for clues to successful crime prevention strategies today.

"Little changes make huge differences," he has concluded. "The bottom line is you don't have to change the structure of society to have a decline in violent crime."

During the dramatic '90s U.S. crime decline, New York City's crime rates dropped a whopping 75 percent.

"New York is a marvelous example of how small changes can make a big difference," Zimring says. Factors that affected crime nationwide – such as a decline in the size of the youth population and an increase in economic prosperity – were at work in New York. But Zimring attributes the other 35 percent of the city's crime drop to changes in policing. New York beefed up its police force and instituted more aggressive patrolling on the streets and more management accountability.

"The closer you get to the front end of crime, the more you're changing on city streets, the bigger impact you'll have," says Zimring.

That includes keeping guns off the streets, he says, and investing in long-term programs that help kids make successful transitions to adulthood.

"Anything that helps boys in school will reduce the risk of high criminality in adulthood," he says. "Early education if it works has wonderful long-term effects."