Violence in Urban America Mobilizing a Response (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix B: Summaries of Conclusions, Recent Studies
Appendix B: Summaries of Conclusions, Recent Studies
Pages 85-104
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APPENDIX B Summaries of Conclusions Recent Studies
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Nor did it deal with suicide or other forms of self-harming by violent means. The second thing worth noting is that we did not talk generally of violent crimes or violent behaviors.
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We recommended that a reasonable policy for funding research on understanding violent behaviors would give priority to research proposals that involved at least two of these levels for example, studying both community and individual factors to determine the relative contribution of each to given violent behaviors. The fourth thing that guided our final deliberations was that we could find relatively few examples in which research or evaluation provided sufficient evidence to conclude that a particular violence prevention or reduction program should be recommended for implementation.
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Yet research suggests some promising and achievable objectives: reversing housing policies that geographically concentrate poor, one-parent families with teenage sons; supporting social networks and parenting whose values discourage violence; improving police-community cooperation; and providing legitimate economic alternatives to violent illegal drug and gun markets. During childhood development, promising points of intervention and prevention include helping parents to be nonviolent role models, provide consistent discipline, limit children's violent entertainment, and teach them nonviolent ways to meet their needs.
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But as we should have learned from the "drug wars," making them work requires community support, evaluation, and progressive development. Moving from promising points for intervention to effective violence prevention will require cooperation by organizations that don't always work well together: police; other criminal justice agencies; community-based organizations; school, public health, and social service administrators; and evaluation researchers.
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The phenomenon of child abuse and neglect has moved from a theoretical framework, where we looked at individual disorders and pathology in parents, toward a focus on more extreme disturbances of child rearing often part of a con Cathy Spatz Widom served as a member of the Panel on Child Abuse and Neglect, which produced the report summarized here (Anne C Petersen and Rosemary Chalk, editors; Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1993)
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The cognitive effects of abuse range from attentional problems and learning disorders to severe organic brain syndromes to low IQ and reading ability levels that persist very dramatically into young adulthood. Behaviorally, the consequences range from poor peer relationships all the way to extraordinarily violent behaviors.
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In this research there is also a puzzling race-specific effect, which we cannot explain, but which I would encourage everyone to think about more carefully. This effect suggests the need to be very sensitive in terms of the way we respond to abused and neglected children at the very earliest stages so that when we first hear of a case of abuse and neglect, if we have services available before detaining children, we need to offer these services equally to black and white children.
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I want to repeat and emphasize that increased attention needs to be paid to neglected children. Neglect is almost three times as common as physical abuse and sexual abuse cases, and yet the rates of arrest for violence are
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Finally, I'd like to encourage you to think more broadly about what you do to prevent future violence. There's a role for people in terms of community policing.
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Institutions and systems initially designed to help high-risk youth, such as juvenile justice and child welfare, have instead become sources of risk. The social forces that are straining these institutions are many and complex, but they are all influenced by the relentless decline in income of families with young children.
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We must keep in mind that a rising economic tide will not necessarily lift most poor families out of poverty. Both the proportion and total of families living in poverty increased during the long period of economic expansion in the 1980s.
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, grade retention, "pull-out" Chapter 1 programs, and categorical dropout prevention programs. Some schools and districts are experimenting with alternatives specifically focused on improving the achieve
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Sixth, the report identified a number of ways in which the juvenile and criminal justice systems fail to intervene before adolescent offenders become fully enmeshed in the adult criminal justice system. We are all painfully familiar with the high proportions of inner-city youth, especially minorities, who have had official contact with the criminal justice system, and these contacts, in effect, mortgage an adolescent's future by jeopardizing long-term employment prospects.
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Terri Moffitt marshals evidences regarding neurological and psychological links to violence; Felton Earls and Jacqueline McGuire present a public health perspective on child abuse; and Nancy Guerra examines programs designed to reduce violence in urban America. The book ends with a summary that sets an agenda for improving life in inner cities through reduction of violence.
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Even after the Civil War, blacks were largely excluded from educational institutions and white collar occupations (Horton, 1993; Kirschenman and Neckerman, 1991; Lane, 1986; Steinberg, 1989; Thernstrom, 19731. In counterpoint to this picture of inequality, American democracy sets out an ideal of equality.
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Programs designed to reduce antisocial behavior or to improve the wellbeing of those living in inner cities have not been well served in terms of evaluations. Preschool health-related home visits have gains that seem to be largely short term.
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. The New York City Draft Riots.
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. Perplexing questions in the understanding and control of violent behavior.
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