Q&A: Rutgers-Newark Psychologist on Preventing Youth Violence
Paul Boxer, a Rutgers-Newark Psychology professor, is an expert on youth violence, which has declined since the 1990s, in part due to successful methods for defusing and preventing it. Boxerhas co-authored The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A Mixtape for Practice, Policy and Research, a collaboration with Raphael Travis Jr., a professor of Social Work at Texas State University-San Marcos. The book, published this month, is a blend of stories from those who work in the field and reports on strategies that have proven successful. Boxer has worked with youth in detention centers, neighborhoods experiencing violent crime, and psychiatric hospitals. He has also written about youth and gun violence, including mass shootings committed by juveniles and young adults. The title of the book draws an analogy between its combination of scholarship, narrative, established research, and new ideas. “The standard hip-hop style mixtape, the genre from which we drew our inspiration, blends the old and the new, traditional voices and rhythms with newer innovations,'' said Boxer.
What are the biggest risk factors for youth violence?
There are many and it would be tough to say which are the biggest. But I think research in recent years has certainly pointed to a few that are consistently linked to involvement in violence. These include emotional desensitization to violence, which sometimes can look like callousness; extensive histories of trauma, especially parental physical abuse; persistent and intense exposure to violence in homes, neighborhoods, and schools; poor impulse control and anger management capacities; and gang membership.
How has the nature of youth violence changed over the years with the rise of social media and the proliferation of assault weapons?
There is plenty of research now to suggest that social media has provided a new venue for conflicts between kids in a manner that certainly can lead to violent posturing and incitement, in turn spilling over into violence on the street. As for the proliferation of automatic weapons - and assault weapons - we primarily have observed impacts only in terms of the lethality of mass shooting events, which sometimes have included youth perpetrators. However, as my colleagues and I have found, mass shootings are really not predictable or preventable in the same manner as what we have called “street shootings,” or less-lethal kinds of violent incidents that occur far more often among youth in comparison to mass shooting events.
How has youth violence declined in recent years and why has there been a decrease?
There have been documented declines in the United States for youth violence. For example, every two years since 1991 the Centers for Disease Control has administered the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, a large-scale national study tracking rates of involvement in a variety of risky behaviors including violence. In 1991, just over 40 percent of American high school students reported being involved in a physical fight. But over the last 8 to 10 years, that number has hovered around 20 percent. At the same time, though, from the early 1990s onward about 7 to 9 percent of American high school students consistently have reported being threatened with or injured by a weapon on school property. Still, juvenile arrests for “person crimes”--typically involving violence to some degree–also have shown substantial reductions in recent years, from well over 400,000 arrests in 2005 down to fewer than 200,000 arrests per year since 2019. Of course, declines have not occurred uniformly everywhere. In some areas of the US, youth violence has remained high whereas in others it has dropped significantly.
Where meaningful reductions in youth violence have sustained, it is likely attributable to multiple factors. Many states now have adopted very serious “anti-bullying” laws and required local school district implementation of social-emotional programs that target violence and bullying prevention. Many also have adopted more developmentally appropriate policies and procedures in juvenile justice, making it easier to keep youthful offenders out of detention settings and creating more alternatives to detention for lower-level and first-time offenders. These have surely had the effect of moving many youth off of trajectories that might otherwise have led to violence.
What are the most effective ways to prevent youth violence?
Traditionally, interventions that successfully prevent youth violence involve three distinct but intersecting approaches: First, they target behavior explicitly and attempt to replace destructive behaviors, such as verbal or physical fighting, retaliation, substance abuse, or truancy with nonviolent conflict resolution skills, restorative action and civic engagement. These can also include healthy ways to cope with stress and involvement in educational or vocational development programming. It could also involve interventionists showing kids how to calm themselves down when they get angry, how to ask for help and problem-solve challenges with peers, and enrolling in new, positive activities.
Second, successful strategies meaningfully involve families or close kinship networks to monitor, support and encourage youth, as well as hold them accountable. This might include interventionists teaching parents new ways of communicating with or disciplining their children.
And finally, strategies that work leverage broader community resources and agents of change, including school staff, mentors, justice system officials, police officers and coaches. These sorts of approaches target youth and their families directly. As we present in the new book, there are many other innovative ways to address youth violence in communities outside of working directly with youth – for example, physical, structural changes can be made to community infrastructure to render neighborhoods safer and less likely to attract violence.
