Neighborhood Violence Research Articles

Good kids with ties to “deviant” peers: network strategies used by African American and Latino young men in violent neighborhoods

Adolescence can be a precarious time for young men of color growing in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of violence. For young men in those neighborhoods this may mean developing a suite of coping strategies that help them successfully navigate their neighborhood and school. Those strategies may include developing social ties with neighborhood residents that are engaged in “deviant” behavior. The aim of this paper study is to leverage the concept of resiliency to examine how social ties to the neighborhood-based “deviant” peers operate as protective factors. To answer this question we use qualitative data from African American and Latino boys and young men from neighborhoods in Chicago and Waukegan, IL who are between the ages of 14–25. Themes emerged that highlight short term positive impacts of social ties with “deviant” peers vs long term consequences. Implications for social work practice and future research are discussed.

Fortitude in the Face of Adversity: Resilience as a Moderator of the Developmental Pathway from Childhood Exposure to Violence to Dating Violence Perpetration

The purpose of the current study is examining personal resilience as a moderator of the developmental pathway from childhood exposure to violence to the experience of dating violence. Participants (N = 235) completed a series of measures in Spring of 2015. Results from analyses revealed partial support for the three hypotheses. While resilience moderated relations between childhood exposure factors (exposure to indirect violence, violence in the home, and neighborhood violence) and three outcomes related to the perpetration of dating violence (threatening behaviors, emotional/verbal abuse, and physical abuse), resilience did not moderate any relations with victimization as an outcome. Results are discussed in terms of the development of resilient functioning.

Selecting for Safety: A Qualitative Meta-Analysis of Neighborhood Violence and Residential Decision Making

Many studies have established that people in high poverty neighborhoods who select to participate in housing mobility programs cite crime and violence as primary motivations for wanting to make a residential move. Using a novel approach, we analyzed qualitative data across several studies to explore the frequency and dimensions of safety concerns, relating these to the role of neighborhood forces in the residential decision-making process. We asked the following questions: What are the sources and frequency of motivations for residential mobility among participants? In what ways does neighborhood violence factor into residential mobility? Does a more accurate understanding of the role played by neighborhood violence in residential mobility have either theoretical or practical implications for practitioners or policy makers? Qualitative data pertinent to voucher programs, neighborhood crime and residential decision making were gleaned from 20 studies published between the years 2000 and 2014. Our meta-synthesis revealed not only that neighborhood violence is a key factor in the decision making of voucher holders but also a complex one. Violence affects all of the factors that participants consider in the relocation equation: the needs of the household, housing unit features, the prospective neighborhood and its institutions and how these will affect both participants and their dependent children. We also consider the policy implications of the costs to opportunity incurred as a result of neighborhood violence and the magnitude of the role that neighborhood violence plays in shaping residential decision making.

Prevalence and Predictors of Bullying Behavior among Overweight and Obese Youth in a Nationally Representative Sample.

Child and adolescent overweight and obesity are independent risk factors for poor social outcomes. Whether children who are overweight display greater bullying behaviors than normal weight peers, controlling for demographic and other social-ecological factors, was examined. The influence of child (e.g., mental health), family (e.g., income, parent mental health, and exposure to domestic violence), and community (e.g., exposure to neighborhood violence, unfair treatment based on race or ethnic group) factors on bullying risk in the subset of children who are overweight and obese was explored. We conducted a secondary data analysis of the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children's Health, a cross-sectional study providing a nationally representative sample of participants, using a series of multinomial logistic regressions in Mplus software (Muthén & Muthén, Los Angeles, CA). Participants were 41,361 youth ages 10-17 years. Despite statistically significant differences in unadjusted analyses, no differences were found in bullying behavior by weight status once controlling for other factors. Child, family, and neighborhood factors predicted bullying behavior in both the overall sample and the subset of overweight and obese youth. However, some risk factors were unique to children who were overweight or obese. Children who are overweight or obese are not at greater risk for engaging in bullying behavior than normal weight peers. Health professionals targeting bullying behavior should be aware of the impact child, family, and neighborhood factors have on bullying by overweight and obese children and adolescents.

The health status and well-being of low-resource, housing-unstable, single-parent families living in violent neighbourhoods in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The health and well-being of single-parent families living in violent neighbourhoods in US cities who participate in housing programmes is not well described. This two-phase, mixed-methods study explores the health status of families who were participants in a housing-plus programme in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 2011 and 2013 and the relationship between the characteristics of the neighbourhoods in which they lived and their perceptions of well-being and safety. In phase 1, data collected with standardised health status instruments were analysed using descriptive statistics and independent sample t-tests to describe the health of single parents and one randomly selected child from each parent's household in comparison to population norms. In a subset of survey respondents, focus groups were conducted to generate an in-depth understanding of the daily lives and stressors of these families. Focus group data were analysed using content analysis to identify key descriptive themes. In phase 2, daily activity path mapping, surveys and interviews of parent-child dyads were collected to assess how these families perceive their health, neighbourhood and the influence of neighbourhood characteristics on the families' day-to-day experience. Narratives and activity maps were combined with crime data from the Philadelphia Police Department to analyse the relationship between crime and perceptions of fear and safety. Phase 1 data demonstrated that parent participants met or exceeded the national average for self-reported physical health but fell below the national average across all mental health domains. Over 40% reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression. Parents described high levels of stress resulting from competing priorities, financial instability, and concern for their children's well-being and safety. Analysis of phase 2 data demonstrated that neighbourhood characteristics exert influence over parents' perceptions of their environment and how they permit their children to move within it. This research suggests the need for robust research, programmatic and policy interventions to support housing-unstable families who live in neighbourhoods with high levels of violence.

Prevalence of adverse childhood experiences and socioeconomic disadvantage among Portuguese prison inmates and its relationship with current psychopathology

Introduction Adverse childhood experiences such as emotional/verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, household dysfunction and parental psychopathology play a role in the development of chronic mental and physical diseases as well as in the development of aggressive and criminal behavior. Objectives/aims Our aim was to explore the prevalence of childhood adversity and social disadvantage among prison inmates in Portugal and its relationship with current psychopathology. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study among criminal offenders in a high-security prison in Portugal. Socioeconomic status was evaluated using the Graffar scale. Additionally, we inquired our sample about topics concerning education level, work experience and present social and economic situation. Childhood adversity was measured using yes or no questions evaluating sexual, physical, emotional and verbal abuse, neglect, family integrity and household dysfunction, parental psychopathology and/or drug abuse, family, school and neighbourhood violence and economic disadvantage. General psychopathology and psychological distress were measured using the Brief Symptom Inventory. Data was analyzed using SPSS. Descriptive data is provided for all measured variables, and correlation between the number of childhood adverse events and the BSI total score were calculated using the Spearman's rho. Results/conclusions Since the study is currently ongoing, and data collection will be completed by December 2015, we will only be able to provide final results and conclusions by the time of submission of our work presentation, in March 2016. Total sample size is expected to be in excess of 100 subjects.

Abstract P200: Neighborhood Disadvantage and Poor Social Conditions Influence Cardiovascular Disease Incidence in African American Adults: A Prospective Analysis in the Jackson Heart Study

Introduction: Racial residential segregation results in increased exposure to adverse neighborhood environments in African Americans; however the impact of economic and social neighborhood conditions on CVD incidence has not been examined in large, socioeconomically diverse African American samples. Hypothesis: Neighborhood disadvantage and poor social conditions (i.e. violence, physical disorder, and low social cohesion) will be associated with increased risk of developing CVD. Methods: The study included 4,096 African American women and men ages 21-93 from the Jackson Heart Study. Census tracts served as proxies for neighborhoods. Neighborhood disadvantage was assessed using 8 indicators from the 2000 US Census. Neighborhood-level social conditions including social cohesion, violence, and physical disorder were assed using self-reported, validated scales. Multivariable cox-proportional hazards models were used to calculate gender-stratified adjusted hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals. Results: A total of 232 incident cases of CVD occurred during a median follow-up of 8.38 years. Age-adjusted incidence rates generally increased as neighborhood economic and social conditions worsened for both women and men. Among African American women, each standard deviation increase in neighborhood disadvantage was associated with a 25% increased risk of developing CVD after adjustment for socio-demographic characteristics (HR: 1.25, 95% CI: 1.05-1.49). Risk of developing CVD also increased as levels of neighborhood violence and physical disorder increased after socio-demographic adjustment (HR: 1.13, 95% CI: 1.00-1.28 and HR: 1.20, 95% CI: 1.02-1.40, respectively). No statistically significant associations were observed among African American men in multivariable-adjusted models. Conclusion: In conclusion, worse neighborhood economic and social conditions contributed to increased risk of developing CVD among African American women in our sample. Policies and interventions directly addressing these issues may alleviate the burden of CVD in this group.

How Young People Peacefully Challenge Community Norms Embedded With Violence in a Brazilian Favela

Drawing on social disorganization theories this paper considers what type of voluntary organization might mediate community social norms in localities with low income where violence is embedded in social institutions and residents appear unable to informally regulate violent crimes. This study describes how the situated logic of one organization, located in a favela in Brazil, transcends personal ties to the organization and illustrates how community-based organizations have potential to influence community norms with the expectation that rates of violence will decline. This organization has made it possible for young people to publically disrupt the symbolic order that maintains divisive social rules and has started to alter gendered norms that contribute to high levels of neighbourhood violence.

The Social Context of Substance Use and Perceived Risk among Rhode Island Urban Minority Adolescents.

Our qualitative study examined how stresses of daily life affected substance use and perceived risk among Black and Hispanic adolescents. We conducted 11 focus groups with students aged 13-25 in public and alternative schools in Providence, Rhode Island, using Bourdieu's Social Practice theoretical approach to guide questioning and data analysis. Despite participants' frequent marijuana use, they perceived the emphasis society places on substance use as misguided, obfuscating the persistence of more critical problems such as stress and reduced opportunity resulting from neighborhood violence, poor schools, financial difficulties, and home troubles. Drug use appeared not to be a catalyst but a response. Our findings underscore the need for prevention strategies to address systemic racism and structural conditions limiting opportunities in young people's lives. Planners should explore adolescents' pragmatic decision-making contexts and ways that social, health, and community resources can together contribute to conditions where adolescents have opportunities to make healthful choices.

Business models impacting social change in violent and poverty-stricken neighbourhoods: A case study in Colombia

The business model (BM) – a representation of a venture’s core logic for creating value – is an emergent construct of interest in social entrepreneurship research. While the BM concept is normally associated with financial objectives, socio-entrepreneurial BMs are uniquely identifiable by their social value propositions, by their intended target markets and by the projected social change. Drawing from a longitudinal case study of a Colombian foundation, we outline the characteristics of socio-entrepreneurial BMs. We analyse the entrepreneurial process behind the implementation of a BM that draws on communitarian innovative solutions that benefit the excluded and, ultimately, society at large. Focusing on the question of how socio-entrepreneurial BMs progressively evolve to produce social change, we examine the BM of a successful socio-entrepreneurial venture that exhibits the conditions of social change. Our findings show that the social value proposition, the entrepreneur’s passion for social change and a community-based network are decisive factors.

Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication

Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social media platforms like Twitter. We examine the Twitter communications of one known female gang member, Gakirah Barnes, during a two week window in which her friend was killed and then weeks later, she was also killed. We explore how street culture is translated online through the conventions of Twitter. We find that a salient script of reciprocal violence within a local network is written online in real time. Those writing this script anticipate, direct, historicize, and mourn neighborhood violence.

Disentangling Neighborhood Effects in Person-Context Research: An Application of a Neighborhood-Based Group Decomposition

This paper proposes a framework to assess how compositional differences at the neighborhood level contribute to the moderating effect of neighborhood context on the association between individual risk-factors and delinquency. We propose a neighborhood-based group decomposition to partition person-context interactions into their constituent components. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we demonstrate the extent to which variation in the association between impulsivity and delinquency can be attributed to (1) differences in mean-levels of impulsivity and violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods and (2) differences in coefficients across neighborhoods. The moderating effect of neighborhood disadvantage can be attributed primarily to the stronger effect of impulsivity on violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods, while differences in average levels of violence and impulsivity account for 14 percent and 2 percent of the observed difference, respectively.

Examining Change in Adolescent Street Efficacy and Its Association With Violent Outcomes.

Research suggests that street efficacy-the perceived ability to avoid dangerous situations in one's neighborhood-is related to violent outcomes. We investigated change in street efficacy using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Measures of street efficacy and violence (offending, victimization, secondary exposure) were constructed at Waves 2 (1997-2000) and 3 (2000-2002) from youth interviews and parent reports. Results from hierarchical overdispersed Poisson models indicated that street efficacy was a malleable construct with stronger contemporaneous than enduring effects. Furthermore, rates of all three violent outcomes were reduced as individuals increased their levels of street efficacy. Findings support (a) teaching youths to safely navigate violent neighborhood situations and (b) continuously reinforcing youths' perceived ability to navigate danger.

Conduct Problems Among Boston-Area Youth Following the 2013 Marathon Bombing: The Moderating Role of Prior Violent Crime Exposure

A large body of work documents the heavy mental health burden of youth exposure to disasters, but the majority of this research has focused on posttraumatic stress and internalizing symptoms. Less is known about associations between disaster exposure and children’s conduct problems (CPs), or variables that may moderate such relationships. Given well-documented links between CPs and children’s exposure to community violence, youth with greater prior community violence exposure through residence in high-crime areas may be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of disaster exposure on CPs. We surveyed Boston-area caregivers (N = 460) in the first 6 months following the 2013 Marathon bombing on their children’s event-related exposures, as well as CPs. To estimate prior violent crime exposure, children’s neighborhoods were assigned corresponding violent crime rates obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s uniform crime reporting statistics. Almost 1 in 6 Boston-area children assessed in this convenience sample showed clinically elevated CPs in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt. Prior violent crime exposure significantly moderated the link between children’s manhunt exposure (but not bombing exposure) and child CPs. Manhunt exposure was related to increased CPs among children living in areas with high and medium (but not low) levels of prior violent crime. Children living in neighborhoods characterized by violent crime may be at particularly increased risk for developing CPs after violent manmade disasters. As most postdisaster child intervention efforts focus on posttraumatic stress, efforts are needed to develop programs targeting child CPs, particularly for youth dwelling in violent neighborhoods.

‘Rolling dolo’: Desistance from delinquency and negative peer relationships over the early adolescent life-course

Although much of the literature on desistance has focused on late adolescence and early adulthood, little is known about how delinquent early adolescent African-American males develop strategies to desist from youth crime and violence during mid-early adolescence. Furthermore, there are few qualitative studies which examine the strategies delinquent black male youth use to negotiate neighborhood violence and the code of the street. This paper explores why some delinquent black male youth choose to maintain distal relationships or acquaintanceships with neighborhood peers as a safety strategy rather than forge relationships characterized by mutual obligation, trust and reciprocity. Youth define this strategy as ‘rolling dolo’. Drawing on three years of longitudinal ethnographic participant observations and interviews with 15 early adolescent African-American males (ages 12–16) living in a high-risk, low-income inner-city neighborhood in central Harlem, this paper qualitatively explores the meaning, practices and implications of the safety strategy of ‘rolling dolo’.

Experiences of Intimate Partner and Neighborhood Violence and Their Association With Mental Health in Pregnant Women.

Both intimate partner violence and neighborhood crime have been associated with worse mental health outcomes, but less is known about cumulative effects. This association was studied in a sample of pregnant women who were enrolled in a study of disaster exposure, prenatal care, and mental and physical health outcomes between 2010 and 2012. Women were interviewed about their exposure to intimate partner violence and perceptions of neighborhood safety, crime, and disorder. Main study outcomes included symptoms of poor mental health; including depression, pregnancy-specific anxiety (PA), and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Logistic regression was used to examine predictors of mental health with adjustment for confounders. Women who experienced high levels of intimate partner violence and perceived neighborhood violence had increased odds of probable depression in individual models. Weighted high cumulative (intimate partner and neighborhood) experiences of violence were also associated with increased odds of having probable depression when compared with those with low violence. Weighed high cumulative violence was also associated with increased odds of PTSD. This study provides additional evidence that cumulative exposure to violence is associated with poorer mental health in pregnant women.

Mapping Khayelitsha: The complexities of everyday policing in a high crime area

In order for a single South African police station to operate optimally, or indeed at any level of functionality at all, it is required to form cooperative relations with a host of external institutions. This is in addition to ensuring that the internal structural capacity of a police station is maintained. The Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of Police Inefficiency and a Breakdown in Relations between SAPS and the Community in Khayelitsha identified shortcomings in both internal structures and the functioning of external relations. Here, we provide an overview of the stakeholders that make up the policing web in Khayelitsha. This forms the basis for clearer understandings of on-the-ground policing in this unsafe and violent neighbourhood.

Mapping Khayelitsha: The complexities of everyday policing in a high crime area

In order for a single South African police station to operate optimally, or indeed at any level of functionality at all, it is required to form cooperative relations with a host of external institutions. This is in addition to ensuring that the internal structural capacity of a police station is maintained. The Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of Police Inefficiency and a Breakdown in Relations between SAPS and the Community in Khayelitsha identified shortcomings in both internal structures and the functioning of external relations. Here, we provide an overview of the stakeholders that make up the policing web in Khayelitsha. This forms the basis for clearer understandings of on-the-ground policing in this unsafe and violent neighbourhood.

Camp Hope: Integrating Tai Chi and Humanbecoming in a Camp for Children.

This article is about Camp Hope, a two-week summer day program for children age 6-12 from low income families and violent neighborhoods and for children who are struggling academically or identified as having behavioral health issues. The camp is operated by House of Peace and Education (HOPE) a 501(c)(3) nonprofit company that began in 1996. The program is designed to offer enrichment activities in a caring community for young children. The theoretical framework behind the vision and policies is Parse's humanbecoming paradigm. In particular, the camp administrators and staff try to see all persons as co-creating of their everchanging humanuniverse process.

Relative Risk in Context: Exposure to Family and Neighborhood Violence within Schools

This paper evaluates the extent to which four different measures of exposure to risky neighborhood and family environments are associated with individual levels of victimization and attitudes supporting the use of aggression among a large and representative sample of Colombian children and adolescents in 5th and 9th grades (about 49,000 participants nested in 1,648 schools and 295 towns) who were evaluated in 2005. With the aid of random intercept models and adaptive centering, we conceptualize and describe the exposure to neighborhood and family violence reported by each participant as a function of their relative position within and between schools and towns. Results indicate unique and distinct effects of school and town composition on individual outcomes. We present our results as a basic descriptive portrait of the contextual experiences of Colombian students, and discuss how they may be used to identify ecological levels where interventions may be most likely to succeed.