Gang Research Articles

Developmental trajectories of firearm carrying among Justice-involved youth: effects of socioeconomic status and gang membership

ABSTRACT There is limited understanding of how socioeconomic status, gang membership, and their interaction predicts the development of firearm carrying. The Pathways to Desistance data were analyzed. Group-based trajectory modeling identified heterogeneity in patterns of firearm carrying. Multinomial logistic regression examined socioeconomic status and gang membership as predictive of development. A seven-group firearm carrying model best fit the data. Gang membership predicted increased risk of assignment to the Low Chronic, Adolescence Limited, and High Chronic groups. Socioeconomic status did not exert a significant direct effect on group assignment. The interaction between socioeconomic status and gang membership was significant and negative for the High Chronic group. Gang members with higher socioeconomic status presented the highest risk of high chronic firearm carrying.

Masculinity Challenged?

Abstract This article aims to present some of the results of our investigation on prisoners’ conversion into Evangelical churches, amongst (ex)convicts in Piura, a Peruvian Northern city and in Lima. Our objective is to research highly debated and understudied topics about this type of process of conversion: whether it is an individual process or a strategy to gain protection from the church in a dangerous surrounding (Algranti)? Which changes do (ex)convicts undergo through conversion, especially in ways of enacting virile masculinity, a very important feature of gang members and of Evangelical churches? Many (ex)convicts’ religious careers oscillate between extremes, from delinquency to strict church discipline, until some of them may stabilize. We argue that in spite of conversion and apparent changes in behaviors, the social religious imaginary (Morello), especially in terms of ideals of masculinity, remains almost unchanged, based on relations of power, fights and domination. (Ex)convicts pass from a “perverse” version of masculinity to a “virtuous” one (Fuller). For them, the ideal of femininity remains rooted in submissive women.

Fragile assets: Street gangs and the extortion business

This study examines how El Salvadoran street gangs make assets fragile and, hence, amenable to extortion in the territories that they control. Starting from prior Foucauldian inspired accounting research and the literature on stationary bandits, we propose that social actors and their assets are simultaneously enmeshed in relations of government and relations of sovereign power. Using longer-term participant observation data as well as interviews and archival data from El Salvador, the study shows how people and assets are placed into sovereign power relationships, thereby helping to make assets (and people) fragile and thus facilitate extortion. The study also suggests that it is the Salvadoran state, through its taxation practices and its failure to nurture marginal territories, that creates the conditions of possibility for the extortion business.

Racism versus culture: competing interpretations of racial inequality in Canadian public policy

ABSTRACT The paper explores why the provinces of Ontario and Quebec devised contrasting policies in response to similar incidents of urban violence in the mid-2000s. In both settings, municipal police departments launched aggressive campaigns against so-called “youth gangs.” However, Ontario went one step further and created a new “youth policy” to expand out-of-school programs for children and adolescents. By examining the origins of the policies in each province, the paper concludes that Black political actors in Ontario were leading champions of the youth policy, whereas, in Quebec, police chiefs took the driver’s seat and advocated for a disciplinary strategy against “street gangs.” The contrasts in policy and Black political participation exemplify the distinct racial politics of the provinces. Race-conscious policy in Ontario grows out of a tradition of Black radicalism and multi-racial coalitions. In Quebec, minority nationalism turns race into a proxy for clashes over ethnicity and culture.

Risk Factors Associated With Urban Gang Membership in Juveniles: A Systematic Review

The involvement of juveniles in urban gangs has increased in different territories. Consequently, government resources have been invested to dismantle and contain such gangs. The aim of this paper was to analyze studies that relate risk factors with the increasing integration of juveniles into urban gangs. Nine scientific articles were included, out of a total of 394 publications. Different risk factors significantly related with the integration of juveniles into urban gangs were identified: social disorganization, unsafety neighborhood, school failure, absenteeism, and failure to pass assessment standards, involvement of family members in criminal acts, depression, substance use, low self-esteem, rebelliousness and elevated feelings of leadership, social disadvantage, or lack of resources. The risk factors analyzed should be integrated into prevention programs.

Moral reasoning about gang violence in context: A comparative study with children and adolescents exposed to maras in Honduras and not exposed in Nicaragua.

This study examined how youth morally deliberate about conditions of gang violence shaping their communities. Participants (N = 80; 10-11 and 14-15 years; 50% female) exposed to gangs (maras) in Honduras and not exposed to maras in Nicaragua evaluated hypothetical situations of physical harm in contexts of chronic gang violence. Results indicated that mara-exposed youth were more likely to endorse harming a rival gang member in some contexts, but not others. Moreover, in some contexts, males were more likely to endorse harming others as necessary. Few age differences emerged, suggesting comparability among children and adolescents. Discussion focuses on how children and adolescents coordinate different moral and social concepts and concerns pertaining to acts of physical harm in situations involving gangs.

The Residue of Imprisonment: Prisoner Reentry and Carceral Gang Spillover

What happens to the gang ties of people when they leave prison and return to the community? There is much speculation but little empirical research concerning carceral gang spillover, which refers to the reproduction of prison gang associations, identities, politics, and structures in communities. This study examined continuity and change in gang embeddedness in a representative sample of 802 men in Texas interviewed in prison and reinterviewed twice upon release. Based on a series of multilevel models this study arrived at four main conclusions. First, prisons are a vector of gang activity. Embeddedness in gangs dropped markedly after release from prison and continued to recede with temporal distance from prison. Second, the residue of imprisonment was moderated by pre-release gang status. Negative linear trends were stronger for active gang members and weaker for former and never gang members. Third, a temporary surge in gang identification occurred for active and former gang members despite continued declines in gang associations, reflecting a behavioral-cognitive decoupling. Finally, the types of groups with which prisoners affiliated contoured trajectories of gang embeddedness. The declining significance of gangs with prisoner reentry opens productive lines of inquiry on carceral gang spillover and offers policy and practice guidance concerning reentering populations.

Dynamic graph neural network-based fraud detectors against collaborative fraudsters

Telecom fraud detection is a challenging task since the fact that fraudulent behaviors are hidden in the vast amount of telecom records. More concerning, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) accelerated the use of mobile internet, providing more criminal opportunities for fraudsters. However, current telecom fraud detection mostly focuses on individual sequences representation, rarely noticing the collaboration of fraudsters, making it exhibit unsatisfactory performance in the face of gang crimes. To address this problem, we propose to extract collaborative networks from user call logs with an emphasis on unveiling collaborative fraud. We employ eight months of telecom datasets in China with 6,106 users and 5.0 million call logs between 1.25 million telephone recipients. Through our study, we find that the social structure of fraudsters evolute rapidly while the normal users remain stable relatively. In addition, we find that mining collaborative fraud strategies help to detect fraudsters with less distinct fraud characteristics. To this end, we propose a novel model named COllaborative-REsistant Dynamic Graph Neural Network (CORE-DGNN), to enhance the dynamic GNN aggregation process. Specifically, we first use co-recipients to obtain the collaborative network under each time slice. Then, we design a multi-frequency graph neural network to adaptively aggregate the features of node neighbors at different frequencies to address the problem of heterophily in collaborative networks. Finally, a self-attentive temporal convolutional network is designed to aggregate node embedding features across multiple time spans. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world telecom fraud datasets show that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Educational Empowerment for Peace: Transformative Impacts of Lectures on Former Gang Members in Mogadishu

Educational Empowerment for Peace: Transformative Impacts of Lectures on Former Gang Members in Mogadishu

The New Zealand Government's Efforts in Social Recognition of Motorcycle Gangs as a Social Community in Order to Maintain National Security

New Zealand faces challenges related to motorcycle gang activities that can threaten national security. In addressing this issue, the New Zealand government has made efforts to recognize motorcycle gangs as social communities to uphold national security. The method used in this research is qualitative research, and new findings regarding the research object will be supported by data collection techniques, such as structured interviews and group discussion with the Director of The Toda Peace Institute - Professor Kevin Paul Clements. This approach aims to change the negative perception of motorcycle gangs and involve them in more positive activities. In the government's efforts of social recognition towards motorcycle gangs as social communities, a softer policy approach is adopted. In this context, the government acknowledges the existence of motorcycle gangs as communities within society. This step aims to strengthen the social identity of motorcycle gangs and provide recognition to the community. The presence of motorcycle gangs in New Zealand poses significant security challenges. By enhancing their connection with the wider community, it can help maintain national security by engaging this community in positive and constructive endeavors. With this research, it is also hoped to contribute insights and recommendations to the Indonesian government on appropriate and suitable approaches to tackle the issue of motorbike gangs in Indonesia.

Caregiver Type and Gang Involvement: A Comparison of Female and Male Gang Members

Gang involvement and delinquency are prominent issues frequently examined in criminal justice scholarship. Research has revealed that gang involvement increases the likelihood of delinquency/crime, and that youth participate in gangs for a variety of reasons including protection, status, and a sense of belonging. Although research has found that various social and familial factors increase the probability of gang involvement, it primarily focuses on males, and little work has compared how a youth’s primary caregiver influences the likelihood of gang involvement among both male and female gang members. The current study uses school level data to examine gang involvement and primary caregiver type among male and female youth. The results identify significant differences in gang involvement among boys and girls when examining primary caretaker. The findings have implications for theory and programming in connection with youth gang involvement for both boys and girls.

Fracture Behavior of the Hot-Stamped PHS2000 Steel Based on GISSMO Failure Model

Hot-stamped steel is currently the most widely used lightweight material in automobiles, and accurately predicting its failure risk during the simulation is a bottleneck problem in the automobile industry. In this study, the fracture failure behavior of the hot-stamped PHS2000 steel manufactured by Ben Gang Group (Benxi, China) is investigated by experiments and simulation. Static tension and high-speed tension tests are conducted to obtain the elastic-plastic stress-strain relations, and a Swift + Hockett–Sherby model is proposed to describe the hardening behavior under static and high-speed loads. Tests under five kinds of stress states, namely static shear, static tensile shear, notched static tension, center-hole static tension, and static punching, are conducted to obtain the ultimate fracture strains under different stress states for establishing a failure model. The finite element method (FEM) is used to inversely achieve the fracture parameters of the material, and the GISSMO model in LS-Dyna is adopted to describe the fracture characteristics of the material. A fracture card is further established for simulation analysis by combining fracture characteristics with high-speed tension curves and simultaneously loading size effect curves of meshes. Finally, the card is applied in the simulation of the three-point bending test. High-precision results of fracture simulation matching the experimental results are obtained. This research proves that the proposed fracture card is accurate and can be widely used in the simulation of fracture behaviors of the hot-stamped PHS2000 steel.

The Corner, the Crew, and the Digital Street: Multiplex Networks of Gang Online-Offline Conflict Dynamics in the Digital Age

Social media is increasingly intertwined into people’s lives, spurring questions about the relationships between online behavior and offline actions. We advance knowledge in conflict dynamics by using a multiplex network framework that conceptualizes online and offline gang relationships as co-constitutive networks—online and offline relationships often overlap and entangle in complex ways that influence behavior in both the virtual and real worlds. We propose a mixed-methods abductive approach for digital data that uses qualitative analyses to challenge and corroborate quantitative analyses of online gang conflict. Synthesizing data from Facebook posts by alleged gang members, maps of gang territory, and police records of offline shooting events, we show that online gang conflicts are not random attacks but targeted network relationships, and such online relationships are dependent on offline geographic relationships and shooting history relationships between gangs. Our mixed-methods approach further shows via qualitative analyses that the statistical network associations are based on cultural-specific language surrounding gang names and symbols, neighborhood streets, and prominent gang members. Our approach underscores how mixed-methods and qualitative approaches are essential in unpacking “big data” and computational methods in understanding the multiplex nature of group conflict.

Cinematic Representations of Homegirls: Echo Park vs. Hollywood in Allison Anders’s Mi Vida Loca

Allison Anders in Mi Vida Loca (1993) presents various aspects of gang life: from becoming a gang member, through various examples of female sisterhood and betrayal. Not resorting to gangxploitation, Mi Vida Loca is the “first commercial film to focus entirely on Chicana gang members” (Fregoso 97). Anders’s project, well-grounded and well-designed, attempts to do away with numerous stereotypes concerning homegirls in L.A. and to portray a credible picture of gang life in Echo Park. At the same time, Anders’s approach is relatively “partial in its one-sided view of la vida loca,” which inevitably leads to further stereotyping of Chicana homegirls (Fregoso 97). The purpose of the article is to analyze assets and disadvantages of Anders’s representation of Chicana female gang members focusing on the dynamics of the interplay between Hollywood (i.e. Anders’s project) and the barrio-in that case Echo Park, L.A.

Gang Membership among Malaysian Indian Young Adults

Gang Membership among Malaysian Indian Young Adults

Dynamics of the Deviant Subculture Klitih Gang and Al-Fatah Transgender Boarding School in Yogyakarta

Klitih gangs in Yogyakarta, as a tangible form of juvenile delinquency, cannot be separated from the construction of the failure of environmental socialization and socialization of adolescent life in modern times. This study used interpretive approach (qualitative). Researcher digs deeper into how cultural criminology views the deviant subculture of youth members of the Klitih Gang and the dynamics of the Al-Fatah Transgender Islamic Boarding School as accurate facts. This article focuses on discussing several aspects that are interconnected with the school of cultural criminology, including (1) cases of youth violence and street crime by gangs of Klitih as a form of crime as culture; (2) community construction related to culture as crime against transgender groups, especially in the Al-Fatah transgender Islamic boarding school, Yogyakarta; (3) discussion on the realm of existentialist criminology in its allusion to ways of life, style, and semiotics. This phenomenon creates anomie in the dynamics of social life and requires efforts to harmonize both from a juridical and sociological perspective.

“You Get Hit or You Get Put in Check, at the End of the Day, the Love is Still There”: Hmong Culture, Diaspora, Immigration, and Gang Continuity

There has been an increased focus on the factors that influence gang continuity given the short- and long-term consequences associated with gang membership. Despite this, Asian gangs—notably the Hmong—have rarely been at the center of these academic inquiries. This is especially troubling given that their cultural and historical profile provides a unique vantage point for assessing how culture, diaspora, and immigration affect social deviance and crime. Considering these empirical gaps, the current study examines the motivations associated with gang persistence by analyzing life history interviews and ethnographic observations among a sample of 34 current and former Hmong gang members in the United States. Emergent themes suggest that brother love, perceptions of power, and a sense of obligation ensnare individuals in gang life for extended periods of time, with notable geographic and cultural distinctions. These findings highlight important avenues for future research and practice.

Weak State as a Security Threat: Study Case of El Salvador (2014-2019)

Weak State as a Security Threat: Study Case of El Salvador (2014-2019)

Youth Gangs and overcoming waithood in a United Nations Protection of Civilians Site in South Sudan

ABSTRACT This article investigates contestations over the roles and legitimacy of gangs within the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) Protection of Civilians (PoC) site in Bentiu, South Sudan. Drawing on qualitative interviews, it argues that ‘gangs’ represented the medium through which everyday struggles and processes of social contestations were negotiated between youth, elders, and protection actors. Prevailing narratives of gangs as violent criminal entities structured conflict with elders and protection actors, but to their affiliates, gangs provided protection, identity, belonging, responsibility, agency, and a route to overcome the limbo of ‘waithood’ and achieve social adulthood.

Characteristics of acid attacks involving children in India.

Aim: To examine the characteristics of acid attack survivors who were aged ≤16 years at the time of the assault. Methods: Case files from the Chhanv and the Laxmi Foundations in India were accessioned for cases of acid attacks involving children and adolescents (≤16 years). Details of the age, sex, reason for the attack, injuries sustained and possible outcomes were recorded. Results: Ten cases were identified that involved eight girls (aged 3-16 years) and two boys (12 and 14 years). The head and neck were the primary targets in all cases. The primary reasons for the attacks involving adolescent girls were punishment for refusing sexual advances from older males and family violence/child abuse. The two male victims were assaulted as part of property dispute and gang violence. Penalties varied greatly with prison sentences (when handed down) ranging from <1 year to 10 years. Conclusion: The number of cases of paediatric acid attacks appear small, with motivations for the attacks including responses to spurned sexual advances, domestic violence/child abuse, criminal gang activities and ostensibly at random. Nongovernment organisations are vital in the rehabilitation of victims. It is of concern that dissemination on social networks and publicity through the media may lead to an increase in number of cases.