This report summarizes a program of study on African-American children and violence conducted by a comprehensive community mental health center on the southside of Chicago. The research, which looked at exposure to violence, self-reports of aggression, and possible interventions, grew out of: (1) an awareness of the enormous amount of familial and extrafamilial violence in the black community; (2) clinical experiences that indicated that victimization and covictimization (i.e., victimization of close others) were often significant factors in the lives of the mentally ill; (3) a growing uneasiness, and indeed curiosity, over the extent to which children were witnessing these events and the impact of this witnessing, particularly on their own levels of aggression; and (4) a belief that the integrity of the black community was being threatened by the violence and that solutions must be sought.
Purpose
To present a conceptual framework which accounts for the relationship between community violence exposures and youth HIV risk behaviors.
Methods
This article provides an overview of existing research on the links between community violence exposure and HIV risk for youth and offers a conceptual framework for clarifying how community violence exposure might contribute to HIV sexual risk.
Results
Increasing empirical findings substantiate that the links between community violence exposure and HIV risk behaviors among youth are mediated by psychological problem behaviors, low school success and negative peer influences.
Conclusions
Researchers have identified the behaviors that place teens at risk for becoming infected with HIV. However, most scholars have overlooked the potential importance of community violence exposure in influencing such behaviors. This paper presents new directions for adolescent research and HIV interventions based on an integrated conceptual framework.
The current study examines violent and nonviolent traumatic events involving friends and family members as predictors of PTSD, depression, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 403 African American early adolescents from chronically violent environments. Although there are many studies of urban children's exposure to community violence, few address the unique contribution of events involving significant others, and almost no research addresses African American youths' exposure to traumatic events other than violence. This study found that violent and nonviolent traumatic events were pervasive in the lives of these urban youth, and that they were as likely to report loss and injury of a close other through an accident as an act of violence. There were strong gender differences in the data. Unexpectedly, injury or loss of a close friend or family member from nonviolent events, but not from violent events, predicted PTSD, internalizing, and depression for boys. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for school-based universal interventions in communities where large numbers of children live with loss and trauma.
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