Leveraging youths’ digital literacies: The E-Responder social media violence interruption model and pilot evaluation

A role for social media? A community‐based response to guns, gangs, and violence online

“…Findings from the pilot implementation of E‐Responder focused on youth outcomes and supported E‐Responders's effectiveness at preventing the escalation of online provocation (Sichel et al, 2019). Building on this previous work, the present paper pivots to concentrate on the role of empathy in an intervention incorporating social media to address and prevent traumatic experiences, and centers on the efforts and experiences of CMs, to better understand the potential for interventions targeting the radiating effects of community trauma through online spaces.…”

“…While adults working to prevent and intervene in gun violence are aware of the role of social media (Patton, Eschmann, Elsaesser, & Bocanegra, 2016), to date there are no documented systematic evaluations of efforts that incorporate social media into violence prevention interventions. The program described here, E‐Responder, was developed in collaboration with the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City as a novel intervention in response to these trends (Sichel, Javdani, Ueberall, & Liggett, 2019). Created to complement the Cure Violence model (Butts, Roman, Bostwick, & Porter, 2015), which is a public health program to reduce the number of deaths associated with gun violence, E‐Responder uses credible messengers (CMs; members of the community), many of whom were previously involved with gun and gang violence themselves.…”

“…Thus far scholarly work focuses on defining and describing gang involved youths’ risky social media use, rather than examining the potential for intervention (Sichel et al, 2019). Similarly, examinations of Cure Violence tend to focus primarily on youth outcomes, failing to attend to the experiences of the CM workforce (Cappella & Godfrey, 2019).…”

“…Drawing in trauma‐informed and strengths‐based principals, the E‐Responder intervention included training (described in additional detail below) on how to recognize, assess, and respond to risk online, prioritizing the safety of both CMs and the youth with whom they worked. In addition, CMs were trained in modeling and reinforcing healthy behavior on social media, to shift norms (for additional description, see Sichel et al, 2019).…”

“…For an overview of the E‐Responder pilot see (Sichel et al, 2019). The current study builds on this previous, applied work through the secondary, deidentified analyses of quantitative and qualitative data collected during a quasiexperimental implementation.…”