Youth Activism as Violence Prevention

Abstract

Interpersonal violence remains a serious social issue, particularly among street gangs and other groups of armed young people in marginalized urban communities. Much of this violence and gang membership can be understood functionally as responses of resistance—however self‐destructive—to experiences of marginalization and oppression. Given this analysis, one potential approach to violence prevention that has received little attention from researchers and practitioners lies in engaging alienated youth involved in violence in progressive activism and organizing initiatives. Young people have historically played a central role in social movements, and the power of these movements has often drawn in gang members and other street youth and redirected their energies in prosocial directions. This chapter offers an overview of youth activism as a promising approach to violence prevention, drawing on behavioral science, historical examples, current research with gang members in Chicago, and an appraisal of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

Out of the Lab: Shaping an Ecological and Constructional Cultural Systems Science

“…Contemporary behavior science supports an emphasis on constructional approaches to personal and social problems (Goldiamond, 1974(Goldiamond, /2002; see also Mattaini, 2013;Sidman, 2001)-shaping and sustaining alternative patterns of behavior that produce reinforcers (positive and negative) relatively equivalent to many of those offered by problem behavior, although potentially producing preferred social outcomes. Extensive existing literature demonstrates that enlisting young people in strategic activism and social movements offers a set of reinforcers substantially equivalent to those that gang life and street cultures provide-and some advantages those lifestyles cannot (Aspholm & Mattaini, 2017;Stephan & Thompson, 2018).…”

“…Other conceptual contributions included significant work in behavioral community psychology in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (Greene, Winett, Van Houten, Geller, & Iwata, 1987, more recent studies out of the University of Kansas, particularly from Steve Fawcett (e.g., 1991) and his colleagues and students (e.g. Francisco, Paine, & Fawcett, 1993), two books edited by Peter Lamal in the 1990s (Lamal, 1991(Lamal, , 1997, the work of the University of Nevada Reno Group (e.g., Alavosius, Newsome, Houmanfar, & Biglan, 2015), and perhaps some of our own (e.g., Aspholm & Mattaini, 2017;Mattaini, 2013). Jay Moore's 2002 presidential address called out and conceptualized our collective ethical obligations to support social justice (Moore, 2003).…”

“…Consider as another example, the complex realities within which a failing school in an impoverished and marginalized community operates (e.g., Rice, 2018). Factors leading to failure typically involve a mix of intrastaff dynamics; marginalized families; trauma histories of children, parents, and in many cases teachers; relational responding emerging from media attention, neighborhood and personal histories; state budget provisions; patterns of community-police relations; actions of teachers' unions; intersections with youth "gangs" (now mostly very small cliques; Aspholm & Mattaini, 2017); local churches; and the list goes on. Within this network, an established but narrow intervention like the Good Behavior Game (Barrish, Saunders, & Wolf, 1969;Embry, 2002;Leflot, van Lier, Onghena, & Colpin, 2010) can be of help, but is unlikely to have major impact or to be sustained unless attention is also directed in a tightly targeted way toward identifying and addressing the most powerful and accessible elements of the larger ecological context, and the interactions among them (Gambrill, 1994;Mattaini, 2002;Mattaini & Holtschneider, 2016).…”

“…• Construction of networks of support for youth activism within multiple social sectors (e.g., religious institutions, nongovernmental organizations, local community organizations, local community organizations, businesses, media and others (Aspholm & Mattaini, 2017;Mattaini, 2013) • Construction of global electronic and in-person networks of youth activists (e.g., Saleem, 2018 and other AFSC publications) • Development of accessible educational programs for youth emphasizing social justice, consciousness-raising, and the dynamics of advocacy, civil resistance, and movement building (Atkinson, 2012) to understand and reduce problematic behaviors and practices, or better yet to construct competing and desirable options, laboratory studies can assist with and refine specific component questions, but taking experiments out of the lab, and into the complex world in which violence, trauma, marginalization, economic inequities, and other violations of human rights and many other contextual variables are inescapably present, difficult or impossible to eliminate, and crucial to research results at some point are required. We have long known that in child welfare work, for example, generalization of parenting skills learned in a clinical setting to the home environment is uncommon without targeted attention to the transfer of skills (e.g., Goldstein, Keller, & Erné, 1985;Mattaini, McGowan, & Williams, 1996;Stokes & Baer, 1977).…”

Editorial: Rendezvous With Truth and Discovery

“…In his 2020 book, Views from the Streets, Aspholm interviewed young men from the South Side of Chicago who were actively involved in street violence. His research was able to identify motivative and reinforcement factors contributing to the behaviors enacted by those men, and suggested potential data-driven constructional alternatives (Goldiamond, 1974(Goldiamond, /2002 for assisting this population to broadly engage in social action with their broader communities while researching systemic political, police, and economic barriers to doing so (see also Aspholm & Mattaini, 2017).…”