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Chapter Abstract: This chapter presents three cases of sons’ violence against mothers that were handled by a diversionary youth conference, a restorative justice process. Drawing on interviews with conference coordinators and victims, the analysis considers the histories, contexts, and dynamics of the violence; what happened in the conference, including gendered power dynamics and re-victimization; and the women’s experiences during the conference and post-conference. The literature on youth parental violence and debates on the appropriateness of restorative justice for domestic or partner violence cases is reviewed and assessed. The dynamics of male youth offender cases are similar to those of their adult counterparts; and thus, the youth cases provide insight on the strengths and limits of restorative justice for partner violence.

Why are Central American youth attracted to gangs and why does violence play such an important role in gang life? This chapter argues that chronic shame resulting from the experience of relative deprivation (poverty), abusive or absentee parents, and school problems makes some Central American youth prime candidates for joining the gang. The gang offers a temporary escape from chronic shame because it offers gang members the possibility of accessing pride through rituals of solidarity, the excitement of engaging in crime, and access to money, drugs, and sex. In the second half of the chapter the author examines the social structural sources of chronic shame—including poverty, unemployment, and the feminization of migration—and develops a model for understanding why some barrio youth join the gang and others do not.

Chapter 1 frames the scope of the problem and introduces the primary goals of the book. The chapter addresses the overlap in different forms of violence; the intersection of race/ethnicity, culture, and gender; risk and protective factors, and prevention.

Since the 1980s, Nigeria has continued to witness an unprecedented surge of ethnoreligious violence. The involvement of youth in these civil disturbances or conflicts is very disturbing. They are the foot soldiers, and in some cases “generals,” of the various ethnic militia groups that were formed in this period in order to defend the narrow interests of the various ethnic groups or individuals who established them. This chapter considers the factors responsible for youth violence in the country. It also focuses on the state reaction and measures to curb youth involvement in violence. It argues that until the state resolves the fundamental problems with the economy, especially in the area of employment, Nigerian youth will continue to be involved in ethno-religious conflicts. Second, it is posited that the youth should be involved in creating policies that directly affect them instead of being treated as mere objects of knowledge and policy. Third, fundamental survival techniques in the country must be dissociated from violence.

Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Niger Delta, this chapter describes ongoing protests of the local community against the practices of the multinational oil companies, and repression and violence of the state. It illustrates how youth movements and violence in the region have been deeply embedded in the historical, economic, and political context of Nigeria by tracing Nigeria's colonial, postcolonial military, and postmilitary civilian phases in history. Analyzing the complexities of the ongoing Nigerian conflict from the perspectives of multinational oil companies, local communities, and young people, the chapter argues that youth movements are integral to relations among diverse stakeholders of national resources in conflict with the multinational companies. It offers ideas for transforming the current inequities and lack of access to social and educational mobility, and for re-engaging youth as leaders in social issues, using nonviolent methods.

This chapter illustrates how cultural-historical theory is a potentially integrative means of analysis in the study of transnational immigration and youth violence. It identifies another negative outcome of globalization: transnationalization of communities in search of financial stability. In particular, it discusses the author's work with the Mexican community in New York, examining Mexican young people's experience of their identity in relation to the identities thrust on them by their political and economic status as undocumented immigrants in the capitalist system of the United States. It argues for the importance of focusing on individual experiences. Psychological analyses can complement sociological and political analyses, and can be incorporated in the study of youth violence and conflict in transnational communities in order to offer specific ideas for intervention.

This chapter examines the relationship between changing economic conditions and rates of serious violent victimization among adolescents and young adults between 1973 and 2005. The effects of unemployment, poverty, and consumer sentiment on rates of youth violence are compared by the gender and race-ethnicity of victims. The analysis reveals that increases in youth violence are generally associated with increases in poverty and growing consumer pessimism, but not with increases in unemployment. The effects of poverty and consumer sentiment, however, differ somewhat for males and females and youth of differing ages and race-ethnic groups. Like the previous results presented in this chapter, these findings indicate that the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence is not simple and is conditioned by the age, gender, and race-ethnicity of victims.

This chapter analyzes ongoing youth conflict in terms of the situations of fragmentation and disempowerment in apartheid South Africa. It explains that South Africa, like other postcolonial societies, is a fertile context for youth conflict and violence, not solely because of poverty — although societies taken and then abandoned by colonizers are overwhelmingly poor — but also because of social, political, cultural, and economic upheaval that lead many young people into situations of conflict. Drawing on clinical work with young people in group work by the Sinani Programme for Survivors of Violence, the chapter offers insights by interweaving history, statistics, and the personal stories of violence and tragedy, which the author says are most important for understanding the complexity of youth conflict.

This chapter reviews literature on the rates and impact of harassment and violence against gay and lesbian youth in schools across several contexts as a foundation for proposing a new theoretical framework for understanding how high school-aged youth understand sexual identity. From the perspective of domain theory, it presents results of research on young people's reasoning about homosexuality, and their treatment of their gay and lesbian peers. This theory-based analysis reveals intriguing complexities, such as young people's prejudice and intolerance toward gay or lesbian peers when they believe that individuals have control over whether they are gay or lesbian, but more accepting and tolerant attitudes regarding homosexuality when they believe people are born gay or lesbian, thus placing sexual orientation beyond the individual's control or moral culpability. The chapter also suggests future directions for research and practice to promote tolerance and development around issues of sexual identity.

In many countries there has recently been a dramatic change in the way children are viewed by many of the agencies that work with them. One major change is the increasing recognition that vulnerable children actively contribute to their own survival and coping, and that protecting children does not imply that we treat them as passive victims. This orientation to children was given an enormous international boost by the passage of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which includes the rights of children to have a voice on all matters that concern them. Colombia, a country that has long faced extremely high levels of violence, has been creatively developing new ways of building a more participatory culture of citizenship, including many new ways of working with children and youth. This chapter reviews these experiences and asks what potential these initiatives may have both for individual children and more broadly for the building of civil society. Most of the literature on the participation of young people in war-affected countries concerns adolescence, but this chapter deals with the entire age range, because this is an innovative aspect of Colombia's contribution.

In this chapter, the authors present an outline of the philosophical underpinnings of youth work practice and discuss how youth work is conceived, organised and delivered in different member states, and specifically in those the authors encountered in their study (Germany, Austria and the UK). They then introduce their working definition of youth violence. The authors were keen to move beyond the narrow confines of conceptualisation of youth violence as ‘gang’ violence, partly because this is a heavily populated area of enquiry, but also because they recognised that youth workers will be engaging with young people whose experience of violence falls both within and outside of the bounded and contestable phenomenon of the ‘gang’.

This chapter reports new results from a cross-sectional study of the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and self-reported violent offending among a nationally representative school-based sample of adolescents. Of special interest is whether a threshold of disadvantage must be reached before violence is elevated. In this light, the chapter posits that the relationship between disadvantage and adolescent violence is nonlinear: adolescent violence is relatively low in the least disadvantaged neighborhoods, peaks in more disadvantaged areas, and falls off somewhat in the most disadvantaged areas. Thus, it is recommended that policymakers consider these nonlinear patterns when devising interventions to control youth violence.

This concluding chapter considers the implications for policy and prevention raised in the preceding chapters, focusing on three preconditions for the prevention of youth violence through improvements in economic conditions. First, a strong relationship between youth violence and economic conditions must be established, net of other influences. Second, prevention programs should target the specific economic conditions that affect youth violence, and their effectiveness in improving those conditions must be demonstrated. Third, the economic improvements must be sufficiently large to lead to reductions in youth violence. In the future, it will be important to better understand the short- and long-term relationships between macroeconomics and violence and to evaluate prevention programs for their effect on economic outcomes.

This chapter provides an account of the major factors that lead a large percentage of Brazilian youth to take up life on the streets, a place where they become highly vulnerable to violence and associated problems. It also describes some of the lessons learned from studies conducted as part of an ongoing action-research program designed to improve the conditions of street children.

The youth’s narratives can add depth to many literatures, and chapter one reviews some of the core assumptions within the fields of youth violence, critical youth studies, and punishment in the juvenile justice system and schools. Chapter one also includes a brief review of the colonial history of Hawai‘i.

This chapter offers a theoretical perspective on social and moral development, relevant to discussions of youth conflict and violence. Rejecting the idea that cultures have singular integrated patterns of moral functioning, it explains that a major source of conflict is social hierarchy characterized by dominant and subordinate positions, such as the positions of women and ethnic minority groups across many societies. The chapter reviews research examining conflicts across social developmental domains, in terms of the development of understandings of morality (harm, justice, and rights), social conventions, and personal prerogatives or entitlements. These categories of moral judgment are psycho-social practices that occur across cultures as sources of conflict, disagreement, and struggle. An example of the utility of this theory is its explanation, for example, of why children who are identified as aggressive make moral judgments similar to those of other children but differ in their justifications about retaliation. Examples of group conflicts are also considered, including acts of violence stemming from social hierarchies and cultural practices, such as acts of conflict and resistance by women in contexts in India and Iran where women's freedom of movement and self-determination are much more restricted than men's.

This book has investigated the confluence of social, cultural, and individual factors that account for the physical violence among girls in the low-income neighborhoods of Melrose Park and Lee in Philadelphia. It has shown that girls resort to street fighting for reasons that are far more complex than the stereotypes and generalities that have often been put forward to explain their aggressive behavior imply. It has provided evidence that youth violence in low-income neighborhoods, whether carried out by males or females, is in large part a reaction to a sense of actual and perceived threat, as well as a compensatory attempt to increase a sense of security in both concrete and psychological terms. This concluding chapter offers some suggestions to truly understand the dynamics of girls' violence patterns in inner cities and what it means when girls fight.

In this chapter, the authors introduce the ‘problem’ of youth violence, as well as introducing the youth workers who attempt to redress this problem through youth work. The authors state that they will use case studies in the remainder of the book to investigate, through practical examples, how processes of intervention, prevention and desistance work. In doing this, they will provide an accessible vision for what constitutes a more meaningful youth work response to youth violence. They then go on to outline the structure of the book.