14 DAY TRIAL // Adolescents growing up in dangerous neighborhoods and being exposed to violence on a daily basis, adopt a series of coping strategies which influence whether the violence takes place at home, among friends or whether it involves the police, concluded a new study led by the University of Chicago.
The leader of the study was Dexter Voisin, associate professor at the School of Social Service Administration and an expert on the impact of violence on youth people, and he wanted to explore the way that young people dealt with violence, through a series of interviews with adolescents from a troubled area.
So, along with his team, they recruited 32 teenagers, boys and girls aging from 14 to 17, most of whom were not from low-income homes; almost 40% of them reported their mothers had some college education.
They were asked to describe their neighborhoods and their personal experiences with violence, as well as their response to it.
The research concluded that boys were more likely to be victims or witness of community violence than girls, who most frequently heard about it.
The girls were found to spend most of their non-school time at home.
Voisin said that “the primary forms of violence exposures were physical attacks, fighting, incidents involving police, and gun violence involving murders.”
This study also shed a light on the teens' relationship with the police, who were most often distrusted.
Boys reported being stopped and questioned by police officers, seeing the police chasing and shooting on community residents and also coming into their homes to arrest family members.
“A noteworthy and unique finding, which has not been commonly discussed in prior research, is exposure to police incidents as a form of community violence exposure,” explains Voisin.
The most common way for teens to cope was to associate with people in their neighborhood who were not involved in violence, Voisin concluded, adding that “a second strategy was to avoid situations where violence might erupt, often by isolating themselves.”
There were also adolescents who were resigned to their situation, or who were learning to fight back or carry a weapon.
A quarter of the students were counting on their education as their ticket to a good job and a chance of moving to a safer neighborhood.
So basically, the teenagers' response to violence includes seeking out non-violent friends, avoiding trouble, becoming resigned to the situation, striving to do well in school, or for some, retaliating physically.
The authors said that “exposure to community violence is pervasive among youth in many urban neighborhoods.
“We found in one study that 76 percent of urban youth were exposed to some kind of community violence during the previous year.”
Schools can contribute to reducing violence by providing more counseling opportunities to reduce youth's symptoms of distress linked with violence and also work with the community to reduce gang activity and the availability of guns.
This research was supported with a grant from the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, and the results were published in the article, 'Everyday Victims: African American Adolescents Living and Coping with Exposure to Community Violence in an Inner-City Neighborhood', in the current issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.