Youth Violence

Youth violence can be defined as the intentional use of physical force or power (threatened or actual) exerted either by or against youth that likely or actually causes psychological or physical harm. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that this widespread violence in the United States disproportionately impacts youth ages 10 to 29 years old. These youth are affected as victims, perpetrators, and/or bystanders in these violent incidents. Youth violence can occur within peer or adult relationships, in homes, schools, and communities and can be quite varied in its appearance. Prominent violent behaviors include verbal abuse, bullying, hitting, slapping, and the use of weapons (e.g., stabbing, shooting). Moreover, youth violence includes serious violent and delinquent acts such as aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and homicide. Youth violence is marked by this wide variation in form, and therefore prevalence rates for some forms are quite common while others are quite rare. Thus, violence touches most youth, but the most serious forms are unusual. This result has led to a great deal of attention to youth violence and has led to often confusing or complex statements about its patterns, impact, and needed responses.

Youth violence as a public health and youth development problem often includes verbal and nonverbal actions that imply and employ the coercive use of physical aggression, abuse, and mistreatment against another person including family members as well as peers and adults in home, school, community, and institutional settings. This type of youth violence involves problems and patterns that have clearly harmful and serious effects on the victim as well as involves forms that are problematic because they are violations of prevailing social norms for appropriate behavior.

Research differentiates four types of youth violence, with each having different prevalence patterns, risk factors, and needed interventions: (1) situational violence, where situational factors (e.g., social stress, poverty, firearms) precipitate violence that would not have otherwise occurred; (2) relationship violence, where interpersonal disputes between friends and family often reflect norms and habits; (3) predatory violence, where a person commits intentional harm that is often part of criminal action (e.g., robbery, assault); and (4) psychopathological violence, where the violence is a symptom of a severe mental illness.

The understanding of the causes of youth violence is increasing due to substantial research over the past 20 years. As noted above, these different prevalence patterns are best understood as dependent on similar risk factors, but differ in the extent to which the risk factors involved are primarily sociological, interpersonal, or within the individual. Moreover, even among those with many risk factors, violent behavior, particularly repeated violence, is rare. This rarity has led researchers not only to focus on developmental patterns that differentiate risk for youth violence, but also to emphasize settings and social group processes that might promote or permit violence more readily. At present, the understanding of setting and situational precipitants of youth violence is not well studied and is just beginning to become well characterized. Thus, [Page 768]at present most evidence is about individual differences in tendencies, perhaps leading to the impression that violence likelihood can be well determined as an individual difference. This conclusion would be premature, if not misleading. Most likely, most youth violence, whether relatively minor or very serious, will depend on individual, situational, and accumulated developmental risk factors.

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