104

Youth Activism
as Violence Prevention
Roberto R. Aspholm and Mark A. Mattaini
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Violence remains among the most pressing issues facing modern human civilization. During
the 20th century, nearly 200 million people died as a result of collective and state violence
associated with wars, political conflicts, and episodes of civil unrest, and 60% of these people
were noncombatants (World Health Organization [WHO], 2002). While such collective and
state violence persists as a critical global issue, interpersonal violence presents perhaps an even
more pervasive problem in the 21st century, accounting for approximately 6 million deaths
since 2000—more than all of the world’s wars during that time combined (WHO, 2014).
Violence is not evenly distributed among the world’s population, however, and the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2011 Global Study on Homicide authorita-
tively concludes that violence across the globe “is often rooted in contexts of paucity and dep-
rivation, inequality and injustice, social marginalization, low levels of education and a weak
rule of law” (p. 29). In addition to disproportionately affecting impoverished and otherwise
marginalized populations, violent victimization is a particular risk for young men, who are
killed at a rate more than three times the global average (UNODC, 2011). (This figure for
young people includes those between the ages of 15 and 29; we refer to approximately this
same range throughout this chapter.) In the United States, this nexus of demographic risk
factors makes homicide the second leading cause of death among young men aged 10–24;
African American males in this age range are nearly 18 times more likely than their White
counterparts to be the victim of a homicide (Centers for Disease Control, 2010). Even more
alarming is the rate of homicide for gang members—nearly 900 per 100,000—which is
approximately 100 times greater than the overall rate in the 100 largest cities in the United
States (Decker & Pyrooz, 2010).
Yet homicides constitute only a small portion of all interpersonal violence, and death and
physical injuries represent only the most obvious consequences. Indeed, the less conspicuous
effects of violence on individuals, communities, cities, and society are extensive and severe.
This is particularly true with respect to the public violence that often plagues marginalized
urban communities and generally involves young people. At the individual level, witnessing
acts of violence, living in a high-violence community, and even hearing about acts of community

The Wiley Handbook of Violence and Aggression, Peter Sturmey (Editor-in-Chief).

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781119057574.whbva104

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 2 Roberto R. Aspholm and Mark A. Mattaini

violence after they occur can lead to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, internalizing disor-
ders, posttraumatic stress, and separation anxiety, among other detrimental effects (Cooley-
Quille, Boyd, Frantz, & Walsh, 2001; Freeman & Mokros, 1994; Scarpa, Hurley, Shumate, &
Haden, 2006). High levels of community violence, moreover, serve to compromise public
safety, corrode community cohesion and collective efficacy, depress property values, and
contract local commerce (Greenbaum & Tita, 2004; Lynch & Rasmussen, 2001; Venkatesh,
2006). Wider perceptions of impoverished communities of color as violent and dangerous are
also used as a pretext for repressive police and (para)military campaigns that result in
astronomical levels of incarceration, diminished opportunities for social mobility, and intensi-
fied sentiments of community alienation, yet provide few tangible benefits in terms of crime
reduction or perceptions of community safety (Levenson, 2013; Phillips, 2012; Wacquant,
2009). In turn, violence erodes city tax bases as more affluent residents abandon central cities
for suburbs and economically weakened cities are saddled with the immense healthcare costs
associated with treating victims of violence (Cook, Lawrence, Ludwig, & Miller, 1999; Cullen
& Levitt, 1999).

­Behavioral Systems Analysis of Community Violence

Among Young People

Having an impact on levels of violence among young people requires understanding the active
behavioral contingencies that shape and maintain violent acts as well as the networks of inter-
locking contingencies that establish and support continuing patterns of transactions within
and among communities, social institutions, and street gangs (Mattaini, Twyman, Chin, &
Lee, 1996). High levels of community poverty, residential transience, and racial segregation,
for example, reduce residents’ collective efficacy and weaken local social institutions, under-
mining a community’s ability to effectively supervise and socialize youth and resulting in high
levels of crime, delinquency, and violence (Sampson & Wilson, 1995). Law enforcement in
marginalized communities, moreover, is often ineffective and lacks legitimacy in the eyes of
residents, compelling locals to employ violence as a means of self-help, or justice seeking, in
response to grievances (Anderson, 1999; Black, 1983). Further contributing to the use of
violent self-help in such areas is the widespread reliance on the underground economy for
survival, as the state does not provide recourse for grievances related to such dealings (Black,
1983; Venkatesh, 2006). In the absence of conventional economic opportunities, moreover,
some violence is explicitly economic in nature, such as robbery and violence related to disputes
over the control of drug markets (Hagedorn, 1998; R. T. Wright & Decker, 1997). In
addition, grievances most might perceive as trivial may solicit severe responses from members
of oppressed groups who reconfigure their sense of dignity around the ability to command
what they perceive as proper deference from others in the absence of traditional sources of
identity and pride, such as meaningful employment. Such violent responses, thus, help to
maintain this dignity as well as increase the likelihood of receiving proper deference in the
future and deterring potential predators in search of an easy victim—an important consideration
given the unreliability of law enforcement in providing effective protection (Anderson, 1999;
Wilkinson, 2001).
Conflicts between armed groups, such as cartels and street gangs, represent a particularly
problematic brand of (often) urban violence, owing to the intensity and volatility typically
associated with these conflicts (Hagedorn, 2015; Levenson, 2013; UNODC, 2011). Other

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 Youth Activism as Violence Prevention 3

forms of collective violence, such as state and sociopolitical violence, share similar qualities but
are beyond the scope of discussion here.
Nonetheless, there are often powerful reinforcers associated with integration into gang cul-
tures. Gangs provide marginalized young people with a place in the human web; a powerful
form of family and even love for those who have never experienced them; important—if
limited—economic opportunities and supports; and a viable means of resistance to the
psychological trauma associated with poverty, racial denigration, economic exclusion, and
physical insecurity (Aspholm, 2016; Hagedorn, 2008). Research conducted by the first author
with gang members on Chicago’s South Side, moreover, reveals that, despite the often harsh
realities of gang life, in violent neighborhoods, where one’s physical security is in perpetual
doubt, gangs provide a measure of mutual protection and a way for young people to make
meaning of their experiences of violence. Within this context, gang wars fundamentally shape
life for youth growing up in these neighborhoods in ways that actually promote gang mem-
bership and the maintenance of such hostilities (Aspholm, 2016). For example, Lamont, a
26-year-old Black P. Stone (a Chicago-based gang), explains these dynamics as follows:

For my generation, we didn’t have no beefs. We grew up takin’ on the older brothers’ beef. … I
was in sixth or seventh, eighth grade, they was down there killin’ people. Now I wanna go and
walk to 61st Street, I can’t because of what they did. … Mu’fucka like, “Where you live at?” …
“Man, I live on Stony, but I ain’t in no gang.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! You live on Stony, you
Stone.” It ain’t no—it don’t matter. The streets dictate—unless you got on bifocals, some Urkel
pants,1 some long socks—“You [one of the Stones] off the other end, we don’t trust you ’cause
you live down there with ’em.” … So now, since I’m ’a get bullied on for livin’ down there, I
might as well get a gun and protect myself with them. ’Cause when I get jumped on, I gotta go
back and tell my friends. They gon’ say, “You said you wasn’t with us!” You see what I’m sayin’?
So you have now inherited what the people have done before you, whether they went and killed
[someone] or did this or did that. Because now when you say you from Bull Town, mu’fucka like,
“Aw, man, 10 years ago, them niggas, they shot”—so a mu’fucka finna shoot you based on
something that was 10 years ago. You 20, you was 10 years old then. You ain’t have nothing to do
with that! But that’s how it go.

Thus, despite the potentially severe consequences associated with involvement in violence and
street gangs, for many desperate young people the power of the reinforcers associated with the
use of violence and gang culture far outweigh such aversives. In addition, the predominant
aversive to such activities prescribed by US society, incarceration, is incredibly ineffective as
such. Most acts of violence never come to the attention of law enforcement (WHO, 2014).
Even those that do rarely result in an arrest, much less a successful prosecution. In Chicago,
for example, a suspect is arrested in less than 30% of the city’s homicides (Mitchell, 2015). The
reliance on threat, coercion, and violence by law enforcement and criminal justice officials—as
well as teachers, school administrators, and elected officials, among others—provides extensive
models for, and increases acceptance of, these behaviors both among alienated youth and in
society more generally (for a discussion of the pervasiveness of such experiences in the lives of
marginalized youth, see Rios, 2011).
These realities present a “wicked problem.” Those in political and policy realms often sug-
gest simple and unitary solutions—for example, stricter sentencing, violence interrupters,
establishing curfews, intensive policing, or religious conversion—despite there generally
being little evidence supporting their efficacy (Harcourt & Ludwig, 2006; Papachristos,
2011), or even evidence of their harm (Dmitrieva, Monahan, Cauffman, & Steinberg, 2012;

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 4 Roberto R. Aspholm and Mark A. Mattaini

Western & Pettit, 2010). Indeed, so long as participation in violence and street gangs results
in some relief from marginalization and exclusion, as well as in personal and collective
­advantages, large and enduring reductions in these issues appear unlikely. Worse, the most
powerful factors sustaining marginalization are structural in nature, deeply integrated into
economic, political, and institutional systems (Biglan, 2015; Mattaini & Aspholm, 2015).
The persistent economic inequalities that currently challenge national and global responses
are the result. In the face of these realities, behavioral systems science helps us to avoid over-
simplifications of the deeply interwoven sets of profoundly difficult obstacles that shape street
realities and the resulting violence both domestically and in other high-violence areas such as
Central America and southern Africa. In short, the crucial points to be made here are that (1)
the complex matrix of conditions and experiences described here predictably increases the
probability of violent acts and (2) the probability of reducing such acts is low so long as
significant i­ncentives and advantages are associated with these behaviors and related aversives
remain relatively weak.
More hopefully, we believe behavioral science offers possible routes to constructing mean-
ingful change. This science has convincingly established that efforts to suppress behaviors that
both bring relief from aversives and offer significant advantages are usually futile, because, as
Skinner (1974) noted, “a punished person remains ‘inclined’ to behave in a punishable way”
(p. 62), often learning instead only how to avoid punishment in the future. Instead, behavior
analytic and behavioral systems science has come to rely on “constructional” approaches to
personal and social problems (Goldiamond, 1974/2002; see also Mattaini, 2013; Sidman,
2001). A central tenet of such approaches is to construct alternative patterns of behavior that
offer relatively equivalent reinforcers while producing preferred social outcomes. Goldiamond
emphasized constructional work directly with individuals as well as the construction of institu-
tional arrangements that privilege desired behavioral alternatives—a behavioral systems model
that can be expanded into community work and social change efforts. Constructional—and
nonviolent—methods can also contribute to activism and social movements, as demonstrated
in a number of the examples discussed later (see also Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). Within a
constructional framework, reducing violence could be brought about in part by enlisting
young people in strategic activism and social movements in ways that offer incentives (rein-
forcers) substantially equivalent to those that gang life and street cultures rooted in violence
produce, as well as some advantages those lifestyles cannot.

­Youth Activism

Activism, community organizing, civil resistance, and social movements have historically relied
in large part on young people as central actors in their “operational corps” (Ackerman &
Kruegler, 1994, p. 28). These are the participants who engage in a concentrated way in
campaign activities, ranging from communicating with the larger population and managing
media and social media efforts to performing difficult and perhaps dangerous actions that
cannot be expected of the general population (Ackerman & Kruegler, 1994; Carty, 2015).
The Black Freedom Movement in the United States, the Vietnam War protests, queer liberation
campaigns, the Burmese and Philippine democracy movements, the Occupy Movement, the
struggles of the Arab Spring—nearly all campaigns that depend on turning out large numbers
of people have relied heavily on the participation of young people, often over extended periods
of time (Mattaini, 2013).

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 Youth Activism as Violence Prevention 5

About half the world’s population is under the age of 30 (Central Intelligence Agency,
2015). In many parts of the world—and in many urban areas in the United States—young
people have been extensively marginalized and excluded, both economically and politically. It
is, therefore, not surprising that these populations are ripe for participation in resistance activ-
ities. Such young people often have available time and energy, high levels of commitment to
change, relatively few pressing competing commitments, an openness to the creativity that is
central to much organizing, and a willingness to take risks (Kahn, 2010; Mattaini, 2013). Both
Robert Helvey (2004), an important theoretician of nonviolent action, and Gandhi (1945)
himself noted youth as an important resource while also cautioning that clear codes of conduct
and guidance are necessary to manage young people’s energy and willingness to take risks and
prevent potentially damaging conduct.
Although young people have long participated in the leadership of campaigns and move-
ments, recently more attention has been paid to that reality, and to “youth-led” campaigns
specifically (Checkoway & Gutiérrez, 2006; Delgado & Staples, 2008). Among the most stun-
ning examples is that of Otpor! (“Resistance!”), a nonhierarchical network of Serbian students
and former students committed to ending the Milošević rule at the turn of the 21st century.
This was no ordinary organization; as one member clarified, “You don’t support Otpor, you
have to join Otpor, to live Otpor. And you have to take part in this kind of action, to do your
own actions,” often under the slogan “Bite the system, live resistance!” (Sørenson, 2008,
p. 179). Otpor saw its role as monitoring the multiple opposition parties present to ensure a
unified campaign against Milošević. Most importantly, Otpor became legendary for its methods
of resistance, especially the use of humor to disempower the regime by making it look ridicu-
lous and shifting power to the movement for change. When Milošević attempted to have him-
self named a national hero, for example, Otpor encouraged people on the street to wear
badges each declaring themselves a national hero. Concentrated and continuous campaigns of
satire, parody, and humor shifted equivalence relations for many citizens—for example, from
“Milošević is to be feared” to “Milošević is ridiculous.” It is widely agreed that Otpor’s six
years of creative campaigns integrated with more typical forms of protest and resistance played
a major part, probably the major part, in bringing down the regime—a clear demonstration of
the potential power of marginalized young people (Sørenson, 2008).
Additional examples from the literature include the work of the Chicago Freedom School
(2015), the American Friends Service Committee (2015) in Central America, and the
Grassroots Youth Collaborative (GYC) in Toronto (K. Wright, Sayani, Zammit, & George,
2010). The GYC, formed in the mid-2000s, is a particularly interesting example with direct
applicability to our discussion here. This group of small community nongovernmental organi-
zations was formed to challenge the mainstream emphasis on personal pathologies, violence,
and social control in existing youth programs, by highlighting the realities of life for margin-
alized young people and challenging the lack of social infrastructure for youth who were sys-
tematically excluded from the resources they required to survive and thrive. Notably,
membership in the GYC requires that an organization be “by youth for youth” in orientation;
youth must have significant representation on boards of directors, and a majority of volunteers
and staff need to be young people (ages 13–29).
The GYC shifts the focus from the personal to the political. Its work is intended to “draw
stakeholders’ attention from violence to its root causes of poverty and resource deprivation in
racialized communities” (K. Wright et al., 2010, p. 184). Consistent with this vision, the GYC
refused offered funding for a “gang-exiting” program and instead demanded a focus on “social
programs that valued youth empowerment and channeled youth talent through the cultural

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 6 Roberto R. Aspholm and Mark A. Mattaini

arts” (K. Wright et al., 2010, p. 181). Significantly, much of the work of the collaborative has
been youth-led research related to underserved and excluded communities, conducted to
influence decision makers in the government, funding, and education systems, in addition to
advocacy and organizing.

Activism and Organizing Among Street Gangs

Although generally unknown by the public, ignored by the media, recast as criminal conspiracy
by law enforcement, and disregarded by researchers, street gangs and their members have a
long tradition of involvement in a wide range of organizing activities and social movements.
During the 1970s, for example, gangs in the South Bronx created the now-global, arts-focused
hip-hop culture in an attempt to reduce gang violence, promote unity on the streets, and forge
positive avenues for self-expression and identity construction (Chang, 2005; Hagedorn,
2008). The maras of Guatemala City developed during the 1980s within a milieu of
working-class revolutionary energy and lent their support to progressive movement efforts in
the face of the country’s decades-long campaign of brutal military repression and genocide
(Levenson, 2013). The Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles declared a truce on the eve of the
city’s 1992 uprisings and submitted a comprehensive, yet summarily ignored, proposal to Los
Angeles officials for a gang-led effort to rebuild the city in their wake (Kelley, 1996). The
Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation and the Ñetas in New York City built a progressive,
citywide grassroots movement in the 1990s that challenged Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s policies
of austerity and racist and suppressive policing (Brotherton & Barrios, 2004).
Street gangs were most heavily involved in progressive organizing efforts, however—at least
in the United States—as part of the powerful social movements of the 1960s. While gangs
were involved in movement activity across the country, nowhere was this more evident than in
Chicago. On the city’s South Side, the Blackstone Rangers organized a massive boycott of the
1968 presidential election in protest against Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “War on Gangs” and
collaborated with the radical Alinskyite Woodlawn Organization in securing nearly $1 million
in federal funds for a gang employment program in cooperation with its bitter rivals, the Black
Gangster Disciples (Fry, 1973). The Puerto Rican Young Lords fought gentrification and
police brutality in the greater Lincoln Park area on Chicago’s North Side and formed a pro-
torevolutionary “rainbow coalition” with the Black Panthers and the (White) Young Patriots
(Fernandez, 2012). On the city’s West Side, the Conservative Vice Lords incorporated as a
nonprofit organization, led a campaign to block illegal evictions, and owned and operated
roughly a dozen businesses near its headquarters in North Lawndale (Dawley, 1992; Hagedorn,
2008). In perhaps the most radical and powerful display of gang activism of the era, the Vice
Lords, Blackstone Rangers, and Black Gangster Disciples put aside their animosities to forge
the Lords, Stones, and Disciples (LSD) coalition around the common goal of equal employment
for African Americans in the city’s construction trades. Through guerrilla ambush tactics that
successfully shut down nearly $100 million in government construction projects during the
summer of 1969, including the site of the University of Illinois’s Chicago campus, LSD, as the
radical boots-on-the ground vanguard of the Coalition for United Community Action, forced
the city to commit to hiring 4,000 Black construction workers, 1,000 of whom were to be
members of LSD (Dawley, 1992; Gellman, 2010). Despite these heroic efforts, however,
intense police and political repression, evaporating urban employment, and the weakening of
the Black Freedom Movement ultimately redirected these street gangs toward criminality in
the early 1970s (Hagedorn, 2008; see also Davis, 1990; Levenson, 2013).

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 Youth Activism as Violence Prevention 7

Black Lives Matter

That prosocial gang organizing and activism were at their height during the 1960s, the most
powerful period of progressive social movements in the United States during the 20th century,
is not a coincidence. It was precisely the force and scope of these movements that galvanized
marginalized youth of color and drew them in. In this sense, the Black Lives Matter movement
represents the greatest opportunity to involve gang members in progressive organizing in
nearly half a century. Indeed, although sparked and largely sustained by the frequent number
of high-profile “extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes,” the movement’s
official website clarifies that Black Lives Matter represents a much broader effort to “(re)build
the Black liberation movement” (Black Lives Matter, 2015). Gang members across the country
seem to be taking notice. In Ferguson, Missouri, for example, a number of reports indicate
that local gang members have been involved in protests related to the police killing of unarmed
Black teenager Michael Brown, with pictures surfacing of members of rival gangs apparently
discouraging protesters from burning down a local business (Deutsch, 2014; Valrey, 2014). In
the wake of Freddie Gray’s killing at the hands of Baltimore police, local gangs declared a
peace treaty—both between themselves and with respect to their public demonstrations—as a
display of solidarity against police brutality: “The Bloods and Crips stood at the intersection
of North and Pennsylvania avenues dressed in their respective gang colors, red and blue, form-
ing a unified front against police violence” (Charles, 2015). Predictably, law enforcement offi-
cials have made unsupported and entirely unsubstantiated claims that gangs are joining these
protests merely as an opportunity to organize antipolice violence and recruit new members,
among other outrageous accusations (see Deutsch, 2014; Mathias, 2015).
The potential of the Black Lives Matter movement to draw in gang members and other alien-
ated young people involved in violence lies not only in the growing popularity of the movement
but also in the enduring salience of police brutality as an issue of tremendous concern for these
populations. Indeed, police brutality was often the issue that galvanized gang members and
street youth outside the South to join the Black Freedom Movement during the 1960s and
1970s, and incidents of police brutality have overwhelmingly provided the spark for urban
rebellions in the United States over the past half-century (Davis, 1990; National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968). The first author’s research with gang members in
Chicago (Aspholm, 2016), conducted shortly before the explosion of the Black Lives Matter
movement, revealed both the continuing importance of this issue for gang members and the
gang members’ views that organizing and movement building are key elements in reducing
urban violence. Consider the following quote from Marco, a 21-year-old Black Disciple, in
response to a question asking for his recommendations for addressing violence in the city:

Back in the 1960s, Black people was all together back then because we all basically had, like, a common
enemy—it was police brutality and shit, you know? So Black people was always together. I always hear
the old people say Black people used to talk a lot and make sure everybody good and shit, you know,
and it was like a community, you feel me? Mu’fuckas just gotta remember that. It’s like people don’t
remember where we came from, man, like how we used to fight for our rights back then and shit. Now
police do anything the fuck they want because we don’t got that same drive no more, you feel me?
’Cause the police be doin’ whatever—they be doin’ some crazy-ass shit, man. The police crazy as hell.
But I feel like the only thing that’d get everybody on the same page is if we had a common enemy, man.
Like, say if you was to get into it with the police, you feel me? Like, that’d be different than getting’
into it with [other] niggas, ’cause it’s like, damn, that’s the police, though. Everybody hate the police,
you know? That’d have to be the only way to get back on the same page—if it was back like the 1960s.

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 8 Roberto R. Aspholm and Mark A. Mattaini

While perhaps presenting some logistical challenges, the youthful, decentralized, fluid
nature of the Black Lives Matter movement and its style of leadership also represent an
attractive alternative to traditional hierarchical organizational models for marginalized
young people. Indeed, the first author’s research demonstrates that, since around the turn
of the millennium, Black gang members in Chicago—long home to the country’s most
organized street gangs—have successfully overthrown the exploitive and coercive leadership
structures of their respective gangs and established egalitarian collectives in their stead
(Aspholm, 2016; on the decentralized nature of Black gangs in Los Angeles, see Phillips,
2012). These young men do not take orders from anyone and would likely be unresponsive,
if not outright antagonistic, to the type of top-down, bureaucratic organizations that gener-
ally characterized the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, as local rapper
Tef Poe elucidated at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Ferguson, “This ain’t your
grandparents’ civil rights movement” (Pearce, 2014). For the prospects of engaging gang
members and other alienated youth in organizing within a new progressive social movement,
this is a good thing.

­Youth Activism as a Functional Alternative to Participation

in Street Violence

Participation in violence, and in cultures of violence, offers valued incentives, including the
relief that striking out can carry for those who have experienced violent trauma or humilia-
tion, a sense of agency, some measure of financial benefit, the powerful social reinforcers
associated with belonging, and an awareness of acting in resistance—albeit self-destruc-
tively—to oppressive forces. As the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate, participa-
tion in activism may be at least a partial functional alternative to participation in violent street
culture, in that activism can in some cases offer similar incentives. Of particular importance
may be membership in a close community of activists (a community with potential for close,
even loving, relationships with substantially less threat), the potential sense of agency, and
opportunities to act in resistance to oppression. Clearly more research is required to establish
the extent to which incentives associated with organizing are substitutable for those associ-
ated with street organization life, but historical examples are promising, and the underlying
conceptual base (including matching theory) is strong. (Matching theory suggests that, the
more valued reinforcers can be accessed through activism, the less behavior is likely to be
directed toward street violence.) In addition, activism has the potential to reduce violence in
the short term by uniting hostile parties around prosocial goals and in the longer term by
altering the oppressive conditions that promote and sustain violence in marginalized
communities.
Context, however, is clearly crucial. Maximum impact from youth organizing is much more
likely if multiple community sectors adopt practices that support activism and minimize prac-
tices that present obstacles. Table 104.1 provides examples of supporting and opposing prac-
tices within four key community sectors, and sources of incentives, disincentives, and facilitating
conditions that are likely to increase the incidence of desirable supporting practices. (See
Mattaini, 2013, for an expanded matrix including additional sectors.)
The incidence of youth violence is responsive to community context; the extent of con-
structive activism similarly depends to a considerable degree on the presence of support-
ing practices within the (local, national, or global) context. Increasing desirable practices

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 Youth Activism as Violence Prevention 9

Table 104.1  Sample practices, in key community sectors, that support or oppose youth activism. See
Mattaini (2013) for an expanded matrix including additional sectors.

Sector Practices Supporting Practices Opposing Incentives, Disincentives, and

Activism Activism Facilitating Conditions

News Media Locate and provide Portray youth primarily Community response to news
coverage of positive as “predators” or as stories; advertising dollars;
youth actions and incompetent and easy access to positive
activism; portray youth lacking good stories
as powerful community judgment (adultism)
resources
Police Reach out to youth to Make contact with Positive policies established
develop common youth primarily for and monitored;
projects; participate in surveillance, observations of and contact
circles of understanding; suppression, and with positive community
make visible enforcement; use work by respected models
contributions to excessive force within and outside of
communities departments; governmental
and activist monitoring
Local Encourage, support, and Create youth Voter responses; legal
Government respond to actions by programming limitations; incentives
youth councils; structure focusing on youth as related to access to funds
intensive youth problems to be
involvement in planning managed and
youth programming and controlled
community development
efforts
Nongovernmental Facilitate connections Establish youth Available funding; examples
Organizations among youth-led programs that treat from other
activism locally and young people nongovernmental
globally; offer training in primarily as powerless organizations; partnerships
strategic options service recipients, with activist organizations
including nonviolent problems to be
resistance and contained, or clients
peacemaking to be treated

Source: © Mark Mattaini. Adapted with permission from Mattaini (2013, pp. 70–72).

in important sectors, therefore, requires establishing contextual incentives supporting

those practices (the last column in the table) within the target sectors. Given such an
encouraging context, while youth activism and organizing are not the only or complete
routes to reductions in community violence, they offer potentially promising strategic
directions.

Notes

1 Steve Urkel, a fictional character in the popular 1990s TV sit-com Family Matters, was
known for his nerdy persona and attire, which included high-water pants worn with
suspenders.

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 10 Roberto R. Aspholm and Mark A. Mattaini

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