CSPV
School Violence Fact Sheets
An
Integrated Approach to Youth Violence Prevention
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- Many social institutions traditionally responsible
for youth development are "losing ground."
This deterioration is a major cause of the youth violence
problem and increasingly puts pressure on schools
to compensate for other institutional failures.
- "No school is an island," particularly
pertains to the waves of violence that sweep from
families and neighborhoods into the schools. Understanding
and preventing youth violence, therefore, requires
attending to the interconnectedness between families,
schools, and their neighborhoods.
- The interconnections between social contexts and
their impact on schools also have major implications
for prevention efforts. This interrelationship must
be taken into account when developing and implementing
such efforts. A comprehensive strategy that attends
to the multiple social contexts in which youth live
and function, including schools, has much greater
promise for successfully stopping or reducing youth
violence.
- Youth development takes place through a dynamic
interaction between children and adolescents and their
social environments. For example, youth violence can
have major consequences for the general climate of
schools.
- Violence may express frustration or hopelessness
for some youths who are striving but failing to master
the tasks relevant for their developmental stage.
Violence may acquire functional value as it becomes
a method in and of itself for accomplishing developmental
tasks when conventional opportunities are unavailable
or unworkable.
- The prevention of violence involves building relationships
among representatives of all public and private sectors
that touch the lives of youth. Comprehensive prevention
strategies are needed that address multiple risk and
protective factors in the different but overlapping
social contexts relevant to the developmental stages
of youth.
- The public health violence prevention strategy should
be used to assess the nature and extent of the youth
violence problem and to plan and carry out violence
prevention programming.
- There are three primary intervention strategies
for preventing violence in schools: systematic changes
for schools, programs for individual youths, and public
policy positions.
Note
The information for this fact sheet was taken from
the concluding chapter of Violence in American Schools:
A New Perspective. This chapter, as well as this fact
sheet, summarizes the key themes and recommendations
of the previous 12 chapters in this volume. These chapters
are individually summarized in various School Violence
fact sheets.
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