Youth and Violence

Italian sociologist Francesco Notarbartolo di Villarosa is piloting a participatory mapping project in Borel, in Rio's Zona Norte. The program collects data on infrastructure, access to social services, security concerns, and employment prospects, among other things, in order to make social assistance in the area more effective.

Fabiana Cantero and Fernando Veneziale, from Argentina's Secretaría de Niñez y Adolescencia, interviewed  218 young offenders in a youth detention center in Buenos Aires. They wanted to know what connection there is between offending and drug use, and discussed the results of their study with Comunidad Segura in an exclusive interview.

Isabel Aguilar from Guatemala's Interpeace, an NGO devoted to violence prevention in Central America, denounces the branding of young gang members as responsible for all social violence. Aguilar believes they are more vulnerable and less dangerous than other actors, but lack the social policies that will put them on the path to peace, as she tells Comunidad Segura in an exclusive interview.

Prison was in the past seen as a solution for unruly, violent or criminal gangs. No longer, now the reality is prisons must shrink in size. Comunidad Segura spoke to University of Chicago's John Hagedorn about how new measures to reduce the size of prisons may affect a world where gang members and convicts intersect.

The Missouri model of Juvenile Justice is credited with a great turn around on how to work with juvenile corrections. It is also considered less expensive and is noted for low rates of recidivism inspiring similar initiatives across the US. Comunidad Segura interviewed Mark Steward, the man who played a key role in that change over 20 years.

Pandillas, or gangs, are growing in the United States and Europe, a very real option in the lives of disillusioned immigrant youths.  Mexico's Juan Carlos
Narváez focuses on the transnational experience in his book "Ruta
transnacional: a San Salvador por los Ángeles".

Teny Gross, head of the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, RI, discusses his work with youths age 14 to 23 in an area prone to gang violence. The institute is dedicated to violence prevention by reaching out to at-risk youths in their communities, through street outreach workers and programs that teach nonviolence in schools and jails.

Luís Pedernera, member of Uruguay's Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Child discusses their recent report that denounces detention centers that work as little more than warehouses for young offenders.

University of Chicago Illinois gang researcher Robert M. Lombardo is a man with 30 years experience in the police force and another 10 in the halls of academia. He discusses the changes imposed on gangs by the drug trade and the end of factory jobs in America, in his view, the trouble with gang violence is far from over. 

“People act based on expected behavior, on the expectations of their community. If you understand this you can promote change.” Cristina Bicchieri, Philosophy of Science professor at University of Pennsylvania, on science's contribution to social activism.