Eliminating Childhood Violence

1. Eliminating Childhood Violence
EDU 524 Fall II 2010
Chapter 12
Dr. Paul A. Rodríguez

2. Have We Given Up on Controlling Violence
Robert Putnam (2000) writes that Americans have stopped joining organizations and
have disassociated themselves from the political process. This lack of community
and political involvement makes dealing with childhood violence almost impossible.
 There needs to be an increased effort on the part of America’s schools to work
cooperatively with the child welfare system and the police to identify abused
children, school bullies and children beginning to show the early signs of violent
behavior.
 Schools are where youth crime frequently takes place, but the very center of
youth crime activity, the school system, seems unwilling or unable to cooperate
with law and child welfare enforcement to identify, report and then work with
community agencies.
 Craig and Pepler (1997) believe that only 9% of the juvenile violent crimes
committed in schools are reported to criminal justice authorities, compared with
a 37% report rate for similar juvenile street crimes.
 When a child sees 8,000 murders on television, videos and video games by the
time they finish grade school, (Simons 2001), and we have a serious youth
violence problem in America, we must begin to wonder if violent entertainment
provokes and encourages violence in children.
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3. Eliminating Childhood Violence
What can we do?
 A No-Tolerance Policy toward Child Abuse and Neglect
 A Well-Trained Core of Professionals for the Criminal Justice Field
An astonishing 5% of the adult population in Texas (706,000 people) is in
prison, on parole or on probation. Of the 163,000 prisoners in Texas, 89,400
are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. African Americans in Texas are
incarcerated at seven times the rate of whites, while probation is given to
black prisoners only 20% of the time, compared with the 45% of white
prisoners.
Control of Violence in the Media
Local television news too often emphasizes violence and too seldom produces
thoughtful stories on what works. This helps create a “mean world
syndrome” in the minds of viewers, who then often conclude that nothing
works.
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4. Schools That Work to Limit Violence
The main aims of health promoting schools are to provide a healthy
environment and to encourage healthy lifestyles for the pupils. Bullying
behavior is one aspect that is expected to have an adverse effect, and
preventing such behavior is an important task.
Schools must do a better job of identifying children at risk of violent behavior.
Bullying is one of the earliest signs of violence in children. There must be
trained mental health professional in a school can have an enormously
positive impact on children through the suggestions provided to teachers in
containing violence.
Funding for Research
We really are in our infancy in the treatment of childhood violence. Much
more money needs to be spent on developing effective treatment approaches
at the individual , family, institutional and community levels to treat and then,
ultimately, prevent childhood violence.
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5. A Positive Attitude When it Comes to Children
Research on developmental resilience has introduced ideas that challenge
three prominent beliefs about the way children develop into adults, and
these still dominate our thinking:
1. There are fixed stages of development
2. Childhood trauma usually leads to adult psychopathology
3. There are social conditions, interpersonal relationships and institutional
arrangements that are so toxic they inevitably lead to serious problems in
the everyday functioning of children and adults, families and
communities.
Research suggest that people do change, and that learning from prior
experience appears to be an important reason for change. Continued
research on resilience and self-righting abilities are absolutely essential if we
are to understand how violent young children grow and change, and if
creative treatment programs are to be developed.
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6. More Treatment and Less Punishment
Unless we want to put more and more children in prison, where they learn to
be really violent and where the probability is high that they will continue to
commit violent acts, we should choose to build fewer prisons and place our
emphasis on treatment.
Glicken and Sechrest (2003) found little evidence that prisons reduce repeat
offender rates among violent children at a greater level than community
outreach programs or group homes. The illogic of building more and more
prisons is found in California, a state that spends more on maintaining prisons
than it spends on higher education. Putting children in jail seems utterly
wrong. There is a value of using a child’s positive attributes (strengths) when
mental health services may mitigate the impact of serious psychiatric
symptoms and risk, allowing children to remain in homelike settings
successfully.
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7. Reflections
1. Can you think of some positive rewards we can give parents for
controlling the amount of violence their children are permitted to view in
the media?
2. Why do you think schools do such a minimal job of controlling bullying in
and out of the classroom?
3. What would you do to improve the work of child welfare agencies in
America so that they intervene quickly and effectively in child
maltreatment cases?
4. Why do you think we provide so little money for research and training
when youth violence is such a serious problem?
5. Why do you think people are so cynical about reports showing that
violence and crime are down in any given year?
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