Teens And Recent Tragic Events
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Recent tragic events such as school shootings have presented us with images of adolescent aggressive and antisocial behavior. There is a national search for answers. Fortunately, a long-term commitment to basic behavioral research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is now having some very practical payoff for just these vexing problems.

Recent data from the National Youth Survey (NYS), a long-term study of violent offenders, point compellingly to the influence of deviant peers on a young person's tendency to engage in aggressive and violent behavior. The flip side of this finding is that interventions must pay attention to the peer group, a key factor influencing whether a young person will lead a young adulthood characterized by violent and aggressive behaviors.

In 1976, the NYS began to follow a nationally representative sample of 1,725 boys and girls, ages 11 to 17. NYS investigators have monitored participants' self-reports of serious violent behaviors as well as official records of law violations. At the time of the most recent interview, the survey participants were between ages 27 and 33. More than half of all participants with records of violent behavior began to engage in such behavior between the ages of 14 and 17, although a substantial number began as young as age 12. After age 20, the risk of initiating a pattern of violent behavior was found to be close to zero. They found that association with delinquent peers precedes the initiation and progression to serious violent offenses in 90 percent of cases. This finding was true of young people of all races.

Many well-intended attempts to "reform" severely delinquent youths have had few positive effects and even negative outcomes. Typically, these programs place delinquent youth with other delinquents in settings such as "group homes." One alternative based on the new under-standing of peer influence is the Therapeutic Foster Care program, a treatment model for serious and chronic delinquents (i.e., with an average of 14 arrests, including 4 for felonies).

In this program, severely delinquent youths are placed in the homes of "therapeutic foster parents" - carefully selected couples who are specially trained in science-based procedures for working with these troubled youngsters and are given round-the-clock support as well. Evaluations of the Therapeutic Foster Care program have shown that it is more effective in reducing delinquency than the usual placement in group homes. It is also significantly less expensive, and has fewer runaways and fewer program failures.

The Foster Family-based Treatment Association, developed under NIMH leadership, now has some 400 agency members across the U.S. who promote the use of this science-based and effective model. The research and its effective application seriously challenge the policies, programs and procedures that bring problem youth together. Today's research is also suggesting new ways to prevent antisocial behavior through an array of interventions for youth that is aimed at peers and other key components of their social environment.

That research has revealed that although there are identifiable and escalating pathways to antisocial behavior, and possibly some biological factors placing some children at risk, they are not set in stone, and individuals can make a long-term difference in the lives of troubled and troubling children. As summed up in a major review of current research on antisocial and aggressive behavior: "Current levels of delinquency and violence in many Western societies, particularly the United States, are sufficiently high in many communities that successful intervention and prevention require a focus on the attitudes and behavioral norms of the whole adolescent peer culture. In many urban schools, an aggressive reputation is positively related to adolescent peer popularity. It is not just the deviant peer group that influences delinquency and risk taking.

Children in these schools grow up in neighborhoods of poverty and high crime rates, being exposed to homicide and the frequent use of guns. All this is embedded in a media culture of highly explicit violence... The challenge of contemporary prevention, whether for the high-risk early starter group or the late-starting adolescence-limited group is to alter these adolescent norms.

The primary strategy currently employed to achieve this goal is through the use of classroom and school-based programs in social problem solving, conflict management, violence prevention, and more broad-based curriculum for promoting emotional and social development in the total school population. ...These universal interventions should not be considered as alternatives to more targeted interventions with high-risk youth, because each approach provides a complementary strategy to reducing violence and antisocial activity in the entire community. The success of one approach should influence the success of another."

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