The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization (Two-Volume Set)

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The Psychology of Teen V↜iolence and V↜ictimization

The Psychology of Teen V↜iolence and V↜ictimization Volume 1: From Bullying to Cyberstalking to Assault and Sexual V↜iolation Michele A. Paludi, Editor Foreword by Lisa Krenkel

AN IMPRINT OF ABC-CLIO, LLC Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England

Copyright 2011 by Michele A. Paludi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The psychology of teen violence and victimization / Michele A. Paludi, editor ; foreword by Lisa Krenkel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-39375-4 (hardback: acid-free paper) – ISBN 978-0-313-39376-1 (ebk) 1. Children and violence. 2. Violence in children. 3. Youth–Crimes against. I. Paludi, Michele Antoinette. HQ784. V55P79â•… 2011 303.60835–dc23â•…â•…â•…2011033276 ISBN: 978-0-313-39375-4 EISBN: 978-0-313-39376-1 15 14 13 12 11╇ 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse, or exploitation. —Jessica Lange It is my hope that these volumes of The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization will help parents, educators, activists, and legislators continue to advocate for and protect the rights of children and adolescents. —Michele A. Paludi

Contents

Foreword by Lisa Krenkel

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction by Michele A. Paludi

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Part I. Developmental and Cultural Issues in Teen Violence Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

Microaggressions: A Root of Bullying, Violence, and Victimization toward Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youths Kevin L. Nadal and Katie E. Griffin

3

Violence in Emerging Adulthood: A Developmental Perspective Robert F. Marcus and Eric G. Jamison II

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“Mean Girls” in Real Life: The Media’s Influence on Teen Violence and Victimization Jennifer L. Martin

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The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders 57 Margaret C. Stevenson, Katlyn M. Sorenson Farnum, Allison L. Skinner, and Rukudzo Amanda Dzwairo

Part II. Teen Violence at School, on the Internet, and at Work Chapter Five:

Schoolyard Violence Stuart C. Aitken and Donald E. Colley III

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Chapter Six:

Bullying in Middle School: What Does It Look Like, Why Does It Happen, and Who Does It Hurt? Christine M. Wienke Totura and Carol MacKinnon-Lewis

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Chapter Seven:

Teachers and Teen Bullying Deborah James, Maria Lawlor, Niamh Murphy, and Ann Flynn

Chapter Eight:

Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls by Peers, Teachers, Employers, and Internet Predators 155 Michele A. Paludi and Ashley Kravitz

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Part III. Teen Violence by Family and Mates Chapter Nine:

Chapter Ten:

No Safe Haven: Sexual Abuse of Teens by Family Members Jeanette Krenek, Joanna L. Goodwin, Paula K. Lundberg-Love, Lindsay Marie Pantlin, and Britney Hilbun Child Sexual Abuse and Adolescent Sexual Assault and Revictimization Kate Walsh and David DiLillo

Chapter Eleven: Developing Teen Relationships: The Role of Violence Andrea Poet, Catherine R. Swiderski, and Maureen C. McHugh Chapter Twelve: Stalking of Adolescents Thomas M. Evans and Todd Hendrix Appendix:

Organizations Concerned with Teen Violence and Victimization Michele A. Paludi

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203

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Index

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Foreword Lisa Krenkel

The solution of adult problems tomorrow depends in large measure upon the way our children grow up today. There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing that, when we save children, we save ourselves. Margaret Mead

The subject of teen violence in today’s society is both volatile and controversial. Teenagers are the victims of violence, and the perpetrators are increasingly not only adults but also teens’ own peers. As an attorney, I have seen the end result of this disturbing trend: a juvenile justice system that is overburdened, underfunded, outdated, and ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught of cases involving teenagers. Teenage victims are not often afforded the same resources as adult victims of physical abuse and sexual violence, and even when they are, the resources are designed to assist adult victims and are not tailored to the unique psychology of teens, who are often marginalized in our society. Ultimately this results in a resistance to treatment and assistance that can have life-threatening or lifelong consequences. The statistics are staggering, and the solution is evasive. The violence is increasingly more violent in degree, and the age of the offender is younger and younger. Technology has quickly outpaced society’s ability to codify many crimes such as sexting and child pornography. Sexual violence in schools and on school buses, bullying, and Internet crimes of harassment, humiliation, and intimidation are increasingly unmonitored, with devastating results. Is the answer merely to treat these juvenile offenders as adults and absorb them into the adult criminal justice system? Should the adult laws of criminal intent and capacity be applied to teen offenders? Will adult concepts of punishment serve the same purpose when applied to

x Foreword

teenagers? Can we help the teen victims in the same way that we try to help adult victims of violent crime? In these two volumes, Dr. Paludi and her colleagues seek to examine the roots and causes of teen violence by exploring society’s changing attitudes toward sex, gender, and violence and teenagers’ precarious status within this paradigm. Dr. Paludi has dedicated her life to helping women and children. She is an educator, author, and expert witness and a psychological theoretician. In these volumes, she challenges us all to explore the difficult issues that affect children, specifically teenagers, in a time of technological advancement that is marked by social inequality and the marginalization of teenagers, who can neither defend nor empower themselves. As a litigator, I see the aftermath of the violence, its end result. Dr. Paludi and contributing authors explore the etiology of this violence as it manifests itself in an effort to change the pattern of violence and victimization that has besieged our nation’s youths.

Acknowledgments

I have had the honor of knowing and working with individuals and organizations who have advocated for adolescents’ rights, especially with respect to violence and victimization. I would like to acknowledge their work and the impact they have had in protecting our children and teens: The American Association of University Women Business and Professional Women’s Club of Schenectady, New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment Florence L. Denmark Susan Klein Lisa Krenkel Donna Linder and Child Find of America Paula K. Lundberg-Love Jennifer L. Martin Kevin L. Nadal Bernice Sandler Nan Stein Susan Strauss Brittany Tarabour United States Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse in Higher Education Women’s Studies Program, Northeastern University

I also appreciate the caring and support of my sisters Rosalie Paludi and Lucille Paludi during the writing and editing of these volumes.

xii Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Debbie Carvalko and her colleagues at Praeger for knowing how much writing and editing books means to me. As Toni Morrison is quoted as saying, “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Debbie knows this about me!

Introduction Michele A. Paludi

Adolescents and Hate Crimes Hate crimes are the scariest thing in the world because these people really believe what they’re doing is right. Cher

During the writing of The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization, the following incidents received national attention: March 2010: Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince committed suicide following bullying, verbal harassment, and physical abuse from peers at school. May 2010: Cactus Grill Restaurant in Leawood, Kansas, was sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for sexually harassing an 18-year-old woman, including unwanted touching, sexual advances, and requests for sex. July 2010: Cory Miller, a 16-year-old teen from Havana, Illinois, was attacked by bullies for the third time in two years. Cory was born with cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair. The bullies had taunted and threatened him, violently kicked and beat him, spit on him, and broke his wheelchair and glasses. They left him lying in dirt. August 2010: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that Arkansas, Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri were the five states with the highest percentages of girls being raped. September 2010: Marco Gonzalez, a 15-year-old boy in Georgia, was abducted by individuals who stole his family car with him inside of it. October 2010: Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after learning that his roommate and classmate had used a webcam to secretly broadcast Tyler’s sexual relationship with another man.

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October 2010: Four teenagers in Staten Island, New York, were arrested for bullying a Muslim classmate, Kristian, for more than a year, which included spitting in his face, punching him in the groin, and calling him a terrorist. October 2010: Yale University fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon paraded through the university campus shouting sexually offensive slogans against women, including “No Means Yes; Yes Means Anal.”

Much violence against adolescents and committed by adolescents is a result of hate crimes (McConnell & Swain, 2000; Steinberg, Brooks, & Remtulla, 2003), as illustrated by the incidents listed above. A hate crime is a crime that in whole or in part is motivated by the offender’s bias toward the victim’s status. Hate crimes are intended to hurt and intimidate individuals because they are perceived to be different with respect to their sex, religion, race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or disability (Paludi, Ellens, & Paludi, 2010). While hate crimes are assaults against an individual, they are also assaults against everyone who shares the victim’s status (e.g., Muslims, individuals with disabilities, African Americans, lesbians, gay males, females). Legislation lists specific crimes that are identifiable as a hate crime, including murder; manslaughter; robbery; aggravated assault; burglary; motor vehicle theft; arson; forced and nonforced sex offenses; intimidation; destruction, damage, or vandalism of property; and other crimes involving injury to any person or property. When the behavior does not fall into one of the listed criminal categories identified above, hate offenses are referred to as bias-motivated incidents. These incidents may include cases of verbal slurs and may be precursors to more serious hate crimes (Paludi et al., 2010). Thus, violence against adolescents (as well as adults) exists along a continuum, from incivility and microaggressions to hate crimes, including assault and murder (Paludi, 2010; see also chapters 1 and 5, volume 1, and chapter 10, volume 2, of this book set).

A Closer Look at Gender-Based Hate Crimes Gender-based hate crimes are the most prevalent type of hate crimes committed and experienced by teens. Gendered violence, or gender-based violence, has been defined as follows: “any act that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (United Nations, 1995). This definition includes rape, stalking, intimate partner violence, and child

Introduction

sexual abuse. The terminology “gendered violence” is used, as highlighted by Russo and Pirlott (2006, p. 181), “because such violence is shaped by gender roles and status in society. . . . A complex mix of gender-related cultural values, beliefs, norms, and social institutions implicitly and even explicitly have supported intimate partner violence and provided little recourse for its victims.” Hate crimes against lesbians, gay men, and transgender individuals is gendered. Unlike other forms of hate crimes, however, gender-based hate crimes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youths are viewed as the most socially acceptable type of violence by adolescents (see chapter 1, volume 1, of this book set). Boys and men commit most of the violent crimes against gay males and lesbians (National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 2009). The majority of murders of transgender individuals are perpetrated by nontransgender men; most victims are transgender women. Such violence has its roots in gender nonconformity (Schilt & Westbrook, 2009). The violence is fueled by anger as well as fear about gender nonconformity and feeling deceived by the individual’s gender presentation (Schilt & Westbrook, 2009). Adolescent girls are exposed to more violence than are adolescent boys (Flores, 2006; see also chapter 11, volume 2, of this book set). The National Survey on Drug Use and Health of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2010) reported that from their sample of 33,091 girls aged 12 to 17, 18.6% got in a serious fight at school or work, 14.1% participated in a group-against-group fight, and 5.7% were violent toward others with an intent to hurt them. With respect to adolescent boys, this research found that 25.4% got into a serious fight at school or work, 17% participated in a group-against-group fight, and 9.3% attacked another person with the intent to harm that person. Girls (and women) are most likely to be murdered by a romantic partner or ex-partner (Lundberg-Love & Wilkerson, 2006; McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008; Tan & Gregor, 2006). Ten percent of teen girls report that they have experienced physical violence in their own relationships, including hitting, shoving, throwing of objects, grabbing, and other physical force used with the intention to injure, harm, or kill another individual (McHugh et al., 2008; Ulloa, Castaneda, & Hokoda, 2010; see also chapter 2, volume 1, and chapter 4, volume 2, of this book set). A comparison of intimate partner violence rates in adolescents and adults indicates that teen girls are at a higher risk of intimate partner abuse (Silverman, Raj, Mucci, & Hathaway, 2001; see also chapter 11, volume 1, of this book set). In addition, girls and women are more likely than males to experience stalking and sexual assault (see chapter 12, volume 1, of this book set).

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In fact, adolescent girls aged 16 to 19 are almost four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, with the majority of these girls experiencing date rape, not stranger rape (Gerber & Cherneski, 2006; Maxwell, Robinson, & Post, 2003). Approximately 71% of school-aged females report being bullied (Chisolm, 2010; Martin, 2010; Paludi, 2010; see also chapter 6, volume 1, and chapter 6, volume 2, of this book set). Eighty percent of adolescents have been sexually harassed by a peer, including name calling, graffiti written about them in school bathrooms, offensive drawings disseminated about them, unwanted touching, cyberbullying, sexual rumors, and pressure for sex (see chapter 8, volume 1, and chapter 8, volume 2, of this book set). As another example of gendered violence, approximately 30% of adolescent girls are victims of child sexual abuse (Lundberg-Love & Marmion, 2006; see also chapters 9 and 10, volume 1, of this book set).

Placing Gendered Violence into an Adolescent Developmental Context: Power Issues American boys must be protected from a culture of violence that exploits their worst tendencies by reinforcing and amplifying the atavistic values of the masculine mystique. Our country was not created so that future generations could maximize profit at any cost. It was created with humanistic, egalitarian, altruistic goals. We must put our enormous resources and talents to the task of creating a children’s culture that is consistent with these goals. Myriam Miedzian

In the life cycle, adolescence is a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood (Newman & Newman, 2008). According to theories of adolescent development, one of the most important developmental tasks of adolescence is establishing an identity (Erikson, 1963). During adolescence, individuals begin to integrate the opinions of influential others (e.g., parents, teachers, music idols, actors) into their own likes and dislikes. The eventual outcome is people who have a clear sense of their values and beliefs, occupational goals, and relationship expectations. This normative developmental task can be disrupted by individuals manipulating the adolescents (Kroger, 2000). Adolescents are establishing intimacy and self-esteem during this stage as well (Chisholm, 2010). During adolescence, girls and boys want to be seen as popular with their peer group (Hartup & Stevens, 1999). The functions of a peer group for teens include social support, emotional intimacy, fun, and understanding. Adolescents are more likely to behave in ways that are gender-role stereotypic when with their peer group than

Introduction

when alone (Doyle & Paludi, 1998). Because of the importance placed on the peer group, behavior that is gender-role stereotypic is intensified during adolescence in order for teens to fit in with their peers. Among boys, the pressure to be tough is intensified during adolescence; teen boys are likely to engage in fights with their peers. They do so in order to gain status and popularity among other teens in their peer group (American Association of University Women, 2001). Teen boys are likely to participate in a crowd, that is, a large group of boys recognized by a few characteristics, such as involvement in athletics (Way & Pahl, 1999). In addition, Paludi, Martin, and Paludi (2007) and Giladi (2005) noted that boys act out of extreme competitiveness or fear that they will lose their position of power. Since they don’t want to be viewed as less masculine or weak by their male peers, they engage in sexual victimization of girls. Thus, girls are the objects of the game to impress other boys. De-individuation is common among adolescent boys; they discontinue self-evaluation and instead adopt group norms and attitudes. Deindividuation causes group members to behave more aggressively than they would as individuals (Paludi, 2010). In addition, Doyle and Paludi (1998) and DeSouza (2004) noted that the male-as-aggressor theme is so central to many adolescent boys’ self-concept that it spills over to their relationships with girls. The California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (2002) reported that among 1,600 juvenile sexual assault offenders, 23.5% perceived sex as a way to feel power and control, 9.4% perceived sex as a way to dissipate anger, and 8.4% perceived sex as a way to punish girls. In addition, both abusers and victims attribute the responsibility for violent dating behavior to victims; for example, the girl provoked the violence because of her personality, the girl had a need for affection, or the girl was influenced by her peer group (Lavoie, Hebert, Tremblay, Vitaro, & McDuff, 2002). Equally disconcerting is research by Jackson, Cram, and Seymour (2000) indicating that 77% of girls and 67% of boys in high school endorse sexual coercion, including unwanted genital contact and sexual intercourse.

Hate Crimes, Violence, and Stereotypic Beliefs During adolescence, teens rely on stereotypes about individuals and, in the case of hate crimes, act on these stereotypes (Morrison, Morrison, Pope, & Zumbo, 1999; Otis & Loeffler, 2006). Stereotypes refer to individuals’ cognitions that typically do not correspond with reality (Fiske & Lee, 2008). Stereotypes occur when individuals are classified by others as having something in common because they are members of a particular

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group or category or are perceived to be a member of this group (e.g., gay men, Latinos, disabled, female). Social science research has identified that stereotypes have the following characteristics (Fiske, 1993): Groups that are targeted for stereotypes are easily identified and relatively powerless. This misperception is difficult to modify even though Â�individuals who hold stereotypes have interacted with individuals of the group who disconfirm the stereotypes. â•… There is little agreement between the composite picture of the group and the actual characteristics of that group. This is the product of a bias in Â�individuals’ information-processing mechanisms.

Race/color stereotyping is a psychological process that describes individuals’ structured set of beliefs about the personal attributes of individuals because of their actual or perceived race or because it is believed that this individual has a particular racial background (Feinberg, 2000). Gender stereotyping is a psychological process describing individuals’ structured set of beliefs about the personal attributes of men and women (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008). Sexual orientation stereotyping is a psychological process describing individuals’ structured set of beliefs about personal attributes of others because of their perceived or acknowledged sexual orientation (Herek & Garnets, 2007). Psychologists have identified an emotional component to stereotypic cognitions: prejudice as well as a behavioral component to individuals’ cognitions involving discrimination, harassment, and violence, including hate crimes (Fiske, 1993). Individuals’ statements and nonverbal gestures toward women and men and individuals’ race/color and sexual orientation provide insight into their structured set of beliefs about individuals of different sexes, races, and sexual orientations (Reskin, 2000). Negative attitudes and feelings about individuals’ sex, race, and sexual orientation develop as a consequence of cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural processes (Paludi et al., 2010). The cognitive aspect refers to placing individuals in categories that activate gender stereotypes, race stereotypes, and sexual orientation stereotypes. The motivational aspect refers to the need for individual power, control, and status. The sociocultural aspect refers to viewing as normal negative attitudes and behavior toward individuals because of their sex, race, or sexual orientation (Fiske & Lee, 2008). Characteristics such as English fluency, skin color, and accents are salient features that individuals use to categorize a person. Consequently, individuals activate stereotypical traits about these characteristics

Introduction

(Wigboldus, Dijksterhuis, & vanKnippenberg, 2003). Stereotypes are not labels but instead are assumptions about personality traits and behaviors that people in the labeled categories are thought to possess (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008). Stereotypes have negative effects; the categorization process causes people to emphasize differences between groups and similarities within groups. Thus, for example, Latinos are seen as radically different from White individuals (Fiske & Lee, 2008).

Out-Group Homogeneity Bias Related to stereotyping is the out-group homogeneity bias (Judd, Park, Yzerbyt, Gordijn, & Muller, 2005; Mulvey, Hitt, & Killen, 2010). This is a process by which individuals view groups in which they are not a part (e.g., a sexual orientation or race different from their own) as more homogeneous than their own group (e.g., their own sexual orientation or race). Thus, stereotypes concerning members of out-groups are stronger than those of in-group members. According to Judd (cited in DeAngelis, 2001, p. 3), “people are more willing to ignore individuating information about members of out-groups, lumping them all into a single disliked category.” In actuality, focusing on differences among protected categories ignores ingroup variability. The overemphasis on differences provides confirmation of the stereotype that religions are opposite and that one’s own beliefs are normative while others are a deviation from the norm (Judd et al., 2005). Adolescents hold stereotypes about victims, for example, victims of sexual assault (Maxwell et al., 2003). Adolescents typically blame the victim for the assault, including the style of dress and walking in certain neighborhoods. Kershner (1996) noted that most students aged 14 to 19 stated that forced sexual intercourse is acceptable under certain circumstances. Marciniak (1998) found that gender role attitudes, attitudes, and cognitive development are important factors in sexual aggression and in accepting rape myths. The continuation of stereotyping in adolescence is explained by the role that stereotyping plays in perpetuating group identity, group norms, and exclusion (Killen, Sinno, & Margie, 2007).

Gendered Violence in the Media We must also be careful to avoid ingesting toxins in the form of violent TV programs, video games, movies, magazines, and books. When we watch that kind of violence, we water our own negative seeds, or tendencies, and eventually we will think and act out of those seeds. Thich Nhat Hanh

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Violence against adolescents has been explained by adhering to stereotypes about unequal power relations and patriarchal values. As Russo and Pirlott (2006, p. 181) summarized with respect to gender-based violence, “gender roles and expectations, male entitlement, sexual objectification, and discrepancies in power and status have legitimized, rendered invisible, sexualized, and helped to perpetuate violence against women.” In addition, factors embedded in the adolescent culture that influence as well as support violence include alcohol and drug use, religious influences, devaluation of subordinated groups, the sexualization of violence, and video games (Maxwell et al., 2003; see also chapter 3, volume 2, of this book set). A major catalyst for the incidence of hate crimes, including gender-based hate crimes and other forms of violence in the United States, is the frequency with which violence is portrayed in media, especially media consumed by adolescents (see chapter 3, volume 1, of this book set). The Parents Television Council (2003) noted that in 2002 compared to 1998, violence on television was 41% more frequent during the 8:00 p.m. time slot and 134% more frequent during the 9:00 p.m. time slot. Kaufman (2004) noted that in January 2004, three continuous hours of violent television programs were aired on one station on Thursday evenings: Cold Case, CSI, and Without a Trace. Kaufman (2004, p. 2) cited research from the National Cable Television Association’s National Television Violence Study indicating that “across the three years of this study, a steady 60% of TV programs contain violence . . . [and] much of the violence is glamorized, sanitized, and trivialized” (p. 2). Beresin (2010) reported that television programs offer 812 violent acts per hour, with children’s cartoons displaying approximately 20 violent acts hourly. Violence in music videos has been observed in between 56% and 76% of the videos and include hitting, shootings, stabbings, punching, and kicking (Baxter, De Reimer, Landini, Leslie, & Singletary, 1985; Sherman & Dominick, 1986; Greeson & Williams, 1986). The most violent music videos are rap, followed by rock. These videos also included alcohol use and smoking as part of the violence. Beresin (2010) noted that by the time children are 18 years old, they will have watched 28 hours of television per week, viewed 200,000 acts of violence in the television programs, and seen more than 16,000 murders in these shows. Seventy-five percent of children and teens watch music videos, with 60% of them indicating that they view these videos pretty much or a lot (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007; van den Bulck & Beullens, 2005). Klein and colleagues (1993) and the Council

Introduction

on Communications and Media (2009) reported that teens aged 14 to 16 years old listen to music an average of 40 hours per week. In violence portrayed in the media, girls and women are often portrayed as weak, objectified, submissive, and vulnerable (LaTouche, 2007). Pipher (1994) concluded that adolescent girls suffer psychologically from negative body image, lowered self-esteem, and achievement conflicts, all as a consequence of the culture’s messages about young women’s bodies needing to be protected, made more beautiful, and preserved. These messages are part of rock music videos, song lyrics, and television programs. In contrast, the media portrays boys and men as aggressive and powerful. Violence is thus used to reinforce gender norms. Exposure to violence in media increases aggressive thoughts and a permanent hostility toward girls and women (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Anderson, Carnagey, & Eubanks, 2003). Bretthauer, Zimmerman, and Banning (2007) noted that a review of “The Hot 100” list generated by Billboard Chart Research Services indicated that violence, especially violence against women, was prominent in music lyrics. They identified six themes in their review: men and power, sexual violence, objectification of women, sex as a main priority for men, women defined in terms of their relationships with men, and women not valuing themselves. Armstrong (2001) found that gangsta rap music is identified with violent and misogynist lyric portrayals, including corporal punishment for women, hitting women with shoes, physically attacking women who refuse sex, rape, and murder. According to Armstrong (2001, p. 8), “the hegemonic dimension of gangsta rap music’s narratives is immediate evidence of a rape culture. . . . In fact, gangsta rap music is a ‘celebration’ of rape culture and its most powerful contemporary voice.” Furthermore, exposure to violence in rock music videos has been linked to increased beliefs in stereotypes about sexuality, attractiveness, and violence. Adolescent boys who have been exposed to rock music videos have stated that they would engage in violence against women; boys who were not exposed to music videos did not endorse this view (Kaestle, Halpern, & Brown, 2007; Johnson, Adams, Ashburn, & Reed, 1995). Research by Malamuth and Check (1981) noted that when men who had never raped were exposed to depictions of sexual assault, they reported a heightened sexual arousal from the scenes and an increase in their rape fantasies. Thus, research suggests that most men find violence a stimulant to heighten or arouse their sexual feelings. Men find sexuality related at some level to an expression of aggression, and in turn aggression heightens their sexual fantasies or actual sexual behaviors (Doyle & Paludi, 1998).

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Impact of Violence on Adolescents The impact of violence has significant effects on adolescents. For example, teens (and children) who are exposed to violence on television will be provided with violent heroes to imitate and taught that violence is the way to resolve conflict with individuals, especially with dating partners (Beresin, 2010; Ward, 2002). Most of these adolescents have televisions in their own rooms, so they watch programs without parental supervision and editing (Beresin, 2010). Adolescents also use headphones, so their parents are not able to hear the lyrics to the music to which their teens are listening. Bretthauer, Zimmerman, and Banning (2007) noted that music lyrics send relationship messages to listeners, who are predominantly adolescents. St. Lawrence and Joyner (1991) reported that adolescents’ preference for heavy metal music is a significant marker for substance abuse, suicide risk, alienation, and risk-taking behaviors during adolescence (e.g., failure to use contraceptives, failure to use a seatbelt). Furthermore, according to Kaufman (2004, p. 3), “the hero of TV shows never gets in trouble for his/her violent actions. The hero is always ‘justified’ in one way or another when committing violent acts. . . . Television will never show a main character lose an arm, leg or get killed on screen. In reality, with as much gunplay that appears on TV, main characters should also get shot. . . . The hero can really be as violent as he/she wants.” Comstock and Paik (1991) identified four dimensions related to the way that violence is portrayed on television and that may heighten the likelihood of the influence of television: efficacy, normativeness, pertinence, and susceptibility. For example: Violence is justified. The perpetrator is similar to the viewer. Violence is portrayed as real events, not events simulated for a television drama. Violent acts leave the viewer in a state of unresolved excitement.

Research suggests a positive correlation between television violence and aggressive behavior (see chapter 7, volume 2, of this book set). Eron and Huesmann (1986) reported that there is a sensitive period between 8 and 12 years of age during which children are particularly susceptible to the impact of violence portrayed in the media. In addition, boys are more likely than girls to identify with a violent character and to subsequently model aggressive behavior.

Introduction

With respect to the impact of real-life violence on adolescents, including rape, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, and bullying, several reports have documented the high cost of various forms of violence within three major perspectives: (1) psychological health, (2) physiological, and (3) education/work (e.g., Barron & Hebl, 2010; Contrada et al., 2000; Dansky & Kilpatrick, 1997; Katz, Joiner, & Kwon, 2002). Responses by adolescents to violence include headaches, sleep disturbances, disordered eating, gastrointestinal disorders, nausea, crying spells, scars, bruising, broken bones, absenteeism from school, decreased morale, decreased school satisfaction, performance decrements, damage to interpersonal relationships at school, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a consequence of violence. Symptoms of PTSD include anxiety, physiological arousal, irritability, avoidance/denial, intrusion, repetitive nightmares, impaired concentration and memory, and acting-out behaviors. Immediately after the violent episode, individuals experience a sense of disbelief, shock, and psychological and physical numbing. A few days after the incident, individuals experience three different types of consequences: 1. Reexperiencing consequences (e.g., dreaming, flashbacks). 2. Withdrawal consequences (e.g., social withdrawal, absenteeism). 3. Other consequences (e.g., irritability, sleep disturbances, anger, exaggerated startle responses) (Avina & O’Donohue, 2002; see also chapters 1 and 2, volume 2, of this book set).

In addition, adolescents think about violence to themselves through self-injury (e.g., cutting) as well as suicide (see chapter 3, volume 1, of this book set). Furthermore, adolescents who have not had anyone intervene on their behalf to stop the violence learn to keep silent about future abuse because they believe that no one will ever help them (Paludi, 2010).

Present Volumes Violence against adolescents has been recognized as a major public health and human rights issue that requires a coordinated response from parents, teachers, counselors, and providers (e.g., health care, mental health, rape crisis centers) in the teen’s community (chapter 7, volume 1, and chapters 5, 9, and 12, volume 2). I wanted to edit these two volumes to highlight the following for parents, educators, guidance counselors, and adolescents themselves: 1. Implications of adolescence as a life stage for individuals learning to be violent and to accept violence.

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2. Understanding the relationship among violence, powerlessness, and lack of access to resources with respect to adolescent victims of violence. 3. Types of violence common to adolescence (e.g., bullying, harassment, intimate partner violence, gang violence, rape). 4. Understanding the link between violence during adolescence and gender roles and gender-related life circumstances. 5. Strategies for prevention for parents, teachers, counselors, and case workers.

This two-volume set on the psychology of teen violence and victimization features scholarly research about individual, institutional, and societal influences on violence against adolescents and perpetrated by adolescents. Contributors discuss the impact of race on perceptions of teen sex offenders (chapter 4, volume 1); the role of adolescent victimization in women’s aggression in their relationships, violent behavior in girls, schoolyard violence, bullying, teen relationship violence, adolescent stalking, educating teens to discriminate abusive from nonabusive situations (chapter 5, volume 2); adolescents, firearms, and violent video games (chapter 3, volume 2); and teen violence prevention (chapter 13, volume 2). We take a multicultural approach to teen violence. In addition, I offer readers resources on teen violence, including organizations concerned with teen violence and victimization. My goal is that these chapters and resources stimulate additional research agendas on teen violence and victimization that make Tyler, Phoebe, Cory, Marco, Kristian, and other victims of violence central, not marginal and visible, not invisible to our research and advocacy. Marion Wright Edelman’s sentiment is expressed throughout these volumes: “If we don’t stand up for children, then we don’t stand for much.”

References American Association of University Women. (2001). Hostile hallways: The annual survey on sexual harassment in America’s schools. Washington, DC: Author. Anderson, C., & Bushman, B. (2002). The effects of media violence on society. Science, 295, 2377–2379. Anderson, C., Carnagey, N., & Eubanks, J. (2003). Exposure to violent media: The effects of songs with violent lyrics in aggressive thoughts and feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 960–971. Armstrong, E. (2001). Gangsta misogyny: A content analysis of the portrayals of violence against women in rap music, 1987–1993. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 8, 96–126.

Introduction

Avina, C., & O’Donohue, W. (2002). Sexual harassment and PTSD: Is sexual harassment diagnosable trauma? Journal of Traumatic Stress, 15, 69–75. Barron, L., & Hebl, M. (2010). Sexual orientation: A protected and unprotected class. In M. Paludi, C. Paludi, & E. DeSouza (Eds.), Praeger handbook on understanding and preventing workplace discrimination: Vol. 1. Legal, management and social science perspectives (pp. 251–273). Westport, CT: Praeger. Baxter, L., De Riemer, C., Landini, A., Leslie, L., & Singletary, M. (1985). A content analysis of music videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 29, 333–340. Beresin, E. (2010). The impact of media violence on children and adolescents: Opportunities for clinical interventions. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Retrieved on November 8, 2010, from http://www.aacap .org/cs/root/developmentor/the_impact_of_media_violence_on_children_and _adolescents_opportunities_for_clinical_interventions. Bretthauer, B., Zimmerman, T., & Banning, J. (2007). A feminist analysis of popular music. Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 18, 29–51. California Coalition Against Sexual Assault. (2002). Research on rape and violence. Retrieved on November 11, 2010, from http://www.calcasa.org/stat/CALCASA_ Stat_2008.pdf. Chisholm, J. (2010). Perils in cyberspace: Current trends in cyberbullying. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families: Vol. 1. Incidence and psychological dimensions (pp. 59–88). Westport, CT: Praeger. Comstock, G., & Paik, H. (1991). Television and the American child. San Diego, CA: Academic. Contrada, R., Ashmore, R., Gary, M., Coups, E., Egeth, J., Sewell, A., Ewell, K., Goyal, T., & Chasse, V. (2000). Ethnicity-related sources of stress and their effects on well-being. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 136–139. Council on Communications and Media. (2009). Impact of music, music lyrics, and music videos on children and youth. Pediatrics, 124, 1488–1494. Dansky, B., & Kilpatrick, D. (1997). Effects of sexual harassment. In W. O’Donohue (Ed.), Sexual harassment: Theory, research and practice. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. DeAngelis, T. (2001). Understanding and preventing hate crimes. Monitor on Psychology, 32, 1–7. DeSouza, E. (2004, July). Intercultural and intracultural comparisons of bullying and sexual harassment in secondary schools. Paper presented at the Association for Gender Equity Leadership in Education, Washington, DC. Doyle, J., & Paludi, M. (1998). Sex and gender: The human experience. New York: McGraw-Hill. Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Eron, L. D., & Huesmann, L. R. (1986). The role of television in the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior. In D. Olweus, J. Block, & M. RadkeYarrow (Eds.), The development of antisocial and prosocial behavior: Research, theories and issues (pp. 285–314). New York: Academic Press.

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Feinberg, M. (2000). Racism: Why we dislike, stereotype and hate other groups and what to do about it. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Fiske, S. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist, 48, 621–628. Fiske, S., & Lee, T. (2008). Stereotypes and prejudice create workplace discrimination. In A. Brief (Ed.), Diversity at work. New York: Cambridge University Press. Flores, R. (2006). Adolescent girls speak about violence in their community. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 47–55). Boston: Blackwell. Gerber, G., & Cherneski, L. (2006). Sexual aggression toward women: Reducing the prevalence. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 35–46). Boston: Blackwell. Giladi, A. (2005, August). Sexual harassment or play? Perceptions and observations of young children’s experiences in kindergarten and early schooling in Israel. Paper presented at the Conference of the International Coalition Against Sexual Harassment, Philadelphia, PA. Greeson, L. E., & Williams, R. A. (1986, December). Social implications of music videos for youth: An analysis of the content and effects of MTV. Youth and Society, 18(2), 177–189. Hartup, W., & Stevens, N. (1999). Friendships and adaptation across the life span: Current directions. Psychological Science, 8, 76–79. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2007). Parents, children and media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Herek, G., & Garnets, L. (2007). Sexual orientation and mental health. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 3, 53–75. Jackson, S., Cram, F., & Seymour, F. (2000). Violence and sexual coercion in high school students’ dating relationships. Journal of Family Violence, 1, 23–36. Johnson, J., Adams, M., Ashburn, L., & Reed, W. (1995). Differential gender effects of exposure to rap music on African American adolescents’ acceptance of teen dating violence. Sex Roles, 33, 597–605. Judd, C., Park, B., Yzerbyt, V., Gordijn, E., & Muller, D. (2005). Attributions of intergroup bias and outgroup homogeneity to ingroup and outgroup others. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 677–704. Kaestle, C. E., Halpern, C. T., & Brown, J. (2007). Music videos, pro-wrestling, and acceptance of date rape among middle school males and females: An exploratory analysis. Journal of Adolescent Health, 40, 185–187. Katz, J., Joiner, T., & Kwon, P. (2002). Membership on a devalued social group and emotional well-being: Developing a model of personal self-esteem, collective self-esteem and group socialization. Sex Roles, 47, 419–431. Kaufman, R. (2004). Filling their minds with death: TV violence and children. Retrieved on November 8, 2010, from http://www.turnoffyourtv.com /healtheducation/violencechildren/violencechildren.html. Kershner, R. (1996). Adolescent attitudes about rape. Adolescence, 31, 29–33.

Introduction

Killen, M., Sinno, S., & Margie, N. (2007). Children’s experiences and judgments about group exclusion and inclusion. In R. Kail (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (pp. 173–218). New York: Elsevier. Kite, M., Deaux, K., & Haines, E. (2008). Gender stereotypes. In F. Denmark & M. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (2nd ed., pp. 205–236). Westport, CT: Praeger. Klein, J., Brown, J., Childres, K., Oliveri, J., Porter, C., & Dykers, C. (1993). Adolescents’ risky behavior and mass media use. Pediatrics, 92, 24–31. Kroger, J. (2000). Identity development: Adolescence through adulthood. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. LaTouche, K. (2007). Gender representation in BET’s 106 & Park and Sucker Free on MTV: A content analysis. Thesis submitted to the College of Communication for the degree of master of science. Florida State University. Lavoie, F., Hebert, M., Tremblay, R., Vitaro, L., & McDuff, D. (2002). History of family dysfunction and perpetration of dating violence by adolescent boys: A longitudinal study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 30, 375–383. Lundberg-Love, P., & Marmion, S. (2006). Intimate partner violence against women: When spouses, partners or lovers attack. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lundberg-Love, P., & Wilkerson, D. (2006). Battered women. In P. LundbergLove & S. Marmion (Eds.), Intimate violence against women (pp. 31–45). Westport, CT: Praeger. Malamuth, N., & Check, J. (1981). The effects of mass media exposure on acceptance of violence against women: A field experiment. Journal of Research in Personality, 15, 436–446. Marciniak, L. (1998). Adolescent attitudes toward victim precipitation of rape. Violence and Victims, 13, 287–300. Martin, L. (2010). Bullying and peer sexual harassment: A prevention guide for students, parents and teachers. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families: Vol. 1. Incidence and psychological dimensions (pp. 89–109). Westport, CT: Praeger. Maxwell, C., Robinson, A., & Post, L. (2003). The nature and predictors of sexual victimization and offending among adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 32, 465–477. McConnell, S., & Swain, J. (2000, August). Victim-offender mediation with adolescents who commit hate crimes. Paper presented at the 108th Annual Conference of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC. McHugh, M., Livingston, N., & Frieze, I. (2008). Intimate partner violence: Perspectives on research and intervention. In F. L. Denmark & M. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (pp. 555–589). Westport, CT: Praeger. Morrison, M., Morrison, T., Pope, G., & Zumbo, B. (1999). An investigation of measures of modern and old-fashioned sexism. Social Indicators Research, 48, 39–50. Mulvey, K., Hitti, A. & Killen, M. (2010). The development of stereotyping and exclusion. Cognitive Science, 1, 597–606.

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National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. (2009). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer domestic violence in the United States in 2008. Retrieved on November 9, 2011, from http://www.avp.org/documents/2008NCAVPLG BTQDVReportFINAL.pdf. Newman, B., & Newman, P. (2008). Development through life: A psychosocial approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Otis, M., & Loeffler, D. (2006). Changing youths’ attitudes toward difference: A community-based model that works. Social Work with Groups, 28, 41–64. Paludi, M. (2010, October). The continuum of campus violence: Applying “Broken Windows Theory” to prevent and deal with campus violence. U.S. Department of Education National Meeting on Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention in Higher Education, National Harbor, MD. Paludi, M., Ellens, H., & Paludi, C. (2010). Religious discrimination. In M. Paludi, C. Paludi, & E. DeSouza (Eds.), Praeger handbook on understanding and preventing workplace discrimination: Vol. 1. Legal, management and social science perspectives (pp. 157–182). Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., Martin, J., & Paludi, C. (2007). Sexual harassment: The hidden gender equity problem. In S. Klein (Ed.), Handbook for achieving gender equity through education (2nd ed., pp. 215–229). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Parents Television Council. (2003). TV bloodbath: Violence on prime time broadcast TV. Retrieved on November 11, 2010, from http://www.parentstv.org/ptc /publications/reports/stateindustryviolence/main.asp. Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York: Ballantine. Reskin, B. (2000). The proximate causes of employment discrimination. Contemporary Sociology, 29, 319–328. Russo, N. F., & Pirlott, A. (2006). Gender-based violence: Concepts, methods, and findings. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 178–205). Boston: Blackwell. Schilt, K., & Westbrook, L. (2009). Doing gender, doing heteronormativity: Gender normals, transgender people, and the social maintenance of heterosexuality. Gender and Society 23(4), 440–464. Sherman, B., & Dominick, J. (1986). Violence and sex in music videos: TV and rock ’n’ roll. Journal of Communication, 36, 79–93. Silverman, J. G., Raj, A., Mucci, L. A., & Hathaway, J. E. (2001). Dating violence against adolescent girls and associated substance use, unhealthy weight control, sexual risk behavior, pregnancy, and suicidality. Journal of the American Medical Association, 286, 372–379. St. Lawrence, J. S., & Joyner, D. J. (1991). The effects of sexually violent rock music on males’ acceptance of violence against women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 15, 49–63. Steinberg, A., Brooks, J., & Remtulla, T. (2003). Youth hate crimes: Identification, prevention and intervention. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 878–989.

Introduction

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2010). Factors affecting violent behavior in teen girls. Retrieved on November 14, 2010, from http://www.teendrugabuse.org/mental-health/factors-affection-violentbehavior-in-teen-girls/. Tan, J., & Gregor, K. (2006). Violence against pregnant women in northwestern Ontario. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 320–338). Boston: Blackwell. Ulloa, E., Castaneda, D., & Hokoda, A. (2010). Teen relationship violence. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families: Vol. 1. Incidence and psychological dimensions (pp. 111–135). Westport, CT: Praeger. United Nations. (1995). Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 4–5 September, 1995. New York: United Nations. van den Bulck, J., & Beullens, K. (2005). Television and music video exposure and adolescent alcohol use while going out. Alcohol, 40, 249–253. Ward, R. (2002). Fan violence: Social problem or moral panic? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7, 453–475. Way, N., & Pahl, K. (1999). Friendship patterns among urban adolescent boys: A qualitative account. In M. Kopala & L. Suziki (Eds.), Using qualitative methods in psychology (pp. 145–161). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wigboldus, D., Dijksterhuis, A., & vanKnippenberg, A. (2003). When stereotypes get in the way: Stereotypes obstruct stereotype-inconsistent trait inferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 470–484.

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PART I

Developmental and Cultural Issues in Teen V↜iolence

CHAPTER ONE

Microaggressions: A Root of Bullying, V↜iolence, and V↜ictimization toward Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youths Kevin L. Nadal and Katie E. Griffin

Introduction In the fall of 2010, six young people in various regions of the United States committed suicide. While teen suicide in itself may not be a new phenomenon, these six individuals gained national attention because they were all reported to have committed suicide as a result of teen bullying. What was even more unique about these young people’s stories was that they were all reported to have been bullied because they were (or were perceived to be) gay. One of these young people was Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old college freshman at Rutgers University, whose classmates posted an Internet video of him having sex with another man. Clementi, who was allegedly a closeted gay man, was reportedly mortified and took his own life shortly after this cyberbullying had occurred. Immediately following this event, a nationwide campaign garnered attention when celebrities and laypeople alike began to create and post videos on the Internet with a message that “It Gets Better.” These videos urged young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people to value their lives and not to view suicide as a viable option.

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Following the course of these events, psychologists, educators, and other practitioners in the media began to hypothesize reasons why bullying exists and why bullying leads to potential suicide. Discussions ensued regarding the motivations of bullies and where bullies learn that such behavior is acceptable and tolerable. Others began to explore the psychological hardships of the victims of bullying, as well as the ways that educational systems were not protecting these LGBT children or creating a safe space for them. Regardless of the motivation of these discussions, all of these experts could agree that bullying needed to stop (or at least be minimized) in order to promote optimal physical safety and positive psychological health for our nation’s youths. However, perhaps all of these questions would need to be examined further, in order to work toward a solution. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how microaggressions, or subtle forms of discrimination, may potentially play a huge role in the bullying that occurs toward children and adolescents. Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities (whether intentional or unintentional) that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward members of oppressed groups” (Nadal, 2008, p. 23). Originally modeled from research on racial microaggressions (see Sue, Bucerri, Lin, Nadal, & Torino, 2007), this type of subtle discrimination is argued to exist toward all marginalized groups, including people of color, women, LGBT persons, persons with disabilities, and religious minorities (Nadal, 2008). The cumulative nature of microaggressions is suggested to detrimentally impact mental health, particularly depression, anxiety, mood, and self-esteem. The current chapter will examine previous literature on microaggressions, in an attempt to understand the influences of such discrimination on the lives of bullies, victims, and all of society. First, we will examine how the microaggressions that bullies witness in their families, communities, and media may lead to the acceptance of hate toward various groups— particularly people who identify as (or are perceived to be) LGBT. Second, we will explore how microaggressions impact the lives of victims, and how victims learn to internalize or oppress discrimination and hate. Finally, we will examine the impacts that microaggressions have on more systemic and environmental levels, advocating for the changes that need to occur in media, government, and educational systems. This first section will define microaggressions—understanding the background behind the concept, the current research involving microaggressions, and the impacts that microaggressions may have on mental health.

Microaggressions

Review of Microaggression Literature The existence of discrimination and prejudice has been recorded throughout all of history. Thinking back to as recently as the 20th century, one can easily recall events like the Holocaust or the racial discrimination that led to the civil rights movement. The violence and cruelty that accompanied these historical events held their basis in racial and religious hatred, in conjunction with strongly held beliefs of inequality and inferiority. The teachings of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were more commonplace in families, communities, and even some school systems. Thus, people in American society were much more vocal and straightforward with their biases, making racism much easier to identify. However, in present-day society, it may be less acceptable and “politically incorrect” to maintain the same sentiments as these aforementioned extremist groups. Nowadays, people tend to hide their biases and prejudices, while many try to be “color-blind” and not see or acknowledge others’ races or ethnicities. As a result, explicit discrimination (such as race-based hate crimes and physical assaults) may have decreased in many parts of the United States, leading many people to believe discrimination to be extinct and a thing of the past. Despite this, blatant discrimination does still occur, albeit arguably at a lower frequency and magnitude. But many authors are now suggesting that racism manifests in a new form of subtle or covert discrimination, otherwise known as microaggressions (see Sue, 2010). In 1970, Pierce first used the term “racial microaggressions” and later described it as “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’↜” (Pierce, Carew, Pierce-Gonzalez, & Willis, 1978, p. 66). Sue, Capodilupo, and colleagues (2007) refined the term “microaggressions” to mean “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to people of color because they belong to a racial minority group” (Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007, p. 273). Sue and colleagues (2007) proposed a taxonomy of racial microaggressions that included nine themes: (1) Alien in own land, (2) Ascription of intelligence, (3) Color blindness, (4) Criminality/assumption of criminal status, (5) Denial of individual racism, (6) Myth of meritocracy, (7) Pathologizing cultural values/ communication styles, (8) Second-class citizen, and (9) Environmental microaggressions. An individual is a victim of a microaggression when asked where he or she is from (alien in own land) or when followed around in a store by an owner or a clerk (criminality/assumption of criminal status). In the first example, the individual is being sent the message that he or she

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is not American and doesn’t belong, while the individual in the second example is being sent the message that she or he must be a criminal (Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007). In both instances the act may be unconscious or unintentional to the enactor but sends a hurtful message to the victim that she or he is different, unwelcome, or inferior in some way. In this racial microaggression taxonomy, it was theorized that microaggressions can be categorized in three major ways: microassaults (direct, intentional statements or behaviors targeting people of color), microinsults (indirect, unintentional statements or behaviors that offend, upset, or hurt persons of color), and microinvalidations (indirect, unintentional statements or behaviors that disregard, discount, or ignore a person of color’s experiences). A microassault would be most similar to “old-fashioned racism” and would reflect the types of discrimination that are often conscious and intentional. For example, someone making a racist joke or racial slur could be viewed as performing a conscious action that conveys his or her true intention and bias. Nadal, Rivera, & Corpus (2010) discussed how microassaults apply to microaggressions toward LGBT people (e.g., someone using homophobic insults or who blatantly conveys disgust or disapproval with nonheterosexual people). Microinsults are often unintentional, and the enactors are often unaware that their behaviors or statements may be hurtful to the people of color who experience them. For example, the aforementioned store owner who follows a person of color around in a store may not recognize that she or he only follows people of color. Moreover, if confronted, this individual may even become defensive and explain that he is simply trying to protect the store, or that he follows anyone who looks suspicious, regardless of race. However, for a person of color who experiences such discrimination regularly, it may be daunting and hurtful to feel these communications of fear or distrust. For LGBT people, microinsults can include everything from a person glaring at same-sex couples in curiosity or disgust to a person casually saying that something is “gay” as a synonym for “bad,” “weird,” or “awful” (Nadal, Rivera, & Corpus, 2010). Microinvalidations are usually statements that are demeaning; again, usually the enactor does not recognize the impact that such statements may have on people of marginalized groups. For example, when a White person tells a person of color that she or he is being paranoid and that racism doesn’t exist anymore, the person of color’s racial reality is challenged and dismissed. Similarly, when someone tells LGBT people to “get over it” or to “not be so sensitive,” a message is communicated that there is something wrong with them, instead of acknowledging the heterosexism or discrimination that exists.

Microaggressions

The taxonomy on racial microaggressions has been supported and extended by research on the experiences of Black/African Americans (Sue et al., 2008; Sue, Capodilupo, & Holder, 2008), Asian Americans (Sue, Bucceri, Lin, Nadal, & Torino, 2007), and Latino/a Americans (Rivera, Forquer, & Rangel, 2010). Both qualitative and quantitative studies have supported that experiencing microaggressions on a daily, consistent basis may have an accumulating affect on those who are victims of such discrimination. Furthermore, literature has purported that microaggressions can impact many other marginalized groups, including women (Nadal, 2010), religious minorities (Nadal, Issa, Griffin, Hamit, & Lyons, 2010), multiracial individuals, and LGBT people (Nadal, Rivera, & Corpus, 2010). There has been an increase in the types of microaggressions that are experienced by LGBT individuals. Sexual orientation microaggressions can be defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities (whether intentional or unintentional) that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative heterosexist and homophobic slights and insults toward gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals, while transgender microaggressions are the verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities that target transgender persons” (Nadal, Rivera, & Corpus, 2010, p. 218). Nadal, Rivera, and Corpus (2010) proposed a taxonomy for sexual orientation microaggressions based on relevant literature that included nine themes: (1) Use of heterosexist terminology, (2) Endorsement of heteronormative culture/behaviors, (3) Assumption of universal LGBT experiences, (4) Exoticization, (5) Discomfort/disapproval of LGBT experiences, (6) Denial of societal heterosexism/transphobia, (7) Assumption of sexual pathology/abnormality, (8) Denial of individual heterosexism/transphobia, and (9) Environmental microaggressions. LGBT individuals experience a sexual orientation microaggression when someone asks them to stop acting so gay (endorsement of heteronormative culture/behaviors) or when asked if they have HIV/AIDS (assumption of sexual pathology/abnormality) (Nadal, Rivera, and Corpus, 2010). A qualitative study regarding LGBT experiences with sexual orientation discrimination supported this taxonomy, revealing the same first five themes, grouping themes 6 and 8 together to form “Denial of the reality of heterosexism,” and adding an additional theme of “Assaults and threatening behaviors” (Nadal et al., under review). (There were not enough examples given to support the environmental microaggressions theme.) Just as research has revealed that racial microaggressions (Sue, Bucerri, et al., 2007; Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007; Sue, Nadal, et al., 2008) and

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gender microaggressions have an impact on the mental health of the victims of such recurring discrimination, research focusing on the experiences of LGBT individuals show similar results. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals have shared the effect that their experiences of victimization have had on their daily functioning and their emotional and physical health (Nadal, Issa, et al., under review; Nadal, Wong, et al., under review; Nadal, Skolnik, & Wong, under review). Similarly, the types of microaggressions that are related to teen bullying can fit into proposed categories of microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations. For example, the act of bullying itself (e.g., teasing, threatening, etc.) can be viewed as a microassault, in that the perpetrators are very aware of their actions and conscious of their biases and hatred. But, perhaps because they aren’t physically assaulting the person, these individuals may believe their actions to be harmless or innocuous. The types of homophobic language that are used “jokingly” may be viewed as microinsults; these include words like “faggot” or “dyke,” or phrases like “That’s so gay” or “Stop being a sissy.” When people use such words (either toward others or casually in conversation), a communication of intolerance or disapproval toward LGBT people can create a hostile environment for young people who identify as LGBT or who are questioning their sexual or gender identities. Finally, when young victims of bullying are told to “ignore” the problem or that they are “making a big deal” of the situation, their experiences are invalidated and they may feel dismissed. Such experiences are not only psychologically damaging to these young people but may send implicit messages that the bullying is tolerated and that bullying does not result in punishment. Nadal, Skolnik, and Wong (under review) found that transgender participants reported feeling a variety of emotional reactions in response to victimization, including anger, frustration, and disappointment. Additionally, these participants reported that such experiences have negatively impacted their interpersonal relationships with their family, friends, and intimate partners and deemed these experiences as tiresome and wearing (Nadal, Skolnik, & Wong, under review). Coping mechanisms have also been found in the research on LGBT individuals, in that many LGBT people utilize various behavioral, emotional, and cognitive reactions to help them deal with discrimination (Nadal, Wong et al., under review). One type of behavioral response may be passive coping (e.g., the individual walks away from the perpetrator of the microaggression). A type of emotional response may be anger or frustration. Finally, examples of cognitive responses may include acceptance

Microaggressions

and conformity, which may be exemplified by an LGBT individual who may act more “straight” in a job interview so as to up his or her chances of being hired (Nadal, Wong, et al., under review). Victims of sexual orientation microaggressions, therefore, have necessarily found ways to cope with such experiences but still report feeling taxed and exhausted by these happenings and by their attempts to deal with them (Nadal, Wong, et al., under review).

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Teens’ Experiences with Microaggressions Now that we have examined the history of microaggressions and the various types of microaggressions that may manifest toward LGBT people, this next section will focus specifically on the microaggressions that are experienced by LGBT teens. As aforementioned, teen bullying may be a type of microaggression in itself, while the verbal and nonverbal microaggressions that create or maintain an unsafe environment may permit the bullying to continue. Thus, it is important to examine the types of bullying that may be considered microaggressive in nature, the various environments where LGBT teens may experience such bullying and other types of microaggressions, and the unintentional and unconscious behaviors that promote dangerous environments, thus allowing microaggressions to perpetuate and thrive. While previous research on sexual orientation microaggressions has recruited adult participants to share their experiences, many of the examples given by these adults occurred when they were adolescents (Nadal, Issa, et al., under review). Because teenagers tend not to have reached their highest levels of emotional, psychological, and cognitive development, they can be particularly susceptible to the perpetration of microaggressions by their peers. Moreover, because adolescence is a time in which individuals may feel especially sensitive, the experience of microaggressions may be damaging to their self-esteem and mental health. Furthermore, it is often during adolescence that LGBT individuals are in various stages of their sexual identity development in that they may be questioning, denying, hiding, or coming to terms with their sexual orientation, making this an often fragile period of their lives. Research has found that sexual minorities are more likely to report physical and sexual abuse than their heterosexual counterparts (Saewyc et al., 2006). Additionally, sexual minorities report more difficulties with their peers and families as well as increased levels of psychological distress (Ueno, 2005). Some of the protective factors that aid in combating against the effects of

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such discrimination are social connectedness and family connectedness; however, sexual minorities, and bisexual individuals specifically, report significantly less protective factors than heterosexual individuals (Saewyc et al., 2009). Adolescents, therefore, may be targets of all kinds of sexual orientation–based discrimination and microaggressions; these may occur at school, in their peer groups, and even in their family.

Microaggressions within Schools/Educational Systems Teens spend about half their day in school, where they are immersed in a social as well as an educational atmosphere. As a result, adolescents may become victims of bullying or microaggressions in the hall between classes, in the lunchroom, and even in the classroom itself. While little research has been done on sexual orientation microaggressions experienced through classroom interactions, one study looked at the opinions of students regarding sexual orientation and the rights and safety of LGBT individuals (Horn, Szalacha, & Drill, 2008). These authors found that students could separate their own beliefs about homosexuality and their opinions regarding the rights of LGBT individuals. While these participants reported that LGBT individuals have a right to feel safe in school, students that endorsed conventional reasoning, or reasoning based on social norms, in addition to homosexuality as personal choice, were more likely to judge excluding and teasing others as acceptable behavior (Horn, Szalacha, & Drill, 2008). Thus, although students may report that everyone has the right to be protected and feel safe at school, they may still behave in such a way that has the opposite effect. Another way in which LGBT teens may experience microaggressions at school is in the classroom as a result of student and teacher interactions. In a study on racial microaggressions, researchers found that such instances in the classroom can lead to a resultant dialogue on race (Sue, Lin, Torino, Capodilupo, & Rivera, 2009). While a discussion on race stemming from a racial microaggression has the potential to be constructive and have a positive impact on the whole class, the discussion, if handled poorly by the teacher, also has the potential of having detrimental consequences (Sue, Lin, et al., 2009). As research has shown that such an occurrence can happen in response to racial microaggressions, one would assume that the same could happen due to the commitment of a sexual orientation microaggression in the same setting. Therefore, LGBT teens may have these experiences in the school setting, which may lead to events that further exacerbate the issue.

Microaggressions

Microaggressions from Peers Another source of sexual orientation microaggressions for adolescents is their peers. Sexual minorities have reported more sexual harassment and bullying from their peers than have their heterosexual counterparts (Williams, Connolly, Pepler, & Craig, 2005). While both LGBT and heterosexual individuals experience dating violence, bisexual males are more likely to report all types of abuse more than heterosexual males, and bisexual females report more sexual abuse than heterosexual females (Freedner, Freed, Yang, & Austin, 2002). Furthermore, Freedner and colleagues (2002) found that lesbians reported feeling more scared about their own safety than did heterosexual females, and bisexuals experience more threats of outing than do gay males and lesbians. A study examining the basis for peer acceptance found that among 10th and 12th graders not only was sexual orientation taken into account, but so was gender conformity (Horn, 2007). This finding suggests that if sexual-minority teens do not conform to gender norms, they may be more susceptible to bullying, microaggressions, or other victimization from their peers. Teens may have peer-related protective factors that help them to deal and cope with sexual orientation microaggressions; however, LGBT teens may lack the necessary protective factors to shield themselves from the effects of such discrimination. Williams and colleagues (2005) found that the relationship between social support and externalizing behaviors was mediated by peer victimization and that the relationship between sexual orientation and psychosocial symptoms was mediated by both peer victimization and social support. Furthermore, the results of the study revealed that sexual-minority adolescents reported less companionship with their best friends than did their heterosexual counterparts (Williams et al., 2005). Saewyc and colleagues (2009) reported that bisexual adolescents reported lower levels of school connectedness than heterosexual adolescents. Ueno (2005) suggests that bonding with other teens that have common social backgrounds is a protective factor for adolescents; however, while heterosexuals often form these bonds, this is less likely to happen for LGBT individuals. When these bonds do form, LGBT individuals report lower psychological distress than those without this protective factor (Ueno, 2005). Therefore, LGBT teens are likely to experience sexual orientation microaggressions from other peers and may lack a social support peer group to assist them in countering the negative effects of these events.

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Microaggressions within the Family Just as peer groups can serve as both a protective factor against and a source of sexual orientation microaggressions, so too can one’s family. With family support, an LGBT teen may have a better coming out experience and may be better able to cope with other sources of such discrimination. Unfortunately, it is often the case that coming out to one’s parents is a very stressful experience and leads to altered parent-child relationships (Saltzburg, 2004). Saewyc and colleagues (2009) found that bisexual individuals reported lower levels of family connectedness than their heterosexual counterparts, thereby reducing the existence of this protective factor. Additionally, Williams and colleagues (2005) found that sexual minorities reported less closeness with their mothers than did their heterosexual peers. In Saltzburg’s (2004) study looking at the experience of parents after their child has come out to them, parents reported feeling various emotions, including disappointment, confusion, and fear of estrangement. Many of the parents in the study reported feeling as though they had lost their child and that all their hopes for what their child’s life was to be were crushed (Saltzburg, 2004). Throughout this process, a child may lose connectedness with the parent, as both may feel that they are so different from each other as to not be able to relate to one another (Saltzburg, 2004). When this is the case or, worse, if the parent disowns the child, the LGBT teen loses a major protective factor and becomes more susceptible to the negative impact of discrimination. In terms of microaggressions specifically, some studies found that unlike racial microaggressions, LGBT individuals often experience subtle discrimination within their own families (Nadal, Issa, et al., under review; Nadal, Skolnik, & Wong, under review). While the experience of outward rejection by one’s family (particularly one’s parents) can be distressing, so too can implicitly disapproving behaviors and statements. For example, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are often told “not to act so gay” or to “tone it down,” and parents of transgender people may have difficulty referring to their children by their preferred gender names or pronouns. Thus, even if family members may believe that they are accepting, their subtle behaviors may indicate unconscious desires for their children to be heterosexual. And because families may not be aware of their microaggressive statements or behaviors, they may not recognize the lack of support that they are conveying to their children.

Microaggressions Based on Intersectional Identities When LGBT teens hold multiple identities, the experiences of microaggressions, bullying, and other forms of discrimination may be even more complex, damaging, or both. When LGBT teens of color (e.g., African

Microaggressions

Americans, Latina/os, Asian Americans, etc.) are the victims of bullying or hate crimes, one may wonder if the experience is due to their sexual orientations (or perceived sexual orientations), because of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, or both. In 2003, Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old African American woman, was murdered as a result of a hate crime in New Jersey (Smith, 2004). Some of her friends said that she identified as a lesbian, while others suggested that she may have identified as a transgender man. Regardless of her identity, the lack of media attention that was paid to Sakia’s death demonstrates how the media often pay little attention to hate crimes that target LGBT people of color. Just a few years prior, the murder of Matthew Shepard, a young White male in Wyoming, became a national topic of interest that eventually led to greater awareness about hate crimes toward LGBT people. However, when a similar crime occurs toward an LGBT person of color, it did not (and still may not) have as much of an impact as a crime that targets a gay White man. Similar experiences occur with LGBT people of color who may not necessarily be victims of overt racism, heterosexism, or hate crimes. Tyra Hunter, an African American transgender woman, died after she was struck by a car in Washington, D.C. When paramedics arrived on the scene, she was found to be seriously injured. While onlookers pleaded for them to help her, the paramedics who responded to the call stood back and ridiculed her. Some argue that it was because of her transgender identity, her gender presentation, her race, or some combination of all of these things. Although they eventually took her to the hospital, the delay in assistance eventually resulted in her death. Her injuries were serious, but they were not life threatening; therefore, her death was preventable. A jury later awarded her family 2.9 million dollars in an action against the District of Columbia Fire Department and the Dictrict of Columbia General Hospital for withholding treatment and for medical malpractice. Again, perhaps these paramedics were not the assailants of the hate crimes themselves. But because of their prejudices and discriminatory behaviors, they eventually caused the untimely death of a transgender woman who could have survived. It is unclear whether such an event was due to her race, gender identity, or both, but it is clear that discrimination (even such experiences that appear to be innocuous) can potentially result in detrimental or mortal consequences.

The Impacts of Microaggressions on LGBT Adolescents’ Mental Health Throughout this chapter so far, we have discussed some of the negative impacts that bullying, microaggressions, and other forms of discrimination may have on the lives of LGBT youths. Perhaps the most important reason for examining these experiences is that many studies have reported

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the numerous disparaging mental health experiences of LGBT youths, particularly in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts. Studies have revealed that LGBT youths tended to be much more depressed than their heterosexual counterparts, and they were more likely to report suicidal ideation and self-harm (Almeida, Johnson, Corliss, Molnar, & Azrael, 2009). Another study found that, in a sample with both urban and rural LGBT youths, 42% of the urban sample and 32% of the rural sample had attempted suicide at least once (Waldo, Hesson-McInnis, & D’Augelli, 1998). Literature has pointed out that LGBT individuals may be susceptible to developing social anxiety (Safren & Pantalone, 2005), and that LGBT individuals are more likely to develop substance abuse problems in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts (Marshal et al., 2008). Finally, one report revealed that LGBT persons are at higher risk of suffering from mental health problems (e.g., depression and substance abuse disorders) and from physical health problems like high blood pressure (Cochran, 2001; Meyer, 2003). A substantial amount of research has reported that overt and covert discrimination has a significant impact on the mental health of LGBT individuals (Burn, Kadlec, & Rexer, 2005; Herek, 2000, 2007; Hill & Willoughby, 2005; Meyer, 1995, 2003; Walls, 2008). One study reported that LGBT youths who were victimized were more likely to hold suicidal thoughts, particularly if they were questioning or unsure of their sexual identities (Poteat, Aragon, Espelage, & Koenig, 2009). Some authors have cited that the harassment of gays during adolescence can be linked to the exceptionally high rate of suicide among LGBT youths (D’Augelli, 1992). Another study found that hate crimes toward LGBT individuals may result in more severe psychological consequences, such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health disparities in victims (Herek & Capitanio, 1999). Finally, studies have reported that experiences of discrimination and stigmatization may lead to lower self-esteem, fears of rejection, and/ or consistent hiding or concealing of identities (Burn et al., 2005; Rostosky, Riggle, Gray, & Hatton, 2007). Given all of these, it is important to recognize that all forms of discrimination, including bullying, hate crimes, assaults, and microaggressions, need to decrease in order to promote more favorable mental health outcomes for LGBT people, especially LGBT youths.

Recommendations for Addressing Teen Bullying and Microaggressions Throughout this chapter, we have attempted to highlight the multitude of reasons for why it is important to reduce or eliminate microaggressions, in order to provide safer and more accepting environments

Microaggressions

for LGBT youths. Perhaps in creating these safer spaces, bullying toward LGBT youths will decrease and an environment of acceptance can be created. Because of this, Nadal, Hamit, and Issa (2010) discuss various ways that microaggressions can be prevented and/or dealt with, in order to create more welcoming and accepting spaces. These include the following: 1. Talking about microaggressions openly when they occur (e.g., confronting others when one observes a microaggression, or if appropriate or safe, confronting others when one is the victim of a microaggression). 2. Having dialogues in families, workplace environments, and other systems about discrimination, prejudice, and diversity, as well as the ways that race and culture impact various aspects of our lives. 3. Being a support system or resource for victims of microaggressions, particularly by validating others’ experiences. 4. Educating others about the term “microaggressions” so that individuals are aware that discrimination may take more subtle forms, which may make some situations easier to identify or manage.

Because these suggestions focus on microaggressions in general, perhaps it may be beneficial to apply these suggestions and provide specific guidelines for addressing bullying toward LGBT youths. First, it is important for individuals to acknowledge this bullying when it occurs. It is very easy for individuals to turn a “blind eye” to bullying because of our fears of dealing with conflict or because of our rationalization that “kids will be kids.” However, when school systems, parents, and other individuals fail to address bullying, the levels of victimization may increase, which may lead to the multitude of psychosocial and mental health problems that have been discussed throughout the chapter. As a result, it is important for bullying to be tackled immediately, in order to convey the lack of tolerance toward victimizing others, as well as to prevent the victimization from becoming more painful or intolerable. Second, it is necessary for dialogues to occur in various groups and systems, in order to prevent bullying from occurring. Perhaps parents need to discuss the importance of equality and respect with their children from an early age. And perhaps teachers and school systems need to emphasize the same. Sometimes children and adolescents are unaware that their behavior may be considered bullying; other times these young people may continue with their behaviors because they are not corrected, are not punished, or both. Perhaps one helpful approach may be to talk about the influx of teen suicides as a result of bullying. Adolescents who bully others may not recognize that their actions may lead to others’ self-harm or even deaths. Perhaps in having these conversations, some adolescents may not want to

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live the rest of their lives knowing that they may have directly or indirectly caused someone to take his or her own life. Third, being a support and resource for all adolescents, particularly LGBT teens who may be struggling with their identities, may be another approach to preventing the detrimental psychological consequences of bullying. Perhaps these teens may develop low self-esteem or social anxiety because they have not learned to accept or love themselves. And it is conceivable that the lack of role models or support systems may be one influence for this outcome. One simple way for showing this support is by talking with youths about their problems, instead of assuming that everything is okay. For example, it is very common for parents to avoid conversations with their children about adolescence and sexuality because they may feel awkward or uncomfortable in discussing such sensitive topics. Moreover, because many parents have developed heteronormative perspectives, oftentimes they may assume that their child is heterosexual. Therefore, they may not consider that their daughter or son may be struggling with sexual identity issues or victimization in schools. Because of this, it is important for open dialogues and communications to ensue (with parents, older siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers, coaches, etc.), so that young people do not internalize their problems or turn to suicide as an option. It is also important for parents (and others) to be open to the possibility that their child may be LGBT. In doing so, they may be more alert to the potential symptoms of bullying and may be able to provide their children with the support and guidance they need. Finally, identifying and acknowledging the spectrum of microaggressions that may lead to bullying is also an important step to creating safer environments for LGBT youths and for all youths in general. Disallowing anyone from using heterosexist or homophobic remarks (whether intentional or unintentional) is one step toward promoting equality and preventing discrimination or hatred. Not assuming that everyone is heterosexual and celebrating the various experiences of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people can help to normalize those LGBT teens who may feel different, while teaching heterosexual teens about acceptance, open-mindedness, and social justice for all. Furthermore, there are a myriad of ways that systemic changes can help to decrease microaggressions, which in turn can assist in decreasing the amount of bullying toward LGBT teens. First, perhaps all professional and governing organizations must take steps similar to those of the American Psychological Association or American Medical Association, which advocate that competently working with LGBT clients is an

Microaggressions

ethical responsibility in being an effective practitioner. Perhaps one reason that many practitioners do not perceive LGBT issues as being salient or relevant is because of the lack of emphasis in their professional training. Thus, incorporating LGBT issues into cultural competence guidelines may result in more positive outcomes for LGBT students, clients, and patients. Changes in the media, government, and educational systems may also help to decrease microaggressions, which can then assist in decreasing LGBT teen bullying and victimization. An increase in positive LGBT images can potentially enhance the acceptance of LGBT people in American society. Perhaps hatred toward LGBT people exists because of their lack of visibility in the media, or because of the presence of disparaging and stereotypical images of them. Adolescents who are able to view LGBT people as normal and/or successful role models may help them to view LGBT individuals as human. Moreover, this greater exposure of LGBT individuals in the media should include all people in the LGBT community—ranging from LGBT people of color (e.g., African Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/os, Arab Americans, multiracial people, Pacific Islanders, etc.), as well as bisexual and transgender people. Because these groups are often invisible or marginalized in the LGBT community itself, LGBT youths who identify in these ways may feel a double burden, which may negatively influence their self-esteem and mental health. Thus, perhaps more media presence, visibility, and normalization can help to ameliorate some of these negative outcomes. A series of amendments in the government and legal systems may also lead to a reduction in LGBT microaggressions, bullying, and victimization. When governments uphold laws that ban or prevent same-sex marriage or disallow LGBT people from serving in the military, a societal message is communicated that LGBT people are second-class citizens in this country. When LGBT people are not allowed to visit their partners in hospitals or when LGBT people are denied health care, their basic rights as humans are compromised. On the contrary, when LGBT people are protected and considered in laws, a societal message is communicated that they are valued human beings in our society. Thus, it is important for government to pass laws that promote equal rights and opportunities for LGBT people. In doing so, messages of acceptance will be transmitted throughout all of society, consequently resulting in a decrease in microaggressions and perhaps a decrease in teen bullying. Finally, because bullying toward LGBT teens occurs most often in school systems, it is necessary for educational policies to promote the physical and psychological safety of LGBT youths. First, curriculum should include and implement diversity in all subjects—from the influences of LGBT people

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in world history to the inclusion of LGBT issues in psychology to the teaching of LGBT works in American literature. Second, harassment and bullying policies should be created and enforced, including special clauses that protect the rights of LGBT students. By developing an atmosphere that does not tolerate hateful behaviors, LGBT students will feel safer, and heterosexual students will learn about equality and social justice. Finally, promotion of egalitarianism and diversity should be incorporated into all aspects of student life—from the encouragements of gay-straight alliances to the hiring of LGBT teachers to the allowing of same-sex prom dates. If school systems, the government, families, and the media really do care about the lives of LGBT youths, some or all of these recommendations can be implemented in many simple ways. Perhaps if these LGBT-affirmative environments had existed in the past, the number of LGBT teen suicides would not have been as substantial as it is (and has been). If we want to see our children survive and live healthy lives, we cannot just tell them that “It gets better.” Rather, we have to show them that we are doing our parts to “Make it better” for them today.

References Almeida, J., Johnson, R. M., Corliss, H. L., Molnar, B. E., & Azrael, D. (2009). Emotional distress among LGBT youth: The influence of perceived discrimination based on sexual orientation. Journal of Youth Adolescence, 38, 1001–1014. Burn, S. M., Kadlec, K., & Rexer, R. (2005). Effects of subtle heterosexism on gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Journal of Homosexuality, 49, 23–38. Cochran, S. D. (2001). Emerging issues in research on lesbians’ and gay men’s mental health: Does sexual orientation really matter? American Psychologist, 56, 932–947. D’Augelli, A. R. (1992). Lesbian and gay male undergraduates’ experiences of harassment and fear on campus. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 7, 383–395. Freedner, N., Freed, L. H., Yang, Y. W., & Austin, B. (2002). Dating violence among gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents: Results from a community survey. Journal of Adolescent Health, 31, 469–474. Herek, G. M. (2000). The psychology of sexual prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 19–22. Herek, G. M. (2007). Confronting sexual stigma and prejudice: Theory and practice. Journal of Social Issues, 63, 905–925. Herek, G. M., & Capitanio, J. P. (1999). Sex Differences in how heterosexuals think about lesbians and gay men: Evidence from survey context effects. Journal of Sex Research, 36, 348–360. Hill, D. B., & Willoughby, B. L. B. (2005). The development and validation of the genderism and transphobia scale. Sex Roles, 53, 531–544. Horn, S. S. (2007). Adolescents’ acceptance of same-sex peers based on sexual orientation and gender expression. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36, 363–371.

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Horn, S. S., Szalacha, L. A., & Drill, K. (2008). Schooling, sexuality, and rights: An investigation of heterosexual students’ social cognition regarding sexual orientation and the rights of gay and lesbian peers in school. Journal of Social Issues, 64, 791–813. Marshal, M. P., Friedman, M. S., Stall, R., King, K. M., Miles, J., Gold, M. A., Bukstein, O. G., & Morse, J. Q. (2008). Sexual orientation and adolescent substance use: A meta-analysis and methodological review. Addiction, 103, 546–556. Meyer, I. H. (1995). Minority stress and mental health in gay men. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 36, 38–56. Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 674–697. Nadal, K. L. (2008). Preventing racial, ethnic, gender, sexual minority, disability, and religious microaggressions: Recommendations for promoting positive mental health. Prevention in Counseling Psychology: Theory, Research, Practice and Training, 2, 22–27. Nadal, K. L. (2010). Gender microaggressions and women: Implications for mental health. In M. A. Paludi (Ed.), Feminism and women’s rights worldwide: Vol. 1. Mental and physical health (pp. 155–175). Westport, CT: Praeger. Nadal, K. L., Hamit, S., & Issa, M. A. (2010). Overcoming gender and sexual orientation microaggressions. In M. A. Paludi & F. M. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families (pp. 21–43). Westport, CT: Praeger. Nadal, K. L., Issa, M. A., Griffin, K., Hamit, S., & Lyons, O. (2010). Religious microaggressions in the United States: Mental health implications for religious minority groups. In D. W. Sue (Ed.), Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact (pp. 287–310). New York: Wiley. Nadal, K. L., Issa, M. A., Leon, J., Meterko, V., Wideman, M., & Wong, Y. (under review). Sexual orientation microaggressions: Perspectives of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Nadal, K. L., Rivera, D. P., & Corpus, M. J. H. (2010). Sexual orientation and transgender microaggressions in everyday life: Experiences of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender individuals. In D. W. Sue (Ed.), Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact (pp. 217–240). New York: Wiley. Nadal, K. L., Skolnik, A., & Wong, Y. (under review). Interpersonal and systemic microaggressions: Psychological impacts on transgender individuals and communities. Nadal, K. L., Wong, Y., Issa, M. A., Meterko, V. M., Leon, J., & Wideman, M. (under review). Sexual orientation microaggressions: Processes and coping mechanisms for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. Pierce, C., Carew, J., Pierce-Gonzalez, D., & Willis, D. (1978). An experiment in racism: TV commercials. In C. Pierce (Ed.), Television and education (pp. 62–88). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

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Poteat, V. P., Aragon, S. R., Espelage, D. L., & Koenig, B. W. (2009). Psychosocial concerns of sexual minority youth: Complexity and caution in group differences. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 77, 196–201. Rivera, D. P., Forquer, E. E., & Rangel, R. (2010). Microaggressions and the life experience of Latina/o Americans. In D. W. Sue (Ed.), Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact (pp. 59–83). New York: Wiley. Rostosky, S. S., Riggle, E. D. B., Gray, B. E., & Hatton, R. L. (2007). Minority stress experiences in committed same-sex couple relationships. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 38, 392–400. Saewyc, E. M., Homma, Y., Skay, C. L., Bearinger, L. H., Resnick, M. D., & Reis, E. (2009). Protective factors in the lives of bisexual adolescents in North America. American Journal of Public Health, 99, 110–117. Saewyc, E. M., Skay, C. L., Pettingell, S. L., Reis, E. A., Bearinger, L., Resnick, M., Murphy, A., & Combs, L. (2006). Hazards of stigma: The sexual and physical abuse of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents in the U.S. and Canada. Child Welfare, 55, 195–213. Safren, S. A., & Pantalone, D. W. (2005). Social anxiety and barriers to resilience among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents. In A. M. Omoto & H. S. Kurtzman (Eds.), Sexual orientation and mental health: Examining identity and development in lesbian, gay, and bisexual people (pp. 55–71). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Saltzburg, S. (2004). Learning that an adolescent child is gay or lesbian: The parent experience. Social Work, 49, 109–118. Smith, S. D. (2004). Sexually underrepresented youth: Understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (glbt-q) youth. In J. L. Chin (Ed.), Psychology of prejudice and discrimination: Bias based on gender and sexual orientation (Vol. 3, pp. 151–199). Westport, CT: Praeger. Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. New York: Wiley. Sue, D. W., Bucerri, J. M., Lin, A. I., Nadal, K. L., & Torino, G. C. (2007). Racial microaggressions and the Asian American experience. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 13, 72–81. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., & Holder, A. M. B. (2008). Racial microaggressions in the life experience of Black Americans. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 39, 329–336. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., et al. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. The American Psychologist, 62, 271–286. Sue, D. W., Lin, A. I., Torino, G. C., Capodilupo, C. M., & Rivera, D. P. (2009). Racial microaggressions in the classroom. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 15, 183–190. Sue, D. W., Nadal, K. L., Capodilupo, C. M., Lin, A. I., Torino, G. C., & Rivera, D. P. (2008). Racial microaggressions against Black Americans: Implications for counseling. Journal of Counseling and Development, 86, 330–338.

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Ueno, K. (2005). Sexual orientation and psychological distress in adolescence: Examining interpersonal stressors and social support processes. Social Psychology Quarterly, 68(3), 258–277. Waldo, C. R., Hesson-McInnis, M. S., & D’Augelli, A. R. (1998). Antecedents and consequences of victimization of lesbian, gay, and bisexual young people: A structural model comparing rural university and urban samples. American Journal of Community Psychology, 26(2), 307–334. Walls, N. E. (2008). Toward a multidimensional understanding of heterosexism: The changing nature of prejudice. Journal of Homosexuality, 55, 20–70. Williams, T., Connolly, J., Pepler, D., & Craig, W. (2005). Peer victimization, social support, and psychosocial adjustment of sexual minority adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 24, 471–482.

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CHAPTER TWO

V↜iolence in Emerging Adulthood: A Developmental Perspective Robert F. Marcus and Eric G. Jamison II

Exploring the risk factors for serious violence across the years of early adulthood, which are some of the most dangerous years in the human lifespan, is a critical step toward understanding violence in early adulthood. In addition, exploring these risk factors, individually or �collectively, can aid in predicting violent behavior. Greater research attention has focused on the dramatic increases in violent crime during adolescence and to its steady decline during the rest of the lifespan, than to the greater lethality of violence from the late teens through mid-20s. Research has shown a decline in the prevalence of serious violence after age 18 in such longitudinal studies as the National Youth Survey and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Marcus, 2009). The reduction in prevalence rates for violence in emerging adulthood can be explained using three complementary theoretical perspectives: the theory of emerging adulthood, the theory arising from developmental criminology, and �evolutionary theory. Public attention has been focused more on the rapid increase in �serious violence during adolescence, but less so on the decline in violent behaviors among those in their 20s. Yet violence during the late teens to mid-20s remains a serious cause for public concern. Violence has consistently been the second-leading cause of death for those 15 through 24 years of age, and the dramatic increases for some seriously violent behaviors do not fade during mid- to late adolescence as quickly as they rise. For example,

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research compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that homicide fatalities for 19- to 25-year-olds for the year 2002 (i.e., 4,524) were 3.3 times greater than homicide Â�fatalities for 12- to 18-year-olds (i.e., 1,391); the deadliest of violent acts actually increase after the years of adolescence. Moreover, beyond the threat to life, violence for those in their 20s can have enormous consequences as career, intimate partner choices, and other important decisions with Â�lifelong Â�significance are made. Violence may have a serious impact on the entire course of adult development. The period between “emerging adulthood” (Arnett, 2000, 2004), roughly the late teens through mid-20s, and “young adulthood,” roughly ages 28 through 36, have been referred to as a major transition stage in which “there is the potential for extensive changes in nearly all aspects of life within a few short years . . . (and research) emphasis has increased around issues related to achieving and not achieving developmental tasks and the path to individual identity” (Schulenberg, Sameroff, & Cicchetti, 2004, p. 804). Longitudinal research, for example, has begun to show that positive work and romantic involvement between the ages of 21 and 23 decreased involvement in antisocial behavior in emerging adulthood for those most impaired by childhood-onset and persistent antisocial behavior (Roisman, Aguilar, & Egeland, 2004). In addition, competence in the completion of developmental tasks of work and romantic involvement in emerging adulthood can predict successful adjustment to young adulthood (Masten et al., 2004). The developmental progression and the context of violence in the late teens and early to mid-20 is the focus of this chapter.

Violence in the Late Teens to Mid-20s Research has generally found a decline in the prevalence of many serious, self-reported violent behaviors from late adolescence to the mid-20s, after which violence continues to decline as a cause of mortality and injury for the remainder of the lifespan. That is good news considering the lethality of violence at that stage. One of the first studies of developmental changes in self-reported violent behaviors from adolescence through the 20s, the well-known National Youth Survey (Elliott, Huizinga, & Morse, 1986), has offered valuable insight into the developmental course of violent behavior. The responses of a nationally representative cross section of adolescents, followed longitudinally for five years into their early 20s, relied on interviews of adolescents who were asked about their serious violent behaviors (such as aggravated assault, robbery, and gang fights) during the past year.

Violence in Emerging Adulthood

Those who had taken part in three or more of these behaviors were designated “serious violent offenders” (SVOs). Data for those between the ages of 12 and 21 showed that about 7% to 8% of males and 2% to 3% of females were SVOs during adolescence (about three times males versus females), but male SVOs were about 8 to 10 times as prevalent as females SVOs by ages 20 and 21. Age-related prevalence rates for males showed that the percentage of males in the SVO classification increased from 6.8% at age 12 to 7.8% at age 16, followed by a decline to 3.1% at age 21. Agerelated prevalence rates for females at age 12 were 2.9%, and that prevalence rate declined to .3% by age 21. The findings of decline in rates of serious violent offending from the teen years to the early 20s was bolstered by longitudinal analysis of hazard rates, the percentage of individuals who were first classified as an SVO at various ages. The greatest hazard rate was 3.7% at age 17, and the rate had dropped to .4% by age 21. Thus, by the early 20s, individuals were not embarking on new violent careers, and those who were violent in their early 20s were most likely those who had started on that path by their late teens and very early 20s. There is also good evidence from longitudinal research that most, but not all, individuals reduce their involvement in violence from late adolescence to their mid-20s, whereas some continue to perpetrate violent behavior. Studies tracking individual differences in violence from the late teens to the mid-20s have enabled greater understanding of the violent careers taken by individuals, and shown there to be many paths toward decline and one toward increase. Two studies of those trajectories will suffice, although the reader may wish to view the multiple paths found in a number of longitudinal studies (Piquero, 2004). First, a recent analysis of the National Youth Survey data (Nash & Kim, 2006) has found five distinct trajectories for those showing “any” violent behavior in adolescence and the mid-20s: (1) low/stable (67.6%); (2) adolescent onset (11.9%); (3) young adult onset (11.8%); (4) early onset/chronic (5.3%); and (5) early onset desister (3.4%). The four groups showing dramatic or moderate declines during mid-adolescence to age 24 were the early onset desisters, early onset/chronic, adolescent onset, and low/stable groups. The one group showing moderate increase in violent behavior from age 18 to 24 was the young adult onset (11.8%). Thus violent individuals cluster into heterogeneous subtypes, most of whom decline in their violent behavior, but some of whom remain violent into their mid-20s. Other studies have illuminated both the nature of the violence as well as the unique paths or trajectories taken by individuals who continue or stop their violence. One such study of the seriousness of violent behavior itself was the Pittsburgh Youth Study (Loeber, Lacourse, & Homish, 2005).

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The Pittsburgh study of violence and homicide among urban males was designed to assess both age-graded changes in violent behavior as well as different age trajectories for subgroups. Violent behavior (based on teacher, parent, and respondent reports) was classified as “0” for nonviolent; “1” as moderate in severity (e.g., gang fighting or carrying a weapon); or “2” as serious (e.g., attack to seriously hurt or kill someone). Results showed that violence seriousness for those who reported any violence (49% of the sample) declined between the ages of 20 and 24 to near zero. However, there were three subgroups showing different trajectories from mid-adolescence to the mid-20s. The first trajectory was named the “chronic group,” 4.7% of the total sample who increased in their level of violence between 14 and 20, and slowly declined to age 24 (to below their level at age 14). A€second, called the “late desister” group (22.4% of the sample), showed a steep decline in the seriousness of violence from age 14 to zero at age 24. A third, an “early desister” group (21.9% of the sample), whose initial level of violence seriousness was half of the chronic group, declined to near zero by age 24. The overall trend for violence seriousness was downward from mid-adolescence onward to age 24, as was shown by cross-sectional studies reviewed earlier, but examinations of trajectories showed both increases and decreases for different sets of individuals. Based on the foregoing discussion of cross-sectional and longitudinal data, inspection of developmental trends for both men and women are likely to show a downward trend from age 18 onward, and that the trend downward may depend on the nature of the violent behavior itself. For some violent acts, and for some violent individuals, there may be no decline in violence at all.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health One ongoing cross-sectional and longitudinal study of a large, �nationally representative sample of those ages 19 through 25 was Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The methodology for Wave III of the Add Health study may be found elsewhere (e.g., Marcus, 2009). Important features of that study were that data were collected using a confidential recording by the respondent into a laptop computer, attempts were made to interview those who had been incarcerated, and the sample was large enough to detect developmental changes in violent behaviors that were relatively rare. The six questions asked about violent behaviors, which were later �dichotomized to their presence or absence to denote their prevalence, can be found in Table 2.1.

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Table 2.1â•…Violence interview questions: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Wave III. 1 In the past 12 months, how often did you use or threaten to use a weapon to get something from someone? (0 5 never to 3 5 5 or more times) 2 In the past 12 months, how often did you take part in a physical fight where a group of your friends was against another group? (0 5 never to 3 5 5 or more times) 3 In the past 12 months, how often did you use a weapon in a fight? (0 5 never to 3 5 5 or more times) 4 In the past 12 months, how often did you hurt someone badly enough in a physical fight that he or she needed care from a doctor or nurse? (number of times) 5 6

Which of the following things happened in the past 12 months? You pulled a knife or gun on someone? (0 5 not marked to 1 5 marked) You shot or stabbed someone? (0 5 not marked to 1 5 marked)

The six behaviors (e.g., gang fighting, robbery, use of weapons, and injury to another) were all serious enough to lead to injury and to criminal penalty, should the perpetrator be caught. Figure 2.1 presents the prevalence of “any” of the six forms of violence by age. Consistent with

Figure 2.1â•… Prevalence of violence by age (n 5 13,764; men: 6,453; women: 7,311). The lines represent violence irrespective of gender and by each gender.

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Figure 2.2â•… Prevalence of violence by age and type (n 5 13,978). Each line represents a different form of violence.

cross-sectional and longitudinal research presented earlier, this crosssectional study showed about a 50% decline in the prevalence rate for “any” violence, and a prevalence rate for men about three to four times that of women. Since the declines in prevalence may not be the same for all types of violent behaviors, the six violent behaviors were separated out and presented by age. The cross-sectional data for each of the six behaviors are shown in Figure 2.2. The Add Health data showed dramatic declines of more than 50% for gang fighting and for injuring others in a fight, two violent behaviors that were highest in prevalence at age 19. Dramatic declines of similar magnitude, albeit starting from lower initial prevalence levels, also were found for the less common use of weapon in a fight and robbery. Interestingly, the prevalence of shooting or stabbing someone and pulling a knife or gun on someone do not fluctuate with age. The finding that some forms of weapon-related violence remained rather steady during this time period was consistent with the results from Wave I of Add Health, noting that teens in the 7th through 12th grades showed no age fluctuation in such violent behaviors as using a weapon in a fight, pulling a knife or gun on someone, or using a weapon to get something from someone (see Marcus, 2007, chap. 1). Analysis showing no developmental change for some serious

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violent behaviors and previous research showing no change for some of those who perpetrate these behaviors suggests an important focus for research. In addition, violence perpetration stability for this period suggests the importance of understanding the risk factors sustaining violence.

Sources of Violence in the Late Teens and Early 20s There have been few attempts to analyze the theoretical basis and to organize risk factors based in theory specifically for violence perpetration, and then test a wide variety of possible risk factors for violence during the late teens and early 20s. One such study of the violent behaviors indicated above was undertaken using the responses of 19- through 25-year-olds from Wave III of Add Health (Marcus, 2009). Given the developmental trends and unique trajectories for violence in subtypes of violent individuals in the later teens and early to mid-20s, research on a relatively large set of risk factors that may increase violence, and on protective factors that may decrease probability, is essential to understanding whether they operate individually or eclipse or cancel out one another, and which are the most potent predictors of violence. One such study of a home-interviewed, nationally representative, large (n = 14,098), and diverse sample of men and women has investigated the contribution of 14 risk and protective variables from Wave III of Add Health (Marcus, 2009). The results of the regression analysis for the sample as a whole identified four risk factors and three protective factors that contributed uniquely to the perpetration of “any” violence. Risk factors elevating the probability of “any” violence, with the interpretation of odds ratios in percentage terms reflecting the magnitude of that increase, were the following: (1) a history of three or more violent acts in adolescence (13.7% of the sample were in that group; increased 154%); (2) poverty, i.e., receipt of at least one of four forms of public assistance (11% of sample; increased 24%); (3) personality trait of high sensation seeking (increased 9%); and (4) symptoms of depression (increased 6%). These four (historical, demographic, and personality) risk factors were unique and additive, and in combination could increase the probability of violence by 193%. Since analyses completed separately for men and women sometimes reveal different risk factors, separate analyses by gender showed that women also were at greater risk if they did not complete high school (increased 138%). The results of the study for protective factors showed the following unique variables to have lowered the probability of “any” violence: (1) female gender (lowered 77%); (2) being married (lowered 43%);

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and (3) being older (lowered 13%). The joint effect of protective variables lowered the probability of “any” violence by a total of 133%. It is important to note that protective influences continued to moderate violence in this study despite the presence of risk factors, and that both risk and protective factors operated independently. In sum, the risk for violence was found to be greater when individuals had a history of violence in adolescence, were poor, did not complete high school (girls only), and had significant sensation-seeking traits and depression symptoms. Conversely, individuals were less likely to engage in “any” violent behavior if they were female, married, or older. Explanations for these empirical findings, and their theoretical bases, now follow.

Theoretical Explanations for Risk and Protective Influences on Violence There are three important theories with implications for antisocial and violent behavior during the late teens to mid-20s that help to explain the foregoing results. The three theories are the following: (1) the theory of “emerging adulthood” (Arnett, 2000); (2) the theory arising from developmental criminology and “turning points” (Sampson & Laub, 1993, 2005; Stouthamer-Loeber, Wei, Loeber, & Masten, 2004); and (3) the evolutionary perspective (Daly & Wilson, 1990, 2001; Campbell, 2006). Interestingly, these three theories do not offer diverging predictions about violence; they predict similar outcomes, often use similar constructs, and tend to converge and supplement one another, but the explanations for the changes found differed significantly in where the emphasis was placed. Historically, our understanding of human development has come with an understanding of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as periods in which major developmental milestones and challenges converge to shape the course of human development. One of the more recent conceptualizations pertains to a period between adolescence and early adulthood, roughly ages 18 through 30 years, as a period of “emerging adulthood” (Arnett, 2000). The theory proposes that, building on earlier development during adolescence, personal identity formation, explorations of romantic relationships, employment and career decisions, and education are revisited during emerging adulthood with greater seriousness and significance for later development (Arnett, 2000). By the mid-20s to the end of the 20s, and for most (but not all), personal identity crystallizes, careers are chosen, firm romantic attachments are established, and financial independence is achieved, and all these milestones occur with greater independence from family-of-origin approval and regulation than in earlier stages.

Violence in Emerging Adulthood

Emerging adults continue their personality evolution as well, which for most individuals proceeds in a positive direction, and such personality change reduces important, underlying risk factors for a variety of antisocial behaviors (e.g., drug use, violence, and illegal activities). Emerging adulthood is described generally as a stage of development in which the mood is more optimistic about life’s possibilities than in adolescence, but it is also a stage in which some of life’s major disappointments, rejections, and failures also may be present. Longitudinal research has found that from ages 18 to 25 individuals increase in self-esteem and decrease in depression and anger, particularly for those with greater family support, and the change is more dramatic for those who start with higher levels of those traits (Galambos, Barker, & Krahn, 2006). Other research shows that personality change usually continues to age 30 (McCrae et al., 1999), with reductions specifically in depression (Schulenberg & Zarrett, 2006), sensation seeking, and impulsivity (Sternberg, 2010). Reductions in depression, anger, sensation seeking, and impulsivity traits are particularly important because they have been positively associated with violent behavior and are likely to underlay decrement in violence for most adults. However, as suggested by the earlier discussions of the different trajectories taken by violent individuals and the research on 19- to 25-year-olds (Marcus, 2009), those adults who experience greater depression, higher impulsivity, and sensation seeking, or who less successfully negotiate romantic attachment and fail at educational and occupational achievement during emerging adulthood, appear to be at greater risk for violent behavior. Before the 1980s, criminological research tended to focus on the factors that distinguished offenders from nonoffenders. More recently, research has focused on the onset, escalation, persistence, and desistance over the lifespan within the population of offenders. This theory most notably explains the hypothesis that crime declines with age, as Sampson and Laub (2005) demonstrate. Through this progression, the field of developmental criminology has enhanced our understanding of the life-course careers of criminals and has begun generating explanations for desistance from crime. Social control theory, for example, offers an explanation that an individual’s emotional bonds are not only to family members but to society and its institutions as well (Marcus, 2009). The second theoretical perspective, from developmental criminology, shifts focus toward the successful attachment to a romantic partner, as well as to attachments to the broader society in the form of investments in education, career, and financial security (Sampson & Laub, 1993, 2005; Stouthamer-Loeber et al., 2004). For example, Sampson and Laub (1993,

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2005) found that being married provided a cutoff from past associations, increased social support, and furthered personal growth, which leads to identity transformations critical to desistance. Others have found that the best predictors of desistance from crime were a negative attitude toward delinquency and being either employed or in school (Stouthamer-Loeber et al., 2004). Additionally, the greater the investment that individuals make in the conventional culture, the more anchored the individual will be and the less willing to jeopardize those bonds. Longitudinal research has found that making such an investment in marital commitment, and making better-quality educational and career choices, leads to desistance in criminal activity (Sampson & Laub, 1993, 2005; Stouthamer-Loeber et al., 2004). Investing in better relationship, educational, and financial endeavors yields “turning points” away from criminal activities (Sampson & Laub, 1993, 2005). As a result, individuals who make better choices have a greater investment to lose should they engage in antisocial behaviors that could jeopardize that capital investment. Conversely, it would follow that those who are unmarried, unemployed, and have poorer educational preparation would have less capital investment to risk losing through criminal or violent actions. The third theoretical perspective, the evolutionary perspective, also pays close attention to the 18- to 30-year-old demographic, as the overarching goal of evolution is Darwinian fitness, and fitness variance is greatest among young men at this stage of life (Daly & Wilson, 1990, 2001). The idea of competition encompasses most of the criminal acts that are likely deemed “instrumental” or “rational,” as well as those crimes deemed “expressive” or “irrational.” For example, most lethal violence occurs not within the family but between unrelated acquaintances and strangers, and much of this violence arises in the context of competition for material goods (Daly & Wilson, 1988). The evolutionary theory proposes that men during their late teens through late 20s compete intensively for women, and that sensation seeking and resultant risk-taking behavior motivates that competition (Daly & Wilson, 1990, 2001; Campbell, 2006). This theory has been applied to women, although the levels of violence and motivation would be less extreme than for men (Campbell, 2006). Furthermore, there is evidence that young women engage in lesser forms of physically violent behavior as a means by which to subdue female rivals as well as a means to attract male attention (Campbell, 2006). In addition, this perspective hypothesizes that the potential for violence is greatest among men when competition for women is most intense,

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when fitness variance is greatest, and when sensation seeking and resultant risk-taking behavior is most intense (Marcus, 2009). As a corollary to this theory, those with fewer resources, in the sense of having less money, being unemployed, and having lower education levels, would compete more intensely with same-gender opponents for available partners, and competition for partners would be more fierce during the late teens and early 20s. Criminal violence and homicide in urban America can be considered an outcome of steep future discounting and escalation of risk in social competition (Daly & Wilson, 1997). Accordingly, Daly and Wilson (1990) have found that marriage and increasing age (beyond the mid-20s) were associated with a decline in homicide among men. There is also some evidence that homicide perpetration is more common among men who were unemployed in the United States (Daly & Wilson, 1990), and more common among Japanese men who had lower income and education attainment than the general Japanese population (Hirwaiwa-Hasegawa, 2005). Thus, evolutionary theory would predict that violence would be greater for men who possess such qualities.

Conclusion Research has found declines in the prevalence of violent behavior for both men and women during emerging adulthood for a nationally representative sample of 19- through 25-year-olds. Not all forms of violence or violent career paths show moderation with age. Two forms of weaponrelated violence did not show such developmental decline during this period. Theoretical explanations suggest that the failure to establish successful romantic relationships, personality traits of depression and sensation seeking, gender, and poverty continue to place individuals at risk for violence, and that violence may have lifelong significance for successful adjustment in early adulthood. Further understanding of violence and its consequences in the late teens to the mid-20s, and who does and who does not successfully negotiate the transition to adulthood, is an important area for study and one of the keys to successful transition to adulthood.

Note This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgement is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle

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for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 ([email protected]). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

References Arnett, J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55, 469–480. Arnett, J. (2004). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties. New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, A. (1995). A few good men: Evolutionary psychology and female adolescent aggression. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16, 99–123. Campbell, A. (2006). Sex differences in direction aggression: What are the psychological mediators? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11, 237–264. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1990). Killing the competition. Human Nature, 1, 83–109. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1997). Crime and conflict: Homicide in evolutionary psychological perspective. Crime and Justice, 22, 51–100. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (2001). Risk-taking, intrasexual competition, and homicide. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 47, 1–36. Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Morse, B. J. (1986). Self-reported violent offending: A descriptive analysis of juvenile violent offenders and their offending careers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 1, 472–514. Galambos, N. L., Barker, E. T., & Krahn, H. J. (2006). Depression, anger, and self-esteem in emerging adulthood: Seven-year trajectories. Developmental Psychology, 42, 350–365. Hirwaiwa-Hasegawa, M. (2005). Homicide by men in Japan, and its relationship to age, resources, and risk taking. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 332–343. Loeber, R., Lacourse, E., & Homish, L. (2005). Homicide, violence, and developmental trajectories: Developmental origins of aggression. In R. Tremblay, W. Hartup, & J. Archer (Eds.), Developmental origins of aggression (pp. 202– 219). New York: Guilford. Marcus, R. F. (2007). Aggression and violence in adolescence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, R. F. (2009). Cross-sectional study of violence in emerging adulthood. Aggressive Behavior, 35, 188–202. Masten, A., Burt, K., Roisman, G., Obradovic, J., Long, J., & Tellegen, A. (2004). Resources and resilience in the transition to adulthood: Continuity and change. Development and Psychopathology, 16, 1071–1094. McCrae, R., Costa, P., Ostendorf, F., Angleleitner, A., Caprara, G., Barbaranelli, C., De Lima, M., Simoes, A., Marusic, I., Bratko, D., Chae, J., & Piedmont, R. (1999).

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Age differences in personality across the adult life span: Parallels in five cultures. Developmental Psychology, 35, 466–477. Nash, J., & Kim, J. S. (2006). Trajectories of violent offending and risk status in adolescence and early adulthood. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Piquero, A. R. (2004, October). Taking stock of developmental trajectories of criminal activity over the life course. Paper presented at the National Institute of Justice Conference on Longitudinal Studies, Washington, DC. Roisman, G., Aguilar, B., & Egeland, B. (2004). Antisocial behavior in the transition to adulthood: The independent and interactive roles of developmental history and emerging developmental tasks. Development and Psychopathology, 16, 857–871. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sampson, R., & Laub, J. (2005). A life-course view of the development of crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 602, 12–45. Schulenberg, J. E., Sameroff, A., & Cicchetti, D. (2004). The transition to adulthood as a critical juncture in the course of psychopathology and mental health. Development and Psychopathology, 16, 799–806. Schulenberg, J. E., & Zarrett, N. R. (2006). Mental health during emerging adulthood: Continuity and discontinuity in courses, causes, and functions. In J. J. Arnett & J. L. Tanner (Eds.), Emerging adults in America: Coming of age in the 21st century (pp. 135–172). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Sternberg, L. (2010). A dual systems model of adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Psychobiology, 52, 216–224. Stouthamer-Loeber, M., Wei, E., Loeber, R., & Masten, A. S. (2004). Desistance from persistent serious delinquency in the transition to adulthood. Development and Psychopathology, 16, 897–918.

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CHAPTER THREE

“Mean Girls” in Real Life: The Media’s Influence on Teen Violence and Victimization Jennifer L. Martin

Introduction Millennial girls have been provided with more opportunities for success than ever before, beginning with Title IX in the early 1970s; however, they are faced with new pressures that inhibit their potential. One half of girls indicate that they do not like their bodies, twice as many girls as boys commit suicide, and girls have a higher risk of abusing alcohol and drugs than do boys; additionally, the number of violent physical assaults committed by girls has increased 60% in the last two decades (Powderhouse Productions, 2009). The media contribute to these problems in a variety of ways. Girls are presented with a barrage of unrealistic expectations for their bodies and selves; simultaneously, the media seduces girls through the presentation of increasingly violent (yet still sexy) female characters in the name of strength and empowerment. These feminist ideals are co-opted and commodified in a damaging glorification of violence, while traditional stereotypes of appropriate feminine appearance and behavior are also sold back to girls, limiting them even more. This juxtaposition has severe consequences for teenage girls. On the one hand, the media tell girls they should be empowered and strong, through images like Power Puff Girls and more violent characters like

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Mrs. Smith (played by Angelina Jolie). These newer violent images are no longer incompatible with femininity. These violent images are also “avatarized” in video games, allowing girls to ape patriarchal dominance through violence, but without providing any tangible or sustainable sense of power. However, at the same time, we are bombarded with media images on television, on the Internet, and in magazines and movies portraying very traditional and stereotyped femininities: for example, the preoccupation with appearance, which demands that girls buy products in order to compete against other girls for the ultimate goal—to get and keep a boyfriend. These media images tell girls that they can never be good enough. There is always something they can change, improve, alter, which always comes with a price tag. The consequences of these new realities are that we have more violent teenage girls who are also still self-doubting. This can manifest itself in heightened harassment of girls at the hands of other girls, and this harassment is becoming ever more physical. Peer harassment has devastating effects on victims, such as social isolation, anxiety, and depression (Kopels & Dupper, 1999). To exacerbate this, teen culture is such that victims often do not tell teachers or parents when faced with harassment for fear of being labeled a snitch. Instead, victims attempt to deal with the harassment on their own, and bystanders remain silent. Erikson (1968) has argued that adolescence is a period of selfexploration, of the analysis and evaluation of the self; ideally, adolescence culminates in the establishment of a cohesive and integrated identity. However, this process may be more complex for female adolescents because of the societal barriers that promote a fragmented female self, such as sexual objectification and patriarchal modes of discourse (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; van Roosmalen, 2000). Brown and Gilligan (1992) argue that girls are still taught to avoid conflict and to “be nice,” to self-censor and suppress any desires that may be incompatible with what they perceive to be “appropriate” societal expectations for females. In others words, the stereotype of the self-sacrificing female is still largely reinforced today, and it has negative consequences for girls. In the late 20th century, research on girls indicated that girls’ innate, self-protective resistance has a tendency to be squashed; that is, females often become self-censored by a society (reinforced by the media) that does not value women’s voices. The emerging body of girls’ literature indicates that something happens to girls during their teenage years, causing a drop in self-esteem, confidence, and performance (American Association of University Women, 1991; Gilligan, Lyons, & Hanmer, 1990). Gilligan and colleagues (1990) discovered that between the ages of 11 and 15 or 16, it became “dangerous” for girls to give voice to what they knew

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or felt. As Stern (2002) states, “Some scholars contend that girls begin to practice self-censorship because they have learned that speaking up can get them in trouble with teachers, worry their parents, and endanger their friendships” (p. 226). Silence, loss of voice, or self-censorship thus became a focus of this emerging body of literature. Scholars also found a loss in articulateness in girls during those adolescent years (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Stern, 2002). Girls who were once articulate began showing signs of verbal ambiguity in responses and in conversational patterns in general, using phrases such as “I don’t know,” “you know,” etc. In essence, girls often cover up what they know. This is still the case, to a large degree. However, we are witnessing a new problem with girls as well, a heightened sense of aggression. Historically, girls kept their bullying of other girls more covert than did their male counterparts (at least more hidden from teachers and adults). The tradition of silence that was instilled in girls, as well as their charge to behave and follow rules, was culturally conveyed in how they bullied and excluded other girls. New digital media have made bullying easier and more anonymous. The average American teen sends and receives approximately 2,000 texts per month, which is more than double the rate of one year ago (Powderhouse Productions, 2009). Some teens even sleep with their cell phone, which speaks to how integral social networking is to their lives, but it also increases the potential for cyber harassment, social shunning, and public humiliation. Again, most victims do not tell their parents when facing these problems; instead, they face them alone. With images of women in the media becoming increasingly violent, it is more acceptable for girls to act out their anger within public view. Although the anger might be more overt, it is often misdirected and still speaks to the silencing of girls, which prevents girls from bonding in order to challenge existing forms of discourse and representations of femininity. Instead, anger pits girls against one another for the maintenance of the status quo, where “girl fighting” is acceptable, and even sexy, but girls’ anger toward traditional forms of power is still unacceptable. This exacerbates the problem of bullying in general and adds to the charge with which educators and parents are already faced: to protect our children.

Alienation and Body Image Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) is still relevant to today’s discussion of girls. In it, Gilligan argues that women and girls often have trouble expressing themselves because they experience a “divided judgment” that stems from their subject positions as both females and human beings.

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Language helps to reinforce the division between the human (male) norm and that of the female; the latter is often described in terms of inferiority and subordination. As Gilligan states, “The difficulty women experience in finding or speaking publicly in their own voices emerges repeatedly in the form of qualification and self-doubt, but also in intimations of a divided judgment, a public assessment and private assessment which are fundamentally at odds” (p. 16). This divided judgment is also experienced by many girls today in the realm of the body. As Brumberg (1997) states, “By age thirteen, 53 percent of American girls are unhappy with their bodies; by age seventeen, 78 percent are dissatisfied” (p. xxiv). Girls receive an abundance of media messages—from television, literature, the Internet, music, and video games—that will them to conform to an unrealistic idea of what it means to be (and look like) a woman. Younger (2003) conducted an analysis of young adult literature written between the years 1975 and 1999 and found a disturbing pattern: thin young women/girls were portrayed as in control, and larger girls were portrayed as passive and irresponsible with their sexuality. Male bodies are rarely described in young adult literature. Descriptions of female bodies proliferate as the male gaze is reappropriated upon characters, the image of the self, etc. (Younger, 2003). This gaze becomes internalized by characters, and as Younger states, it “encourages young women’s self-surveillance of their bodies” (p. 48). Along with identity development, body image lies at the center of adolescence. According to the American Association of University Women (1991), negative body image is correlated with the risk of suicide for girls. The same is untrue for boys. According to Younger (2003), “Using starvation to suspend the onset of sexual maturity complicates the meaning of being thin. For many girls controlling food intake provides a sense of power, but that sense of power is false, since deliberately reducing one’s body size usually diminishes physical strength” (p. 53). This deliberate “project” of body reduction, essentially making one’s self “disappear” or take up less physical space in the world, is a metaphor for female powerlessness and diminished subjectivity in the world. This speaks volumes about the absence of true empowerment for today’s girls. Girls are receiving messages from a variety of sources that, in order to be “good” or “have value,” they must be thin. White Western standards of beauty contribute to girls feeling negatively about their bodies. Kalodner (1996) found that girls of color who do not identify with mainstream culture reported less concern regarding issues of physical image. However, eating disorders among girls of color are on the rise, especially among those girls who are acculturated to Western patriarchal values (Kalodner, 1996). According to Basow and

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Rubin (1999), “As evident in the literature on minority girls, having strong female models and androgynous traits seems to help girls resist negative cultural messages regarding women” (p. 44). Brumberg (1997) argues that female bodies have increasingly been commodified in modern culture such that they have become personal projects where women and girls on an individual level are continually in the process of surveying, altering, changing, and ultimately “improving” upon their bodies. Their bodies are their canvases. According to Harris (2004), “This trend toward a regulation of young women’s interiority, whether the private space of their bedrooms, bodies, emotions, or personal conversations, suggests that the normal girl’s life is one that is lived large. The normalization of the insertion of the public gaze into the private regulates young women by demanding a constant display of self. Young women become ever-available and ever-monitored” (p. 130). This sense of monitoring also comes from without in the realm of consumer monitoring through hygiene. Advertising teaches girls and women that their bodies are dirty: that they need products to clean, sanitize, and perfume themselves. It is hygiene, not sexuality, that is focused upon with menarche and menstruation. As we know, media messages can be damaging for both women and men, girls and boys, but perhaps they are most damaging for female persons because some of the most prominent media images are those that keep women apart and direct them to compete against each other for the attention of men. These same images teach girls and women to constantly compare themselves to other girls and women and to adjust accordingly. This results in keeping women apart—women become alienated from one another, and thus from themselves. This sense of division contributes to the cultural animosity between women that creates the mean girl paradigm and sets the tone for the bully/victim dynamic. In sum, the alienation of American girls and women through media images ultimately prevents them from obtaining true power collectively. Collective power can bring empowerment and perhaps even the creation of alternatives to damaging patriarchal messages.

Alienation through Social Space From an evolutionary and biological point of view, girls cannot physically afford to risk retaliation by attacking openly; culturally, physical aggression is not acceptable in girls and women. Also, girls seem to develop social intelligence before boys do—and, hence, are capable of engaging in effective social manipulation (Chesler, 2001, p. 93).

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As Chesler’s theory suggests, girls are still more likely to act in more covert ways when bullying. Starting in the late 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, there was much talk of “mean girls,” and new terms were coined, such as female aggression or relational aggression, to explain how girls alienate other girls in decisive but covert ways that often involve the entire peer group at the instigation of the “alpha female.” Many books were written on the subject, such as Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Simmons, 2002) and Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and other Realities of Adolescence (Wiseman, 2002). These books, as does the organization The Ophelia Project, purport to explain how, beginning in middle school, many girls are forced into silence through regimented regulation at the hands of female bullies. However, in a study of women and girls across cultures, silence is one of the most prominent themes (Iglesias & Cormier, 2002). Female aggression attempts to regulate or punish female behavior (Brown, 2003); often the victim does not know what she did wrong. More specifically, if a girl is not acting in an appropriate manner according to the “proper” feminine codes of the peer culture of which she is a part, she may become shunned, ostracized, the subject of gossip, and subject to social terrorism. These interactions conjoined with the societal notion that girls are supposed to be interested in boys (through the romanticization of heterosexual romance as girls’ ultimate goal) teach girls that “female friendship is dangerous, suspect, or unimportant” (Brown, 2003, p. 21). Brown (2003) argues that not only do girls police other girls, but they also benefit in the short term from adhering to female sexist stereotypes: “Girls draw on readily available sexist stereotypes of girls and women as excuses to separate from other girls, to join boys, or privilege their relationships with boys” (p. 149). This is done in an attempt, whether consciously or not, to gain power through male approval, or to gain “male power” (Brown, 2003). The cultural messages women receive are the devaluation of all things female. Instead of identifying with what is perceived as negative, or female, women often choose to male identify, to strive to be “one of the boys,” or an honorary man. Or, girls can achieve power and status within the peer culture through a romantic relationship with a powerful boy. This gives women a false sense of power because they can never truly be what they seek to imitate or to “put on.” Moreover, power gained merely through association is not truly personal power. Gilligan and colleagues (1990) argue that something happens in adolescence that causes girls to silence themselves; girls realize that their (relational) style is not valued and validated by society. Girls and women are

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often denied access to the emotions of anger and aggression by a culture that expects them to be caring, giving, and “nice.” As Brown and Gilligan (1992) state, “Girls who fear speaking their anger readily become confused about whether anger really exists, whether they are really feeling angry” (p. 174). This causes a disconnection between thought, feeling, and action. These “severed connections” have serious implications in the lives of girls and are reinforced through many societal institutions, both formal and informal, such as female aggression, socialization, gender inequity in schools, sexual harassment and assault, etc. As Iglesias and Cormier (2002) state, “the implications of silence and speaking out may vary as gender, race, sexual orientation, and social class interact. Silence first becomes an issue for many latency-age girls as they move into early adolescence. With loss of voice also comes loss of self” (p. 259). When females are denied access to emotions such as anger, when they are not allowed to express anger, and/or when their anger has no outlet, it may turn inward. Girls then begin to devalue themselves and one another. What then becomes all important is to be accepted in a heterosexual dating relationship (van Roosmalen, 2000). Girls must deal with societal and internalized sexism, which reinforces that girls and women are inferior in a variety of ways to boys and men. Basow and Rubin (1999) found internalized sexism in their study of girls, and that girls preferred to be considered “just one of the guys,” as opposed to “one of the girls.” Basow and Rubin warn that there is “danger for girls when they confront sexism through choosing to distance themselves from other girls instead of deconstructing and evaluating the negative images of women” (p. 43). This distancing will provide girls a retreat from the negative images of women in society in the short term, but in the long term it only serves to fragment and alienate women from themselves and from truly bonding with other women. In essence, this distancing also prohibits women from confronting the societal problem of sexism in general. Some negative ideas about girls and women are passed down through the culture in nursery school jokes: for example, that “girls have cooties.” As Brown (2003) states, “Girls are still seen by boys as pollutants, as contaminators, as carriers of a deadly strain of femininity. These seemingly innocent insults are given cultural weight by the media and socializing institutions like schools, and are engaged with and passed on by children themselves. It is still considered an insult of great magnitude to call a boy a girl; the reverse, of course, is not true” (p. 20). This dichotomous thinking is dangerous and detrimental to women and girls (Brown, 2003). It is not surprising that many girls give up their female friendships to engage

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in relationships with boys (which they see as the more important relationships) and/or to strive to become one of the boys. As an educator, I have found a strong sense of alienation within the culture of girls. When attempting to start an empowerment workshop for at-risk high school girls, I heard comments such as “I hate females,” “You can’t trust females—they talk too much stuff,” and “All of my friends are guys.” Although many of these girls had devastating experiences with sexual harassment and assault at the hands of boys, they did not feel any sense of allegiance with other girls whatsoever. They indicated that phenomena such as sexual harassment were typical experiences for women, unpleasant, but normal nonetheless. They felt that there was nothing they could do about such issues. Moreover, they could not relate to their sex as a group when discussing such experiences. To be more specific, they took on a victim-blaming stance when hearing of other women’s experiences with sexual harassment and assault. Their personal experiences were the only exceptions to this victim blaming. They shared similar experiences with other girls, but refused to see this. They saw other girls as obstacles. Because of this sense of separateness, one of the biggest challenges for them was that they would not be upfront with other girls when they were upset. If a girl did something to hurt another’s feelings, instead of honestly communicating this hurt the offended girl would gossip, roll her eyes, make backhanded comments, etc. I attempted to teach the girls better ways to resolve such conflicts. We did many role-playing activities on how to honestly and openly communicate one’s feelings in a positive manner both inside and outside of class. This seemed to lessen the amount of female conflict that occurred. But the fact remains that they had learned, somewhere along the line, not to value female friendship. The 18-week workshop helped tremendously in girls identifying with other girls and with feminism, and in their ability to identify sexism within the culture. Thus, this type of analysis can be taught, and young girls can achieve a healthier sense of self, yet it takes time and effort on behalf of caring adults. (For more information on this intervention, see Martin, 2009a.)

Sexuality, Desire, and the Bad Reputation Lack of sexual agency contributes to girls’ lack of voice (Fine, 1988). Women are degraded in American culture while simultaneously being presented with standards of beauty that they can never attain. This combination of heightened and unattainable feminine beauty and a culture that sexualizes, degrades, and devalues women is a breeding ground for such phenomena as sexual harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence

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(Brumberg, 1997). The literature on sexual harassment suggests that more than 90% of the time males are the perpetrators of sexual harassment against females (Fineran & Bennett, 1999). The devaluation of the voices of girls and women within American culture also carries over into the sexual arena. Many girls are not only unable to voice their sexual desires (or lack thereof), but they also may be unable to express their desire to say no to sexual advances because they do not know how. As Brumberg (1997) states, “In a world where men and women still have unequal power and resources, it is hard for many to overcome the gender imbalance, or even to assert themselves, in the domain of intimate relations with men” (p. 192). To a certain degree females are still taught to be deferential to males when they are being pursued (de Becker, 1997). In addition to this gender imbalance, society implicitly pushes adolescent girls away from one another and toward heterosexual dating relationships through the media, traditional fairy tales and stories, toys, etc. When girls and women are pushed away from one another they are thus further alienated from themselves, for they are taught to value the male and their relationships with males more so than relationships with other females. Additionally, to the further detriment of girls, these heterosexual relationships to which they are taught to aspire are organized around male desire. As van Roosmalen (2000) states, “Having sex is stereotyped as a male goal and avoiding sex as a female goal among adolescents. . . . The underlying principle of heterosexuality in a patriarchal culture demands a sexuality organized around male desire” (p. 214). Thus, females are, again, disconnected from their own thoughts and desires, this time in the realm of sexuality. Van Roosmalen (2000) and Fine (1988) both argue that adolescent girls are not taught to act on or even acknowledge their desires; this is often true of adult women as well. Instead, they are taught to suppress their desires. As van Roosmalen states, “Absent a language of female desire, boys and girls may end up interpreting silence and passivity as consent: Sometimes it may be that they intuit incorrectly, and sex becomes coercion” (p. 219). American culture does not provide adolescent girls with an adequate method of discourse through which to express their desires when it comes to sexuality, heterosexual or otherwise. As van Roosmalen states, “Girls look at the world through concepts of male sexuality so that even when they are not looking at male sexuality as such, they are looking at the world within its frame of reference” (p. 223). In other words, even when girls feel that they are in touch with their sexuality and their sexual desire, it is often the girls performing for males: through sexual display or in the performance of sexual acts. Girls are often not the sole receivers of sexual pleasure.

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On the other hand, girls’ alienation from sexual desire is maintained through instruction via the family, the media, and through peer networks: girls are taught only to remain silent or to abstain; if they do not, they are told only that they will become victims, become pregnant, or come to possess a “bad reputation.” As Tolman (1999) states, “In a sense, young women have to be prepared to lose valued social relationships in order to assert control over their own sexuality. They are in a double bind because they need to take initiative in sexual situations, as well as to admit that they are being sexual, while they want to be conventionally feminine, which is by definition to be passive and sexually inexperienced” (p. 235). For some girls, then, to achieve sexual agency may mean to live a secret sexual life or to risk being shunned by peers who may fear developing a bad reputation by association. As Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon (2003) state: Even though alternative ways of being sexual are available, such as those embodied in superstars like Madonna, many girls do not feel they themselves have access to these constructions of female sexuality. Rather, their narratives suggest that they believe female role models who exhibit sexual agency have a status that protects them from being labeled as promiscuous. These girls continue to fear invoking a punitive response from others girls and boys, who enforce more conventional constructions of female sexuality. (p. 5)

The phenomenon of girls sexually policing other girls adds to the complications of young female sexuality and of female expression of sexual desire. The sexual arena is but another area where girls are vulnerable to bullying at the hands of their peers. Girls can damage the reputations of other girls by spreading sexual rumors and labeling a girl with the devastating and stigmatizing slut label. Sometimes boys and girls work together to isolate and stigmatize girls into social pariahs by using this label and corresponding sexual gossip. Being labeled a slut has severe consequences for girls, such as anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, lowered grades, increased rates of self-harm, etc. Many who are labeled as such are not even sexually active; they are simply being punished for some offense and in the process are saddled with a “bad reputation,” of which many will never be able to shake. Possessing a bad reputation, to be seen as a slut, or as sexually promiscuous by one’s peer group, still has negative consequences for girls; the sexual double standard is alive and well in the American high school. Words like “slut” and “whore” are common and contribute to the maintenance of a male hierarchy with boys at the top. As with other feminine norms, girls are taught to regulate the sexual behavior of other girls around patriarchal, heterosexual, and monogamous norms. According to Basow and Rubin (1999), “Messages about female

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sexuality are contradictory: Females are supposed to be sexy and attract males’ sexual interest, but sexually active females are often viewed negatively, especially among Whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans” (p. 33). Social expectations for traditional feminine norms go hand in hand with traditional (read heterosexual) sexual expectations or compulsory heterosexuality. As Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon (2003) argue, “the meaning of gender is organized by patriarchy and, more specifically, by institutionalized heterosexuality” (p. 4). This occurs across the socioeconomic spectrum. According to Brumberg (1997), most studies on teenage female sexual behavior deem sexual decision making equivalent to risky behavior and study mainly heterosexual behavior. In other words, the phenomenon of compulsory heterosexuality is still reinforced; heterosexuality is seen as the norm. Phenomena such as asexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgendered youths are understudied. Despite society’s aversion to addressing teenage sexuality, particularly female sexuality and sexual desire, there are societal consequences for denying females the right to engage in discourse about their own desires in the realm of sexuality. As Fine (1988) states: Growing evidence suggests that women who lack a sense of social or sexual entitlement, who hold traditional notions of what it means to be female— self-sacrificing and relatively passive—and who undervalue themselves, are disproportionately likely to find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy and to maintain it through to motherhood. (p. 48)

Adolescent females who possess traditional gender-role orientations may be limiting themselves in terms of future goals, for they may be more likely to become pregnant in their teenage years. A common theme in the sexual lives of girls across racial and socioeconomic lines is violence. When coming to terms with their sexuality, girls in America today must negotiate between their attempt to achieve sexual pleasure and the attempt to avoid real danger (Brumberg, 1997; Tolman, Striepe, & Harmon, 2003). According to Brumberg (1997), “Unfortunately, in this new disease environment, girls must also handle an increase in sexual pressure, often at a very early age. National data reveal that fourteen and fifteen are two of the peak ages for becoming a victim of sexual assault; approximately 50 percent of rape victims are between ten and nineteen, and half of this group are under sixteen” (p. 186). Implicit in the high incidence of sexual violence against women is the system of patriarchal control of women. As Tolman (1999) states, “the exception is among the few girls who had experienced some form of violence but who had also voiced a critique of patriarchal privileges associated with sexuality.

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These findings offer empirical support for a feminist theoretical and political position that claims sexual violence is a way of controlling women by pushing them out of relationship with themselves, their power, and their pleasure” (p. 242). Education seems to be one way to assist in solving this problem. Positive gender instruction is necessary for both boys and girls, as is open, healthy, non–gender stereotyped sexuality instruction in schools (Wilcox, 1999). Additionally, both girls and boys should be taught about the limitations of patriarchy and the negative consequences it has for both females and males. Educators must present more information to students about the entire spectrum of sexuality, rape culture, its effects on both women and men, and the limitations of traditional sex role expectations. As Brumberg (1997) states, “Although many people will not like it, American girls should be presented, as they mature, with the full range of sexual options that young women now experience, including lesbianism as well as heterosexuality, and also thoughtful discussions of female pleasure as well as danger” (p. 210). Specifically, girls must be taught both resistance strategies, in order to find their own voices to say no when it comes to sexual advances, and the ability to acknowledge their own desires. It is important for girls to come together as one to be taught counterhegemonic discourses. This can be done through education; it is important for girls to engage in critiques of patriarchal norms that are damaging to them and that keep them from identifying with other girls.

Anger and the “Bad” Girl To some extent, studies suggest that men are in control when they use violence and that women are not (Chesler, 2001, p. 39). It has been discussed that girls in American culture have, in a sense, been forced underground in terms of expressing their emotions. Since they are, in large part, still expected to be “nice,” and to control their anger, these “negative” or “unfeminine” emotions do not simply disappear; they appear in other forms, such as female aggression. However, there are girls who resist such stereotypes, who reject traditional notions of femininity, who break those barriers that hold them in limiting spaces or categories: the aggressive girls. As previously indicated, the paradigm of the aggressive girl is becoming more and more acceptable. The aggressive girl is the girl who attempts to be heard; aggression can become an attempt at subjectivity or action. However, this girl creates a tension when she does not adhere to traditional notions of femininity. As Barron and Lacombe (2005) argue, “what troubles society most about the violent girl is that she has

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come to represent the excesses of the changed social, political, and economic status women have gained through their struggles for equality since the 1960s” (p. 64). According to White and Kowalski (1994), aggressive women are judged more critically by society than are aggressive males, for they push the boundaries of or deviate from social mores. In fact, girls are less likely to be arrested but receive harsher sentences than boys for the same offense. When femininity is defined by passivity, girls who do not fit this limiting binary are often viewed by others as social outcasts, as rejecting femininity (Adams, 1999). In 1999, 670,800 girls were arrested, representing an 83% increase from the 1980s (Dohrn, 2004). This increase coincided with a nine-year drop in youth crime. As Dohrn argues, “Arrest and incarceration are different matters, yet the institutionalized confinement of girls has also escalated, despite the lesser severity of girls offending” (p. 305). So it seems that nontraditional girls and girls who acknowledge their anger may receive harsher consequences simply by virtue of being female (and not because of the nature of their “crime”). Programs for delinquent girls are not designed with gender in mind but are modeled on male institutions (Dohrn, 2004). Dohrn warns against essentialist programs that “assume a single racial, cultural, [heteronormative] and class understanding of what is appropriate or effective for girls” (p. 318). Additionally, incarceration is sometimes used to “protect” girls from themselves or from situations in which they find themselves. Such paternalistic practices are not found with such frequency in situations where boys are incarcerated. As Barron and Lacombe (2005) state, “Girl power, the source of social anxieties, is the real nasty here; the moral panic over the statistically insignificant Nasty Girl is a projection of a desire to retrieve a patriarchal social order characterized by gender conformity” (p. 65). The real societal problem is the patriarchy and its proponents attempting to maintain control over girls and women. This problem manifests itself in the societal panic over female anger. As stated previously, girls and women who freely express anger and aggression, emotions that are deemed “natural” in men, are often seen as deviants; girls and women who do not freely express such emotions often suppress them—but they are revealed implicitly in such phenomena as relational aggression, alienation, or insanity. In other words, whether or not girls’ anger is punishable is determined by where it is directed. If girls’ anger is directed inward (girls are more often internalizers) or directed toward other girls, it is acceptable. Female anger toward self or anger toward other females through the policing of other females (based on patriarchal norms) or female aggression are perfectly nonthreatening,

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for they maintain the status quo. However, anger toward the patriarchy is never acceptable; we still see this with society’s backlash against feminism and with people’s hesitancy to embrace the term. Girls and women need real outlets for these emotions just like men do; denying them the right to express emotions such as anger will not make those emotions disappear. As Brown (2003) states: Anger, in fact, seems a legitimate response to a society that objectifies girls and women and too often offers them empty roles, roles that in effect say “in the real game of power, you don’t matter.” The answer in these cases is not to fix girls but to help them locate the legitimate sources of their anger and to provide them ways to understand and confront the pressures and limitations imposed on girls who do not comply with feminine ideals. (p. 208)

Anger can be a source of inspiration and a source of power for girls and women; it can be a tool for promoting social and political change for girls, who as Brown (2003) states, “want to feel powerful, to be visible, and to be respected” (p. 228). According to DeBlase (2003): For women within oppressed groups who have experienced so many feelings—despair, rage, anguish—who do not speak, out of fear, coming to voice, or telling stories, is an act of resistance. . . . girls do find spaces within which they resist cultural codes represented in classroom and popular texts. However, this resistance is often caught up within a web of social matrixes and competing ideologies that complicate and problematize girls’ agency and developing sense of self. (p. 635)

This resistance, which can be realized through feminism, can be an outlet for this anger and a positive channel for promoting a more egalitarian society. When girls have a true outlet for their anger and venues through which to discuss gender norms and expectations, issues of power, etc., perhaps then they cease to view all others of their gender as competition and start seeing them as allies.

The Hope of Education Foucault (1972) argues that education is viewed as a system whereby individuals can gain access to the discursive activity. However, in reality, there is a system of power at play that serves to maintain the traditional appropriation of discourse. Without a strong sense of self-esteem, girls are “less able to fulfill their potential, less willing to take on challenges, less willing to defy tradition in their career choice, which means sacrificing

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economic equity” (Orenstein, 1994, xxviii). Without a strong critique of patriarchal norms, many girls will grow up without a sense of their true potential. In today’s educational system, which is driven by standards and high-stakes testing, concepts such as media literacy, feminist consciousness raising, and critiques of the status quo and of White, male hegemony are becoming less and less a focus. In the educational realm, girls continue to encounter stereotypes of appropriate feminine norms; girls are still channeled into careers that pay less and are more nurture oriented. Research indicates that girls are still, to a certain extent, being funneled into traditional “feminine” careers; for example, girls are five times less likely than boys to study technology in college (Melymuka, 2001). Role models are necessary to inspire girls in science and technology (Thom, 2002). Today girls are just as likely as boys to complete high school courses in math. However, when they enter college, they have less definitive ideas than their male counterparts about potential math/science careers (Thom, 2002). Girls are five times less likely than boys to entertain technologyrelated careers (Melymuka, 2001). They are still channeling themselves into such traditional female arenas as teaching and nursing. In today’s political climate, Title IX, which has in the past provided programs and opportunities to increase the number of girls in math and science, was seriously limited by the Bush administration (Feminist Majority Foundation, 2006). The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) contains a proposal limiting Title IX: a proposal that encourages the establishment of single-sex classes and schools in the public arena (Sadker & Zittleman, 2005). NCLB ignores every aspect of gender but to use it in order to segregate and separate. Some proponents of single-sex schools may argue that biology (read adolescent hormones) dictates that more success will be found educationally if the sexes are separated. However, adolescent hormonal development occurs regardless of the school facility the student attends. Sexism must be fought and eliminated rather than avoided. Sex equity can be transformative for men as well as women and can only occur in an integrated environment. Proponents of single-sex initiatives cite the success of some private single-sex schools as a reason to allow public single-sex schools. However, such success has been found to be more related to selective admissions processes, smaller class sizes, parental involvement, and greater resources per pupil than the factor of gender segregation. Private co-ed schools with these same advantageous features are also quite successful. Legislators should work to provide public schools the funding needed to implement these proven methods of improving educational outcomes

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rather than hoping that separating boys and girls will substitute for them. This single-sex initiative has traded off women’s rights to equal educational opportunity to give some parents the opportunity to segregate their children by sex. This is not the solution for the problems students are facing in public schools today, and it only perpetuates gender stratification, which reinforces traditional gender norms that benefit men and disadvantage women. In the current era of standardization and testing, schools are becoming more regimented, and issues such as women and gender studies, feminism, and sex education are becoming obsolete. As Giroux (2001/1983) states: Public schools don’t need standardized curriculum and testing. On the contrary, they need curricular justice—forms of teaching that are inclusive, caring, respectful, economically equitable, and whose aim, in part, is to undermine those repressive modes of education that produce social hierarchies and legitimate inequality while simultaneously providing students with the knowledge and skills needed to become well-rounded critical actors and social agents. (p. xxvi)

Schools should be sites for social transformation: where students learn the ideals of democracy and aversion to domination (Giroux 2001/1983). However, schools are increasingly becoming sites of regimentation where curricula is increasingly standardized despite students’ interests, strengths, and needs, and despite the social, political, and intellectual importance of democratic participation on individuals (Torre & Fine, 2006). Students are becoming less involved in their own education; thus, schools are becoming less the sites of social transformation and more the bastions of the status quo. Giroux (2001/1983) argues that social transformation is a goal of public education: “learning is not about processing received knowledge but actually transforming it as part of a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice” (p. xxvii). Unfortunately, this, to the detriment of our children and our society, is becoming less and less a priority. In today’s American public education system, students have less time to take electives and chosen areas of study in favor of additional required standards-based classes. This allows less time for self and social examination and critique. According to Lewis-Charp, Cao, and Soukamneuth (2006), “critical self-awareness not only helps an individual identify the seeds of her own problems, but also sheds light on dominant discourses that contribute to her marginalization and oppression of others. Education about the ‘self’ and identity is key to social transformation because it helps individuals identify and articulate what it is that needs to be

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changed” (p. 23). In other words, students need time to reflect on themselves, on their position within the world, and on the world in general, in order to determine what is wrong with the world and how they may take part in making changes around them in their own lives and in their own schools and communities. Such examinations can open up dialogue on school culture, where issues such as bullying, bystander responsibility, and the development of healthy peer relationships can be addressed.

Conclusions In order to work for the cause of promoting healthy, self-reliant girls today, educators should provide girls with the tools necessary to combat patriarchy and the patriarchal structures that relegate them to places of vulnerability. Teaching girls about feminism, media literacy, and cultural critique can assist them in understanding what is wrong in the culture and how they can create their own safe places, places of resistance, where they can find other girls with whom to bond. As Brown (2003) states, “Women hold the power to perpetuate or to contest girlfighting in their own lives and among the next generation of girls” (p. 175). The first step in this process is for girls to learn to value themselves. The second step is in finding their power or agency, and to use this power for social change. One of these changes should be to create safe spaces for girls to exist that stretch the boundaries of what is acceptable for them. Then stretch those boundaries into the larger culture to promote cultural transformation. In short, young girls and women can be empowered to channel their anger to combat the social prejudices that keep them from self-fulfillment, from one another, and ultimately from themselves. According to Basow and Rubin (1999), “Truth telling, the style of directly confronting negative cultural messages . . . appears to benefit all girls” (p. 43). It is this truth telling that will serve as a catalyst for social change— toward dismantling the status quo. The question is how do we do this? Research suggests that if adolescents have one caring adult in their lives that they will be less likely to engage in risky behaviors (Lopez, 2009). Perhaps it is adults—educators, parents, mentors—who need to lead the way in initiating the difficult discourses about power, aggression, anger, and social norms based on gender. Other questions that remain include: How do we go about helping girls come to voice? How will we inspire them to challenge traditional forms of discourse, and to bring girls together instead of keeping them apart, with the goal of ending the pattern of female aggression? Educational interventions

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seem to be the only answer. The work will be difficult, but fruitful, and must involve feminism, media literacy, and cultural critique. For more information on bullying and female empowerment, see Martin (2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2011).

References Adams, N. G. (1999). Fighting to be somebody: Resisting erasure and the discursive practices of female adolescent fighting. Educational Studies, 30, 115–139. American Association of University Women. (1991). Shortchanging girls, shortchanging America. Washington DC: American Association of University Women. Barron, C., & Lacombe, D. (2005). Moral panic and the nasty girl. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 42, 51–69. Basow, S. A., & Rubin, L. R. (1999). Gender influences on adolescent development. In N. G. Johnson, M. C. Roberts, & J. Worell (Eds.), Beyond appearance: A new look at adolescent girls (pp. 25–52). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Brown, L. M. (2003). Girlfighting: Betrayal and rejection among girls. New York: New York University Press. Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. New York: Ballantine Books. Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The body project: An intimate history of American girls. New York: Random House. Chesler, P. (2001). Women’s inhumanity to woman. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. de Becker, G. (1997). The gift of fear and other survival signals that protect us from violence. New York: Dell. DeBlase, G. (2003). Acknowledging agency while accommodating romance: Girls negotiating meaning in literacy transactions. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46, 624–635. Dohrn, B. (2004). All Ellas: Girls locked up. Feminist Studies, 30, 302–324. Erikson, E. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton. Feminist Majority Foundation. (2006, October 27). Changes to Title IX weaken safeguards against sex discrimination in public ed. Retrieved from http://www .feminist.org/news/newsbyte/printnews.asp?id=9964. Fine, M. (1988). Sexuality, schooling, and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 29–53. Fineran, S., & Bennett, L. (1999). Gender and power issues of peer sexual harassment among teenagers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 14, 626–641. Foucault, M. (1972). The discourse on language. In A. M. Sheridan Smith (Trans.), The archaeology of knowledge (pp. 215–238). New York: Pantheon Books. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory of women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C., Lyons, N. P., & Hanmer, T. J. (Eds.). (1990). Making connections: The relational worlds of adolescent girls at Emma Willard school. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Giroux, H. A. (2001/1983). Theory and resistance in education: Towards a pedagogy for the opposition. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Harris, A. (2004). Future girl: You women in the twenty-first century. New York: Routledge. Iglesias, E., & Cormier, S. (2002). The transformation of girls to women: Finding voice and developing strategies for liberation. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 3, 259–271. Kalodner, C. R. (1996). Eating disorders from a multicultural perspective. In J. L. Delucia-Waack (Ed.), Multicultural counseling competencies (pp. 197–216). Alexandria, VA: Association of Counselor Education and Supervision. Kopels, S., & Dupper, D. R. (1999). School-based peer sexual harassment. Child Welfare, 78, 435–460. Lewis-Charp, H., Cao, Y. H., & Soukamneuth, S. (2006). Civic activist approaches for engaging youth in social justice. In S. Ginwright, P. Noguera, & J. Cammarota (Eds.), Beyond resistance! Youth activism and community change: New Democratic possibilities for practice and policy for America’s youth (pp. 21–35). New York: Routledge. Lopez, S. L. (2009). Gallup student poll national report. Washington, DC: Gallup. Martin, J. L. (2008). Peer sexual harassment: Finding voice, changing culture, an intervention strategy for adolescent females. Violence Against Women, 14, 100–124. Martin, J. L. (2009a). Reclaiming feminism: A qualitative investigation of language usage by girls in a high school women’s studies course. Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 54–72. Martin, J. L. (2009b). “Talk to us”: A study in student generated service-learning, mentoring middle school girls. Information for Action: A Journal for Research on Service-Learning with Children and Youth, 2, 1–25. Martin, J. L. (2011). Bullying and sexual harassment of peers. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families (pp. 89–109). Westport, CT: Praeger. Melymuka, K. (2001). If girls don’t get IT, IT won’t get girls. Computerworld, 35, 44. Orenstein, P. (1994). School girls: Young women, self-esteem, and the confidence gap. New York: Doubleday. Powderhouse Productions, Inc., & the Independent Television Service (ITVS). (2009). A girl’s life with Rachel Simmons [video recording]. Available from PBS, http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisinggirls/girlslife/. Sadker, D., & Zittleman, K. (2005, April). Gender bias lives, for both sexes. Principal, 27–30. Simmons, R. (2002). Odd girl out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books. Stern, S. R. (2002). Virtually speaking: Girls’ self-disclosure on the WWW. Women’s Studies in Communication, 25, 223–253. Tanenbaum, L. (2000). Slut! Growing up female with a bad reputation. New York: Perennial. Thom, M. (2002). Girls in science and technology: What’s new, what’s next? Education Digest, 67, 17–24.

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Tolman, D. L. (1999). Female adolescent sexuality in relational context: Beyond sexual decision making. In N. G. Johnson, M. C. Roberts, & J. Worell (Eds.), Beyond appearance: A new look at adolescent girls (pp. 227–246). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tolman, D. L., Striepe, M. I., & Harmon, T. (2003). Gender matters: Constructing a model of adolescent sexual health. The Journal of Sex Research, 40, 4–12. Torre, M., & Fine, M. (2006). Researching and resisting: Democratic policy research by and for youth. In S. Ginwright, P. Noguera, & J. Cammarota (Eds.), Beyond resistance! Youth activism and community change: New Democratic possibilities for practice and policy for America’s youth (pp. 269–285). New York: Routledge. van Roosmalen, E. (2000). Forces of patriarchy: Adolescent experiences of sexuality and conceptions of relationships. Youth and Society, 32, 202–227. White, J., & Kowalski, R. (1994). Deconstructing the myth of the nonaggressive woman: A feminist analysis. Psychology of Women 18, 487–508. Wilcox, B. L. (1999). Sexual obsessions: Public policy and adolescent girls. In N. G. Johnson, M. C. Roberts, & J. Worell (Eds.), Beyond appearance: A new look at adolescent girls (pp. 333–354). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Wiseman, R. (2002). Queen bees and wannabes: Helping your daughter survive cliques, gossip, boyfriends, and other realities of adolescence. New York: Crown Publishers. Younger, B. (2003). Pleasure, pain, and the power of being thin: Female sexuality in young adult literature. NWSA Journal, 15, 45–56.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders Margaret C. Stevenson, Katlyn M. Sorenson Farnum, Allison L. Skinner, and Rukudzo Amanda Dzwairo

Societal fear of dangerous sex offenders has not only been the legal Â�impetus for sex offender registration policies for adults, but also for recently extending registration policies to juveniles who commit sex offenses (Caldwell, Ziemke, & Vitacco, 2008; SORNA, 42 U.S.C. § 16911). Although registration policies were created to protect society from sex offenders, evidence suggests that these laws might not be effective. To date, research has revealed no evidence that registration policies successfully reduce sex offenses (e.g., Letourneau & Armstrong, 2008). Instead, substantial research shows that sex offender registration harms the lives of those registered in ways that, ironically, might lead to further offending (Levenson & Cotter, 2005; Levenson, D’Amora, & Hern, 2007; Tewksbury, 2005; Tewksbury & Lees, 2006, 2007; for reviews, see Chaffin, 2008; Trivits & Reppucci, 2002). How does the public react toward juvenile sex offenders? Although there is strong public support for registration laws applied to adult sex offenders (Levenson, D’Amora, & Hern, 2007; Phillips, 1998), research on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders tells a more complex story. Salerno, Najdowski, and colleagues (2010) revealed strong public support for registering juvenile sex offenders, but only when participants were asked

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to consider juvenile registration laws in the abstract. When asked about Â�specific, less serious juvenile sex offenses, such as harassment or nonforced sex (offenses for which juveniles are registered in several states), public support for registration was much lower. Even so, when asked to describe the typical juvenile sex offender, the majority of respondents described a juvenile who had committed a serious sex offense (e.g., forced rape), which might help explain why abstract support for juvenile sex offender registration policy is so high. Public support might explain why registration policies have been extended to juvenile offenders (Salerno, Stevenson, et al., 2010), even though juvenile sex offenders differ in important ways from adult sex offenders (e.g., juveniles are much less likely to recidivate). (For reviews, see Chaffin, 2008; Trivits & Reppucci, 2002.) The trend toward increasingly severe treatment of juvenile sex Â�offenders likely has serious ramifications for minority juvenile offenders, who are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). In fact, Black juveniles are more likely than White juveniles to be detained, transferred to criminal court, and given longer sentences, even when controlling for offense severity and prior offenses (Engen, Steen, & Bridges, 2002; Wordes, Bynum, & Corley, 1994). Consider the case of Marcus Dixon, an 18-year-old African American high school senior with a college football scholarship (Dixon v. State of Georgia, 2004). Although Dixon claimed that he had consensual sex with a 15-year-old White girl from his high school, he was charged with sexual molestation and rape. The jury acquitted him of the rape charge due to a lack of evidence, yet found him guilty of aggravated child molestation— a crime that requires sex offender registration and a mandatory, minimum 10-year prison sentence (Dixon v. State of Georgia, 2004). Notably in this case, the issue of race was hotly contested: Dixon claimed that the Â�victim’s rape allegations stemmed from her fear that her extremely racist father would kill them both if he discovered that they had consensual sex. Articulating such sentiments, civil rights activist Dr. Joseph Lowery argued during a rally opposing Dixon’s 10-year sentence that if “the young lady were Black and Marcus Dixon was White, I don’t think we would be here” (Jacobs, 2004, p. 1). Only a few years later, a strikingly similar case emerged involving another African American teen—Genarlow Wilson, a 17-year-old high school senior, honors student, and star of his football team (Wilson v. State of Georgia, 2006). Wilson was receiving recruitment letters from Ivy League colleges, but just short of graduation, he was charged with aggravated child molestation. A videotaped recording of a New Year’s Eve party he attended had surfaced showing Wilson receiving consensual oral sex from a

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15-year-old White girl. Because juveniles are automatically registered for adjudicated sex crimes in juvenile court, some juveniles attempt to avoid automatic registration by waiving their cases to adult criminal court, where they receive a trial by jury instead of a disposition rendered by a family court judge. A desire to avoid automatic registration (the standard juvenile court outcome) led Wilson to opt to waive his case from juvenile court to adult court, where he risked the possibility of a much harsher sentence—a possibility that came to fruition. In adult court, Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation, registered as a sex offender, and sentenced to 10 years in jail, the mandatory minimum sentence under Georgia law (Wilson v. State of Georgia, 2006). Again, the issue of race in this case was hard to ignore, and Wilson received support from several civil rights leaders. Former president Jimmy Carter even wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney general, requesting him to consider the possibility that race played a role in Wilson’s harsh sentence (e.g., National Public Radio, 2007; Rome News Tribune, 2008). Although Wilson served only 2 years and Dixon served 15 months in prison before their convictions and sentences were overturned on appeal, these cases inspire important questions about the role of ethnicity in the treatment of juvenile sex offenders and the fairness of these laws and judicial outcomes in general. These questions have been the topic of a good deal of journalistic debate. The Dixon case, for instance, was even featured by Oprah Winfrey on her television show (Rome News Tribune, 2004). Yet, the courts have continued to ignore social science evidence that sex offender registration policies are likely ineffective at best (e.g., Letourneau & Armstrong, 2008) and detrimental to society at worst (e.g., Chaffin, 2008). Indeed, policy aimed at increasingly punitive treatment of sex offenders has not slowed (Wright, 2009). Such trends have particularly unfortunate implications for juveniles because Â�registration has been linked to various negative outcomes, including public harassment, social rejection, and depression (Levenson, Brannon, Fortney, & Baker, 2007; Levenson & Cotter, 2005; Tewskbury, 2005; Tewksbury & Lees, 2006)—all factors shown to increase the likelihood of suicide (Bridge, Goldstein, & Brent, 2006), the third-leading cause of death among adolescents (Xu, Kochanek, & Tejada-Vera, 2009). One particularly alarming case involved a 15-year-old boy who attempted suicide by walking into oncoming traffic because of constant harassment from high school students who had discovered that he was on the registry (Jones, 2007). Another adolescent, William Elliott, was placed on the sex offender registry at age 16 after engaging in consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was just weeks away from the legal age of consent (16).

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Several years later, a vigilante who identified Elliott’s name and address from the registry shot him to death in his home (Ahuja, 2006). Although there are certainly many more shocking instances of brutality perpetrated against registered juveniles, more commonly, adolescents suffer social rejection and harassment as a result of registration. For instance, after being registered at age 11, one girl became the target of lewd phone calls and sexual advances from older men (Jones, 2007). Thus, it has become increasingly important to study perceptions of developmentally vulnerable adolescent sex offenders, particularly racial minority youths who are susceptible to discriminatory treatment. This chapter represents an exploration of the influence of juvenile offender and victim ethnicity on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders, focusing primarily on perceptions of African American adolescents. Although it is certainly important to study perceptions of other racial minority groups, doing so is simply beyond the scope of this chapter. Even so, we believe that exploring perceptions of African American adolescents represents an important first step, particularly given the unique sociopolitical history of racism against African Americans in the United States. First, we review relevant social psychological theory and research, drawing largely from research exploring the influence of race on perceptions of adult offenders. We then turn to research illustrating the effects of race on perceptions of juvenile offenders, where we also review the only existing research in which the races of juvenile sex offenders and victims are experimentally manipulated. Finally, we present the results of preliminary data testing our theory and conclude with directions for future research and implications for policy and law.

Effects of Defendant and Victim Race Although the literature on effects of defendant and victim race paints a complex picture, a thorough review reveals compelling evidence of racial bias, such that Whites generally render more pro-prosecution case �judgments for Black than for White adult defendants and when the victim is White rather than Black. (For a review, see Sommers & Ellsworth, 2006.) For example, a meta-analysis exploring the effects of adult defendant race on sentencing in 14 mock juror studies revealed that Black defendants, on average, receive longer sentences than White defendants (Sweeney & Haney, 1992; see also Mitchel, Haw, Pfeifer, & Meissner, 2005). Mock jury studies involving adult defendants accused of rape also tell a cohesive story: White mock jurors tend to be most punitive in reactions to mock rape cases when a Black defendant rapes a White victim than in

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any other defendant-victim racial combination (e.g., Feild, 1979; Foley & �Chamblin, 1982; Klein & Creech, 1982; Ugwuegbu, 1979). Using the adult mock jury literature as a guide, it appears likely that similar effects of racial bias will manifest for juvenile sex offenders.

Social Psychological Theory Explaining Effects of Race Several social psychological theories help inform the issue of racial bias against minority offenders. First, well-documented negative Â�stereotypes that African Americans are more violent, aggressive, and sexually Â�deviant than Whites (e.g., Devine, 1989) likely drive discriminatory treatment. Myriad research reveals that people pay more attention to, and subsequently remember better, information that is consistent rather than inconsistent with their stereotypes (for a review, see Hilton & von Hippel, 1996). Stereotypes that Black men are more dangerous and criminal-like than White men likely cause mock jurors to perceive Black defendants as more likely to be guilty than White defendants accused of the same crime (for a review, see Sweeney & Haney, 1992). Similar stereotypes exist for minority juvenile defendants. Juvenile probation officers rated minority offenders as more criminal-like, dangerous, and likely to recidivate than similar White juvenile offenders (Bridges & Steen, 1998). Although it is clear that stereotypes play a role in discriminatory Â�treatment of minority offenders, stereotypes alone do not account for why some mock jury studies fail to find effects of defendant race on case outcomes (e.g., Conley, Turnier, & Rose, 2000; Mazzella & Feingold, 1994; Shaw & Skolnick, 1995; Skolnick & Shaw, 1997). To understand this mixed body of research on the effects of race, we next turn to the theory of aversive racism, which is the newer, modern form of racism that has replaced blatant old-fashioned racism (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986). Although it is no longer socially acceptable to appear outwardly racist (in most social circles), according to aversive racism theory, individuals are still influenced by anti-Black attitudes, particularly when the motivation behind one’s behavior is ambiguous and can be justified in nonracially motivated ways (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986). Consistent with aversive Â�racism theory, Sommers and Ellsworth (2001) argue that effects of defendant race can be eliminated simply by making the issue of race salient Â�during a mock trial, or in other words, by highlighting the issue of race during the trial. Specifically, Sommers and Ellsworth experimentally manipulated race salience in the context of a mock trial through the presence or absence of a racially sensitive comment (i.e., the victim merely mentioned or did not mention the defendant’s race during her testimony).

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In support of their theory, White participants’ sentence recommendations were Â�unaffected by defendant race (Black or White) when race was made salient. But, when race was not made salient (i.e., when the victim did not mention the defendant’s race), mock jurors convicted the Black defendant more frequently than the White defendant. The authors theorized that making jurors aware of the issue of race heightens their concern about being racist and, in turn, drives them to control their racial prejudice. Yet, when race is not made salient, participants let their guard down, and underlying racial biases manifest, resulting in more convictions for Black defendants than White defendants. Sommers and Ellsworth argue that these results help account for the mock trial studies that reveal null effects of defendant and victim race, suggesting that the methodology of those studies made race overly salient, which consequently eliminated race effects (see also Sommers & Ellsworth, 2003). Thus, aversive racism can, at least in part, drive discriminatory treatment of Black defendants, particularly when race is not salient throughout the course of the trial. Another relevant psychological theory is the similarity-leniency bias: People simply like similar others more than nonsimilar others, and thus treat similar others preferentially (e.g., Davis, Bray, & Holt, 1977). Thus, because White jurors likely perceive themselves as more similar to White than Black defendants, they should therefore treat White defendants more leniently than Black defendants. Likewise, because Black jurors likely perceive themselves as more similar to Black than White defendants, they should, in turn, treat Black defendants more leniently than White Â�defendants. In support, a meta-analysis by Mitchel and colleagues (2005) revealed that White people tend to treat White defendants more favorably than Black defendants, whereas Black people tend to treat Black defendants more favorably than White defendants. The various theories reviewed thus far to explain bias against Â�minority adult defendants can also be applied to understanding possible bias against minority juvenile defendants. Next, we review existing research examining this possibility.

Effects of Juvenile Defendant and Victim Race Scott, Reppucci, Antonishak, and DeGennaro (2006) were the first to experimentally explore the effects of race on perceptions of juvenile offenders. Community member participants watched a video depicting a masked juvenile rob a convenience store at gunpoint (Scott et al., 2006). The race of the juvenile was experimentally manipulated by showing participants a photo of the juvenile’s face (either Black or White). They found

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders

no effects of the juvenile’s race on sentence judgments or ratings of the juvenile’s culpability. Yet, it is possible that the method of manipulating race (the photo of a Black youth) enhanced suspicion that the study was about race and, in turn, increased participants’ motivation to avoid racial prejudice. Such a possibility is consistent with Sommers and Ellsworth’s (2001) research showing that participants tend to correct racial biases by treating White defendants no differently than Black defendants, but only when the issue of race is made salient. In a similar study, Stevenson and Bottoms (2009) manipulated a juvenile defendant’s race in a way that made it noticeable, yet not overly Â�salient to participants. Their mock case transcript described a juvenile defendant (portrayed as Black or White) who was tried in adult court for the murder of an elderly man (Black or White). Although there were no main effects of defendant or victim race on guilt judgments, there were interactions of juror gender and defendant and victim race. Specifically, men, but not women, convicted more often when the juvenile defendant was Black than when he was White and when the victim was White rather than Black. These findings are consistent with research by Dovidio and colleagues (1997), who manipulated an adult defendant’s race in a mock capital case. Again, men, but not women, recommended the death penalty more often for the Black adult defendant than for the White adult defendant. Perhaps partially Â�explaining these results, men, compared to women, have higher levels of explicit racism and ethnocentrism (Carter, 1990; Kim, & Goldstein, 2005; for a review, see Ekehammar, Akrami, & Araya, 2003) and score lower in measures of general acceptance of others (Mills, McGrath, Sobkoviak, Â� Â�Stupec, & Welsch, 1995). Even so, controlling for participants’ scores on the Modern Racism Scale did not change Stevenson and Bottoms’s results, suggesting that men’s racism alone might not fully explain why men (but not women) were more punitive toward the Black than the White defendant. Alternatively, these results might be understood in the context of genderrelated social categorization. Because the defendant and victim in this study were male, women may have classified them as out-group members more than men. Indeed, people generally pay more attention to in-group than out-group members (e.g., Bernstein, Young, & Hugenberg, 2007; MacLin & Malpass, 2001; for a review, see Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Thus, women might have simply paid less attention to the defendant’s and victim’s racial characteristics than did men. In turn, women might have been less influenced by defendant and victim race, primarily because they did not perceive a male defendant or male victim (Black or White) as part of their in-group. In support, women demonstrate strong Â�positive implicit in-group associations toward women and negative

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implicit associations toward men (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004). Although men also demonstrate positive implicit in-group associations toward men over women, this bias is less pronounced for men (Rudman & Â�Goodwin, 2004). Thus, because men likely attended more than women to the male defendant and victim, men might have been more influenced by the defendant’s and victim’s racial characteristics. In summary, a review of literature exploring the influence of defendant and victim race on perceptions of adult and juvenile offenders provides the necessary theoretical background to understand the influence of race on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders. Using the adult mock trial literature as a guide, we have uncovered evidence of discrimination against Black defendants accused of rape—bias that might extend toward minority adolescent offenders. Yet, not all sex crimes involve violent rape. In fact, only a minority (15%) of juvenile sex offenders are rapists (Uniform, 2007). Â�Contrary to sensationalized stranger rape cases that frequently receive media attention, most sex crimes (76%) occur in the context of existing intimate relationships, friendships, etc. (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998). In fact, several rape-victim crisis support groups have openly criticized sex offender registration policies, arguing that they are motivated by and designed to prevent highly sensationalized stranger rape crimes—crimes that simply are not experienced by the vast majority of their clients (e.g., Coombs, 2006). To understand how race might influence perceptions of less sensationalized, yet more common sex crimes, we turn next to literature exploring the influence of race on perceptions of domestic violence.

Perceptions of Interracial Domestic Violence Recall the case of Genarlow Wilson—a nonviolent, statutory offense consisting of mutually desired, yet technically illegal sexual activity between two similarly aged minors. This type of crime carries a unique set of issues relevant to understanding the complex influence of juvenile defendant and victim race. Specifically, the defendant and victim were close in age and were alleged to have engaged in consensual sexual activity. To explore how race influences perceptions of these types of sex crimes, we turn to research on attitudes toward interracial romantic relationships. Despite the progress we have made since the 1960s, when interracial marriage was still illegal in some states (Porterfield, 1982), we are far from full societal acceptance of interracial relationships (e.g., Ross, 2005). For instance, even though interracial couples can now legally marry, many are reluctant to do so: Only 32% of individuals without prior interracial dating experience indicated a willingness to date someone of a different

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders

ethnicity (Knox, Zusman, Buffington, & Hemphill, 2000). Further, Â�interracial couples continue to be viewed more negatively in general than samerace couples. For instance, as compared to same-race couples, interracial couples are perceived as less compatible and as less supported and accepted by family (Carrasco, 2007; Â� Harrison & Esqueda 2000; Lewandowski & Jackson, 2001; Mills, Daly, Longmore, & Kilbride, 1995; Ross, 2005). Lewandowski and Jackson (2001) experimentally manipulated a married couple’s racial composition and found that, relative to a White married man and woman, a White woman married to a Black man was perceived as less psychologically adjusted and less traditional, and a White man married to a Black woman was perceived as less professionally successful and less competent in general. Similarly, relative to a Black married couple, Black men or women married to Whites were considered less traditional and less compatible. Societal lack of acceptance of interracial relationships might cause people to perceive sexual behavior between interracial teens as more dysfunctional and more deviant than if they were of the same race. In support, Harrison and Esqueda (2000) examined participants’ perceptions of a vignette describing a case of domestic violence. The male batterer’s race and the female victim’s race (Black or White) were experimentally manipulated. Although they found no main effects of race, there was an interaction of defendant and victim race such that the batterer was rated guiltier when he was in an interracial relationship than when he was in a same-race relationship. Thus, it is possible that interracial juvenile sex offenses might be perceived as more criminal-like than same-race juvenile sex offenses, particularly when the offender is not a stranger, but rather someone who has a relationship with the victim (as do most sex offenders; Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998). Next, we turn to the only published study designed to experimentally test the influence of juvenile offender and victim race on perceptions of a juvenile convicted of statutory rape, followed by preliminary data testing the influence of defendant and victim race on perceptions of a juvenile accused of forced rape.

Effects of Juvenile Defendant and Victim Race on Registration Support for Statutory Rape Stevenson, Sorenson, Smith, Sekely, and Dzwairo (2009) recruited 158 community members and presented them with a short vignette depicting the case of a 15-year-old boy convicted of aggravated child molestation of a similarly aged girl. For ecological validity, the case was based on the Wilson v. State of Georgia (2006) case: The defendant received consensual,

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videotaped oral sex from a similarly aged girl victim. Victim and defendant race were fully experimentally manipulated (Black or White), resulting in four conditions of all possible victim-defendant race combinations. After reading the vignette, participants indicated their support for registering the juvenile as a sex offender and made several additional case judgments designed to explain registration support, including perceived likelihood that the defendant will reoffend (i.e., utilitarian concerns for society) and support for registration even if it is ineffective at reducing sex crimes (i.e., retributive goals of punishment). Because the authors were interested in exploring possible participant gender by defendant and victim race interactions, the study conformed to a 2 (defendant race: Black, White) X 2 (victim race: Black, White) X 2 (participant gender) between-subjects design. Although there were no main effects of any independent variables on registration support, there was a marginally significant interaction between defendant and victim race. The simple effects analyses did not reach statistical significance, yet a clear crossover trend emerged such that participants supported registration more when the juvenile offender and victim were of different races than when they were of the same race. Similarly, participants endorsed marginally greater retributive goals of punishment when the defendant and victim were of different races than of the same race. Further, mediation analyses revealed that retributive goals of punishment—not utilitarian goals to protect society—partially explained why participants supported registration more for the interracial than same-race crime (see Figure 4.1). This effect is in line with previous research revealing that retributive goals tend to be more influential than utilitarian goals in the context of legal decision making (Carlsmith, Darley, & Robinson, 2002; Darley, Carlsmith, & Robinson, 2000). Further, these results suggest that participants might have perceived an ambiguously serious sex act between two teens as more like a true crime when the teens were of different races. Such findings might reflect lingering societal lack of acceptance of interracial relationships and the belief that interracial couples are not compatible (Carrasco, 2007; Harrison & Esqueda, 2000; Lewandowski & Jackson, 2001; Mills, Daly, Longmore, & Kilbride, 1995; Ross, 2005). In other words, participants might have perceived teens of the same race as more likely to have been in a romantic relationship and, in turn, perceived the sex act to be more developmentally normative and consensual. In contrast, participants might have perceived teens of different races as less likely to have been in a romantic relationship and, in turn, perceived the sex act to be more like a true crime.

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders

Figure 4.1â•… Retributive goals of punishment as a mediator of the effect of racial composition on registration support. Note. Racial composition was coded as 0 (defendant and victim were the same race) and 1 (defendant and victim were different races). Retributive goals of punishment were coded such that higher values indicate greater retributive desires to punish. Registration support was coded such that greater values indicate greater support for the full application of the registry. a Sobel z = 1.29, p < .10 † p < .10, *p < .05, ***p < .001

There was also a marginally significant interaction of gender and Â�victim race on registration support and retributive goals of punishment, and a Â�statistically significant interaction for the belief that the juvenile will recidivate. Follow-up analyses revealed that women, but not men, were Â�significantly more likely to support registration, believe that the defendant would recidivate, and endorse retributive goals of punishment when the victim was White rather than Black. Mediation analyses showed that retributive goals of punishment—not fear that the juvenile would recidivate— drove the effect of victim race on women’s support for registration. In other words, a retributive desire to punish sex offenders, and not a utilitarian desire to protect society, explained registration support—an effect in line with previous research (Carlsmith et al., 2002; Darley et al., 2000). These results support the hypothesis that gender-related social Â�categorization (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004) might have caused women to pay Â�attention to features of the female victim more than men did. In turn, women’s greater attention toward the female victim might have caused them to be more influenced by her racial characteristics. Yet, men likely paid less attention to the female victim than women did because they Â�categorized her as an out-group member, and consequently they were less influenced by her racial characteristics. Thus, at least for women, these results provide evidence that negative stereotypes about Black women drove them to devalue the worth of the Black victim by supporting sex offender

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registration less often when the victim was Black than when she was White. Well-documented stereotypes that Black women are more sexually experienced, promiscuous, and perverse than White women may, in part, explain this effect (Devine, 1989; Powell, Wyatt, & Bass, 1983; Â�Weinberg & Â�Williams, 1988; Wyatt, 1982). In other words, negative stereotypes about the sexual deviance of Black women might have caused non-Black women to label the sex act as a less serious sexual offense and, in turn, Â�support registration less when the victim was Black rather than White. Finally, contrary to hypotheses, there were no main effects of Â�defendant race. Why? On the one hand, although there certainly are negative stereotypes associating criminality with Black men (e.g., Devine, 1989), such stereotypes might not encompass the specific crime of sex offending. In support, Jackson and Nuttall (1993) found that clinicians perceived child sex offenders as more likely to be White than Black or Hispanic. On the other hand, perhaps there were no effects of defendant race because the sexual offense in this study was a nonviolent sexual act described as consensual. As described above, these findings are likely driven by a lack of societal acceptance of interracial relationships (e.g., Lewandowski & Jackson, 2001; Mills et al., 1995; Ross, 2005), which drove people to Â�perceive an ambiguously criminal sex act as more like a true crime when the defendant and victim were of different races than when they were of the same race. Yet, how will defendant and victim race shape perceptions of a juvenile who commits an unambiguously criminal sex act—forced rape? We have recently started testing this question, and next we present the preliminary results of this new line of research.

Effects of Juvenile Defendant and Victim Race on Registration Support for Forced Rape Recall that studies reviewed earlier reveal that participants tend to react more punitively when an adult rapist is Black and the victim is White than with any other victim-defendant racial combination (e.g., Feild, 1979). Aversive racism (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986) and well-documented negative stereotypes that Blacks are more violent, aggressive, and sexually deviant than Whites (e.g., Devine, 1989) likely drive discriminatory treatment. Thus, it is possible that aversive racism and anti-Black stereotypes might lead participants to support registration more when the juvenile defendant convicted of forced rape is Black and the victim is White than with any other victim-defendant racial combination. Alternatively, the stereotype that Black women are physically �dominant, powerful, and aggressive (e.g., Donovan, 2007; Donovan & Williams, 2002; Esqueda & Harrison, 2005; West, 1995) supports a

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders

competing hypothesis. To the extent that participants perceive Black women as Â�particularly Â�physically strong, they might also believe that Black women are either physically intimidating enough to deter a prospective rapist or strong enough to stop him. Thus, when a Black woman is raped, participants might perceive the rapist as especially dangerous and strong to have successfully raped her. In support, Willis (1992) experimentally manipulated victim race in a forced-rape case and found that participants were more confident in the defendant’s guilt, perceived the defendant as more likely to reoffend, and found the victim to be less blameworthy when the victim was Black rather than White. These results support the Â�possibility that participants perceived the rapist as particularly dangerous and strong to have raped a Black woman, compared to a White woman, possibly because they perceived the Black victim as physically powerful (e.g., Donovan, 2007; Donovan & Williams, 2002; Esqueda & Harrison, 2005; West, 1995). We tested these competing theories by examining perceptions of a Â�juvenile defendant (Black or White) convicted of forcibly raping a Â�teenaged victim (Black or White).

Method Participants were 250 community members (77% women; M age 5 36) who participated in a computer-simulated survey. Participants volunteered to take the anonymous survey, which was posted on the www.craigslist .com volunteer section in various cities across the United States. African Americans were excluded from the data set because this was an examination of anti-Black bias. Eighty four percent of participants were White, 6% were Hispanic, 4% were Asian, 4% were from other racial groups, and 2% declined to state race.1 A brief vignette presented a case involving a 15-year-old boy convicted of forcibly raping a 15-year-old girl. Specifically, the defendant was described as attacking the victim in a park, pulling her into a wooded area, and raping her. This vignette was developed previously by Salerno, Najdowski, and colleagues (2010). Juvenile defendant and victim race were experimentally manipulated in a fully crossed between-subjects design. Demographic descriptors of “African American” or “Caucasian,” and race-consistent names for the defendant (Jamal or David) and victim (Jennifer or Keisha) constituted the race manipulation.2 Participants indicated their support for registering the juvenile as a sex offender by responding to the following question on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree): “Public registration laws are too severe for the defendant’s case.”

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This variable was reverse coded such that higher numbers indicated greater registration support. On the same scale, we assessed perceived defendant recidivism (i.e., “David/Jamal is at high risk for reoffending”) and the belief that the defendant is dangerous (i.e., “David/Jamal is a cold and calculating ‘superpredator.’↜”) Our item assessing defendant recidivism was previously developed and used by Salerno, Stevenson, and colleagues (2010) and Stevenson and colleagues (2009), and the item assessing the belief that the defendant is dangerous was developed by Haegerich (2002).

Preliminary Results We conducted a series of 2 (defendant race: Black or White) X 2 Â�(victim race: Black or White) analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs), including Â�participant gender as a covariate. We controlled for gender because past research has revealed that gender interacts with defendant and victim ethnicity (Stevenson & Bottoms, 2009; Stevenson et al., 2009) and because our preliminary data did not have enough male participants (n 5 57) to include participant gender as an independent variable. There were no main effects of defendant race on registration support, perceived likelihood of defendant recidivism, and belief that the Â�defendant is dangerous, all Fs  .88, #. Supporting our alternative hypothesis, Â�participants were more supportive of registration when the victim was Black (M 5 3.79, SD 5 1.14) rather than White (M 5 3.46, SD 5 1.25), F(1, 245) 5 4.53, p  .05. Participants were also significantly more likely to believe that the defendant was dangerous when the victim was Black (M 5 2.71, SD 5 1.05) rather than White (M 5 2.40, SD 5 1.07), F(1, 244) 5 5.28, p  .05, and marginally more likely to believe that the defendant would recidivate when the victim was Black (M 5 3.99, SD 5 .92) rather than White (M 5 3.75, SD 5 .90), F(1, 245) 5 3.43, p 5 .07. There were no significant defendant race by victim race interactions for any dependant variables, Fs(1, 244 2 245)  1.90, all #. Next, we conducted mediation analyses to understand the effects of victim race on registration support. In line with Baron and Kenny’s (1986) recommendations, we first found that our potential mediators (i.e., perceived likelihood of recidivism and the belief that the defendant is dangerous) significantly predicted our primary dependant variable (i.e., registration support), βs  .16, ps  .05. When victim race and the two potential mediators were simultaneously entered into a regression predicting registration support, the effect of victim race was no longer statistically significant, β 5 2.07, # (see Figure 4.2). Perceived

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders

Figure 4.2â•… Belief that the defendant is dangerous and perceived likelihood of recidivism as mediators of victim race on registration support. Note. Victim race was coded as 0 (Black victim) and 1 (White victim). Greater values indicated greater belief that the defendant is dangerous, greater belief that the defendant will reoffend, and greater support for registration laws. a Sobel z 5 21.62, p 5 .05, b Sobel z 5 21.86, p  .05 † p  .10, *p  .05, **p  .001

recidivism likelihood (Sobel 5 21.86, p  .05) and the belief that the defendant is dangerous (Sobel 5 21.62, p 5 .05) remained statistically significant, βs  .16, ps  .05. Thus, participants were more supportive of registration when the victim was Black rather than White because they believed that the defendant was more dangerous and likely to recidivate when he successfully raped a Black victim rather than a White victim.

Discussion of Preliminary Findings The results of this research, although preliminary, provide a good first step toward understanding the influence of juvenile defendant and victim ethnicity on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders. Consistent with past research (Stevenson et al., 2009), we again found no effects of juvenile defendant race on registration support. Although it is possible that juvenile defendant ethnicity simply has no influence on registration support, we caution readers from endorsing this conclusion. This research constitutes preliminary data, and it included only 57 male participants. Thus, we simply did not have enough statistical power to include participant gender as a third independent variable in analyses. Because past research has shown that men, but not women, treat Black juvenile defendants more punitively than White juvenile defendants (Stevenson & Bottoms, 2009), it is possible that similar effects will emerge in this study as we increase the number of men in our sample.

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We did, however, find support for a competing hypothesis regarding victim race: Participants were more supportive of registration when the victim was Black rather than White. This finding is contrary to effects of victim race found in several other studies, which reveal that Black victims often receive less retribution than White victims (e.g., Feild, 1979; Foley & Chamblin, 1982; Klein & Creech, 1982; Ugwuegbu, 1979). Yet, these findings support an alternative theory. To the extent that participants perceive Black women as more physically powerful than White women (Donovan, 2007; Donovan & Williams, 2002; Esqueda & Harrison, 2005; West, 1995), they might, in turn, have perceived a defendant who successfully raped a Black girl as more dangerous and likely to recidivate. In support, perceived defendant dangerousness and likelihood to recidivate drove effects of victim race on registration support. Further, Willis (1992) found similar effects: Participants perceived an adult rapist as more likely to recidivate and perceived the victim as less blameworthy when she was Black rather than White. Future research should continue to explore additional mediators of victim race effects, including perceived victim strength, to more fully test this theory.

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research The theory and research reviewed in this chapter helps fill practical and theoretical gaps in the field of psychology and the law. This chapter also helps consolidate a complex body of research that highlights the various ways in which racial stereotypes influence marginalized groups of young sex offenders and their victims. Further, we presented novel preliminary data that extends the limited field of research on how race shapes perceptions of juvenile sex offenses—a topic that is particularly important and timely in light of the government’s recent extension of sex offender Â�registration laws to juveniles (Caldwell et al., 2008). Yet, it is clear that much work remains to be done before we can fully understand the complex influence of defendant and victim race on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders. Future research should continue to test the impact of race on perceptions of juveniles accused of other types of sex crimes including, for instance, sexting, date rape, etc. As called for by professionals in the field of psychology and the law (e.g., Diamond, 1997), this research should also strive for greater ecological validity by employing more detailed and realistic case scenarios or even including videotaped simulated trials. In addition, research on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders has begun to uncover a variety of factors that influence

The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Adolescent Sex Offenders

registration support, including, for instance, age of offender (Salerno, Najdowski, et al., 2010), participant education level (Stevenson, Sekely, Smith, & Sorenson, 2010), and the juvenile’s history of having been Â�sexually abused as a child (Stevenson, Najdowski, Sorenson, 2010). Yet, it is possible that these factors might interact with juvenile offender and victim race—a possibility that deserves empirical research. For instance, a juvenile sex offender’s history of having been sexually abused as a child might be used as a mitigating factor (e.g., reducing registration recommendations) only for White juvenile offenders and not for minority juvenile offenders. In support, Lynch and Haney (2000) found that jurors not only were more punitive toward a Black adult defendant than to a White adult defendant, but also that mitigating evidence of a history of child abuse elicited a lenient sentence more often for White defendants than for Black defendants. Perhaps most importantly, although the research and theory reviewed in this article focuses on perceptions of African American defendants and victims, future research should explore perceptions of juvenile sex Â�offenders of other racial minority groups, including Hispanic, Arabic, Asian, and Native American juvenile offenders and victims. Given our current sociopolitical climate and research revealing biases against Hispanic adult offenders (Demuth & Steffensmeier, 2004; Esqueda, 1997; Steffensmeier & Demuth, 2000), it is likely that racial biases against Hispanic juvenile sex offenders and victims will manifest. Consider, for instance, the case of Brandon Coronado, a 17-year-old Hispanic high school student with no prior criminal record (Coronado v. State of Texas, 2003). Although Coronado claimed he had consensual sex with a girl whom he believed was 16 years old, he was charged with aggravated child sexual assault because the girl was actually 12. Coronado waived his right to a trial by jury to avoid a possible life sentence, instead accepting a plea that resulted in 10 years of adjudicated probation and sex offender registration (Coronado v. State of Texas, 2003). Yet, his probation was soon revoked due to a Â�violation, and he is currently serving a 60-year sentence (Crimes, 2010). Understanding how defendant and victim race influence a juvenile’s likelihood of being registered is important given that registering juveniles is not only ineffective at reducing sex offenses, but also negatively impacts the lives of those registered in ways that could contribute to future recidivism (e.g., Levenson, Brannon, et al., 2007). Understanding biases against racial minorities is one important step toward the development of future policy designed to combat discrimination against marginalized and vulnerable young offenders.

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Notes 1.╇ Because it is possible that the 2% (n 5 4) of participants who failed to report their ethnicity were African American, we replicated all analyses excluding those 4 participants. Yet, there was only one difference in the results: The p-value of the victim race effect on registration support dropped from statistically significant (p  .05) to marginally significant (p 5 .06). Because there was just one difference in the results and the difference was such that our hypothesized effects were weaker when excluding these participants, we therefore present the analyses including participants who did not report ethnicity to preserve statistical power. 2.╇ Victim and defendant socioeconomic status (SES) were also manipulated in this study. Yet, because we were uninterested in effects of SES for the purposes of this study, we do not report the SES effects. Instead, we have conducted all analyses collapsed across these independent variables.

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Powell, G. J., Wyatt, G. E., & Bass, B. A. (1983). Mental health professionals’ view of Afro-American family life and sexuality. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 9, 51–66. doi:10.1080/00926238308405833 Rome News Tribune. (2004). Dixon is on Oprah’s mind. Retrieved from http: //rn-t.com/view/full_story/3401153/article-Dixon-case-back-on-%E2%80% 98Oprah%E2%80%99-toda—Local-New. Rome News Tribune. (2008, May 28). Genarlow Wilson, released after sex case, wants to attend college. Georgia News. Retrieved from http://romenews-tribune.com /view/full_story/3462861/article-Genarlow-Wilson-released-after-sex-casewants-to-attend-colleg-Georgia-New. Ross, W. (2005). The perceptions of college students about interracial relationships. National Forum of Applied Educational Research Journal [Electronic Version], 17E(3), 1–16. Rudman, L. A., & Goodwin, S. A. (2004). Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: Why do women like women more than men like men? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 494–509. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.87.4.494 Salerno, J. M., Najdowski, C. J., Stevenson, M. C., Wiley, T. R. A., Bottoms, B. L., Vaca, R., Jr., & Pimental, P. S. (2010). Psychological mechanisms underlying support for juvenile sex offender registry laws: Prototypes, moral outrage, and perceived threat. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 28, 58–83. doi:10.1002/bsl.921 Salerno, J. M., Stevenson, M. C., Wiley, T. R. A., Najdowski, C. J., Bottoms, B. L., & Schmillen, R. A. (2010). Public attitudes toward applying sex offender registry laws to juvenile offenders. In J. L. Lampinen & K. Sexton-Radek (Eds.), Protecting children from violence: Evidence based interactions (pp. 193–218). New York: Psychology Press. Scott, E. S., Reppucci, N. D., Antonishak, J., & DeGennaro, J. T. (2006). Public attitudes about the culpability and punishment of young offenders. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 24, 815–832. doi:10.1002/bsl.727 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). (2011). 42 U.S.C. § 16911. Shaw, J. I., & Skolnick, P. (1995). Effects of prohibitive and informative judicial instructions on jury decision making. Social Behavior and Personality, 23, 319–325. doi:10.2224/sbp.1995.23.4.319 Skolnick, P., & Shaw, J. I. (1997). The O. J. Simpson criminal trial verdict: Racism or status shield? Journal of Social Issues, 53, 503–516. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1997.tb02125.x Snyder, H. N., & Sickmund, M. (2006, March). Juvenile offenders and victims: 2006 national report. Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, US Department of Justice. Sommers, S. R., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2001). White juror bias: An investigation of prejudice against Black defendants in the American courtroom. Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 7, 201–229. doi:10.1037/1076-8971.7.1.201 Sommers, S. R., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2003). How much do we really know about race and juries? A review of social science theory and research. Chicago-Kent Law Review, 78, 997–1031. Retrieved from http://cklawreview.com/.

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Sommers, S. R., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2006). On racial diversity and group decision making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 597–612. doi:10.1037/00223514.90.4.597 Steffensmeier, D., & Demuth, S. (2000). Ethnicity and sentencing outcomes in U.S. federal courts: Who is punished more harshly? American Sociological Review, 65, 705–729. Retrieved from http://asr.sagepub.com/. Stevenson, M. C., & Bottoms, B. L. (2009). Race shapes perceptions of juvenile offenders in criminal court. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39, 1660–1689. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00499.x Stevenson, M. C., Najdowski, C. J., & Sorenson, K. M. (2010, March). Effects of a defendant’s history of being sexually abused on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychology Law Society, Vancouver, Canada. Stevenson, M. C., Sekely, A., Smith, A., & Sorenson, K. M. (2010, March). Individual differences as predictors of attitudes toward juvenile sex offenders: Level of education, political orientation, and gender. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychology Law Society, Vancouver, Canada. Stevenson, M. C., Sorenson, K. M., Smith, A. C., Sekely, A., & Dzwairo, R. A. (2009). Effects of defendant and victim race on perceptions of juvenile sex offenders. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 27, 957–979. doi:10.1002/ bsl.910 Sweeney, L. T., & Haney, C. (1992). The influence of race on sentencing: A metaanalytic review of experimental studies. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 10, 179–195. doi:10.1002/bsl.2370100204 Tewksbury, R. (2005). Collateral consequences of sex offender registration. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 21, 67–81. doi:10.1177 /1043986204271704 Tewksbury, R., & Lees, M. (2006). Perceptions of sex offender registration: Collateral consequences and community experiences. Sociological Spectrum, 26, 309–334. doi:10.1080/02732170500524246 Tewksbury, R., & Lees, M. (2007). Perceptions of punishment: How registered sex offenders view registries. Crime and Delinquency, 53, 380–407. doi:10.1177/0011128706286915 Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (1998). Prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women: Findings from national violence against women survey. National Institute of Justice Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Research in Brief. [Data File]. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved from http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/172837.pdf. Trivits, L., & Reppucci, N. (2002). Application of Megan’s Law to juveniles. American Psychologist, 57, 690–704. doi:10.1037/0003-006X.57.9.690 Ugwuegbu, D. C. E. (1979). Racial and evidential factors in juror attribution of legal responsibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 15, 133–146. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(79)90025-8

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Uniform crime report: Crimes in the United States. [Data File]. (2007). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice—Federal Bureau of Investigations. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gove/ucr/ucr.htm. Weinberg, M. S., & Williams, C. J. (1988). Black sexuality: A test of two theories. The Journal of Sex Research, 25, 197–218. doi:10.1080/0024498809551455 West, C. M. (1995). Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel: Historical images of Black women and their implications for psychotherapy. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 32, 458–466. doi:10.1037/0033-3204.32.3.458 Willis, C. E. (1992). The effect of sex role stereotype, victim and defendant race, and prior relationship on rape culpability attributions. Sex Roles, 26, 213–226. doi:10.1007/BF00289708 Wilson v. State of Georgia, 279 Ga. App. 459, 631 S.E.2d 391 (2006). Wordes, M., Bynum, T. S., & Corley, C. J. (1994). Locking up youth: The impact of race on detention decisions. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 31, 149–165. doi:10.1177/0022427894031002004 Wright, R. G. (Ed.) (2009). Sex offender laws: Failed policies, new directions. New York: Springer Publishing. Wyatt, G. (1982). Identifying stereotypes of Afro-American sexuality and their impact upon sexual behavior. In B. Bass, G. Wyatt, & G. Powell (Eds.), The Afro-American family: Assessment treatment and research issues (pp. 333–346). New York: Grune & Stratton. Xu, J., Kochanek, K. D., & Tejada-Vera, B. (2009). Deaths: Preliminary data for 2007. [Data File]. National Vital Statistics Reports, 58(1), 1–51. Hattysville, MD: National Center for Heath Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs /data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_01.pdf.

PART II

Teen V↜iolence at School, on the Internet, and at Work

CHAPTER FIVE

Schoolyard V↜iolence Stuart C. Aitken and Donald E. Colley III

August 17, 2010: A student is shot and killed in the schoolyard of Belleville Township High School East in Illinois. April 30, 2009: 13 students and staff members are shot and killed at the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in Baku School. March 11, 2009: 16 students and staff members are shot and killed in a schoolyard at Winnenden School, Germany. March 6, 2008: A lone Palestinian gunman shot multiple students in the schoolyard of Mercaz HaPav yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem, Israel. October 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts, 32, takes 10 girls hostage in an Amish school in Nickel Mines Pennsylvania, killing 5. September 29, 2006: Eric Heinstiock, 15, took guns to school in Cazenovia, Wisconsin, and fatally shot the principal. Sept 27, 2006: Duane Morrison, 53, takes six girls hostage, fatally shooting one. November 8, 2005: Assistant principal Ken Bruce was killed by 15-year-old student Kenny Bartley in Jacksboro, Tennessee. May 21, 2005: Jeff Weise, 16, kills five students, a security guard, and a teacher in Red Lake, Minnesota. November 24, 2004: James Lewerke, 15, stabs seven classmates at Valparaiso High School in northern Indiana. February 2, 2004: 17-year-old James Richardson was shot to death at Ballou Senior High School in Washington, D.C. April 24, 2003: James Sheets, 14, shot and killed his middle school principal in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

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April 26, 2002: 17-year-old Dragoslav Petkovis opened fire with a handgun at his high school in Vlasenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, killing one teacher and wounding another. April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhauser, 19, returned to school in Erfurt, Germany, after being expelled and shot to death 13 teachers, 2 students, and a police officer. February 19, 2002: A 22-year-old gunman shot and killed his school’s headmaster in Munich, Germany. Jun 8, 2001: Mamoru Takuma forced his way into Ikeda Elementary School in Osaka, Japan, and stabbed to death eight students. March 5, 2001: 15-year-old Andrew Williams killed 2 classmates and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, California. February 29, 2000: A first-grade boy at Buell Elementary School in Michigan fatally shot Kayla Rolland, 6, after the two children had a verbal spat. April 28, 1999: A 14-year-old boy who had been bullied by his classmates opened fire at W. R. Myers High School in Alberta, Canada, killing a 17-yearold student and wounding another. April 20, 1999: Columbine High School students Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher. April 28, 1998: Two teenage boys were shot to death in the schoolyard of a Pomona, California, elementary school. February 19, 1997: 16-year-old Evan Ramsey opened fire with a shotgun in a high school common area in Bethel, Alaska, killing the principal and a student. March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, entered an elementary schoolyard in Dunblane, Scotland, and killed 16 children, all 5 or 6 years old.

We begin this chapter with a long list of schoolyard violence, including shootings and stabbings that resulted in death, to make five initial points. First, serious violence in schoolyards and common areas is a matter of considerable public concern. Second, in reading details from below the headlines and synopses, it seems clear that in many cases of violent crime an undetected or ignored series of lesser events led to the ultimate tragedies. Third, although a large preponderance of shootings are in the United States, schoolyard violence is a problem affecting a number of countries, with reporting primarily from the Global North (see Akiba, LeTendre, Baker, & Gosling, 2002). Fourth, the list is generated from the Associated Press and other news media venues, which have considerable culpability in the propagation of what sociologist Barry Glassner (1999) calls a “culture of fear,” where certain institutions, organizations, and

Schoolyard Violence

politicians profit from societal anxieties and fears. Glassner points out that these institutions are adept at manipulating our perceptions of schoolyard violence and goes on to argue that Americans in particular are worried about the wrong things. As Small and Tetrick (2001, p. 1) note, “[t]he perception of risk is often greater than the reality, as schools have been largely successful in keeping students and staff safe from harm.” Muschert (2007, p. 60) notes that compared with homes, schools are among the safest places for children, and less than 2 percent of homicides involving school-age youths occur at school.1 When school shootings occur, media hype is only part of the issue; the spectacle is propagated in large part by the idea of child safety and the creation of places that are presumed to be safe, but are not. In a recent book on space and violence, Jim Tyner (2011) notes that schoolyards are indeed violent places for children. This is our fifth initial point. Violence in schoolyards is an impression that resonates with many adult memories of childhood, not because of shootings and other violent tragedies but because of banal everyday violence. Emotionally upsetting taunting, stealing of lunch money, ostracizing, name calling, and bullying are constant features of the schoolyard. Tyner points out that there is a silence surrounding these forms of violence that is akin to the tacit condoning of intimate partner violence.2 What we want to argue here is, first, that the scale of schoolyard violence, whether real or illusory, is part of a larger demonization and criminalization of youths (cf. Aitken 2001; Aitken & Marchant, 2003; Tyner 2011). To do so, we construct a narrative suggesting that schoolyards are a spatialized part of society’s moral integrity, and problematic moral issues foreground the content of lists like the one with which we started. Second, we note that there is another important story relating to playground violence, which is less about serious violence and how it is portrayed in the media and more about insidious, small-scale violent acts that may or may not presage more deadly violence. To make this second argument we construct a narrative of schoolyards that exceed their boundedness, and a narrative of violence that promotes its multiplicity. We assume that schoolyards are not containers of youth activities but are primarily a set of social and spatial relationships. The politics of the event of schoolyard violence begs the question of just how social relations turn up in schoolyards, how relations of power are solidified on the ground and made as real as the space that encapsulates them and gives them form. Schoolyard rules, prescribed activities, territories, dress codes, and buffer zones very much prescribe a normative description of how things ought to be under a neoliberal model of education rather than the way they are in actuality.

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To help focus this notion of power and space, we bring to bear the weight of a relatively new understanding of geographies of violence. We outline in the next section a definition and conceptual understanding of violence that takes hold of the spatial aspects of the problem. In so doing, we weave perspectives from sociology, education, psychology, and anthropology, having each turn into, around, and through space and spatiality. Our argument is that there is nothing in our social, psychological, political, and cultural world that is not also spatial, and there is nothing in our spatial world that is not also social, psychological, political, and cultural. This premise enables us to look briefly at schoolyard violence from implicit, structural, and cultural perspectives before elaborating on how schoolyard violence can be understood from a relational perspective that is less likely to demonize students and that unties from identity politics the notion of violence as a monolithic event perpetrated by particular people and groups. We begin by considering the schoolyard as a moral space.

Schoolyards as Moral Spaces The existence of playgrounds or schoolyards attached to a school building has been part of educational environments since at least the 18th century. In 1799, Robert Owen erected a “new educational institution” as part of New Lanark, his experiment for a planned industrial village. At this time, the village housed 2,500 people and hosted the biggest cotton mill in Scotland. Owen attracted worldwide attention by the gradual introduction of his Utopian moral, social, and spatial experiment. As part of that experiment, the educational institution was placed contiguous to the main mill, and an enclosed play area was laid out at its front: The area is intended for a playground for the children of the villagers, from the time they can walk alone until they enter the school. . . . As the happiness of man chiefly, if not altogether, depends on his own sentiments and habits, as well as those of individuals around him; and as any sentiments and habits may be given to all infants, it becomes of primary importance that those alone should be given to them which can contribute to their happiness. Each child therefore, on his entrance into the playground, is to be told in language which he can understand “he is never to injure his playfellows, but on the contrary he is to contribute all his power to make them happy.” This simple precept, when comprehended in all its bearings, and the habits which will arise from its early adoption into practice, if no counteracting principles shall be forced on the young mind, will effectually supersede all the errors which have hitherto kept the world in ignorance and misery. (Owen, 1816/1972, 81)

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Of course, much of Owen’s perspective on education may be found, in more sophisticated form, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762/1962), which depicts children as angels rather than demons and argues that they are a tabula rasa upon which society can write and instruct. Owen’s writing, however, emanates from the practicalities of the new industrial system and is an important attempt to dissolve the emerging geographic separation of the public and the private that continues today unabated. These are compelling reasons to connect young people to adults and productive activities that are beyond the purview of this essay (cf. Aitken 2001; Aitken, Estrada, Jennings, & Aguirre, 2006; Jennings, Aitken, Estrada, & Fernandez, 2006), but it is also important to recognize in Owen’s writing a set of beliefs about children’s moral behavior that carries over to how the spaces of their play were designed at least through the 19th century (cf. Stow, 1839, cited in Thomson, 2005). Things began to change in the early 20th century, when the moral imperative also incorporated concerns about health and fitness, and playgrounds became spaces for drilling and marching exercises (Mero, 1908). The spatial contiguity of Owen’s cotton mill and his new educational institution is also worth considering in terms of the dissolution and segregation of public and private spaces. Tom Loveless (1998) argues that universal education began as a means of controlling young people who recently had been released from the world of adult work by a series of Factory Acts, which were put in place about 50 years after Owen’s social experiment moved to the planned community of Harmony, Indiana, in the United States and ultimately failed. In addition to their exclusion from the factory floor, young people in North America and Europe were less likely at this time to be taken on as apprentices or child servants (Tyner 2011). With rapid industrialization, public schools were created as part of the sphere of reproduction, as means to producing a well-disciplined and educated labor force. The societal power to discipline is important here because otherwise there was the threat of masses of idle young people roaming wild in the streets. In opposition to the Rousseauvian ideas of children as angels, the ideas of wild and unruly children who require discipline go back in the United States to the puritanical ideas of Cotton Mather, who, through a series of pamphlets in the early 17th century, argued the need to whip the devil out of young people. Written 150 years before Owen’s moral experiment with playgrounds and happy children, Mather’s work was cited as cause for the obligatory schooling system established in Massachusetts in 1647. Specifically, universal education was seen as a means of destroying (thrashing out) that part of a child’s personality that was afflicted by original sin, but it was also about separating children from the adult patriarchal world of work.

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By the end of the 19th century, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) added a class and racial dimension to an evolving story that demonizes and segregates youths. Whether crime and poverty existed in threatening proportions at this time is irrelevant to the fact that middleclass people were convinced by Riis’s rhetoric and representations of innercity youths to the extent that they felt that society’s social fabric would unravel unless so-called delinquent adolescents (a recently coined term) from immigrant and the lower classes were disciplined more fully. Universal schooling provided a morally upstanding solution to the problem. The pioneering psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall forwarded theories of recapitulation, which argued that children can be socialized out of their wild ways to better serve society. Tied to a belief that young people were by nature instinct driven, Hall argued that the individual is dissolved into a collective that exhibits all the traits of evolution, including, during the teenage years, being drawn into tribes or gangs. He characterized preadolescent children as savages, arguing that reasoning with them was a waste of time. Hall claimed that child development recapitulates the history of human evolutionary development, and that the wild and gang instincts could be civilized out of young people through educational institutions. As Tyner (2011) correctly noted, public schools were built on the belief that the schools could rehabilitate children and adolescents who were delinquent. Following Hall and later Piaget, 20th-century public education was predicated on the notion that children must follow a normalized sequence of development. Valerie Walkerdine (1984, 1988) locates public education within a child-centered pedagogy and a set of social and spatial educational practices that constitute not only a mode of observation and surveillance but also the production of a certain kind of child (Aitken and Herman, 1997, p. 68). By looking, among other things, at the ways elementary classrooms and playground in the United Kingdom are laid out, Walkerdine notes a relation between spatial relations and educational practices. At the risk of oversimplifying the complex connections Walkerdine makes between theory and practice, her analysis suggests that the acceptance of developmental theories in educational institutions results in an inability to deal with the practical and complex contexts of children’s lives on the one hand, and an inadequate understanding of the multiple ways that children learn on the other. The notion of the monolithic child, traversing a linear set of developmental stages, does violence to multiple and nonlinear modes of learning and creating identity. It also suggests that zero-tolerance policies and one-size-fits-all dictates constrict not only how we understand children but also how we understand violent events.

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Sarah Thomson (2005, p. 64) argues that playgrounds today are more likely to be “segmented, delimited and customized according to teachers’ and others’ mandates about children’s spatiality.” Using insightful methods of auto-photography and records of perceived intervention, she demonstrates that although primary school children in the United Kingdom see their playgrounds as child focused, they are, in actuality, a space conceived by adults to contain children through prescriptive patterns of usage. An important insight from Thomson’s work is that despite wellmeaning intentions, rules and regulations set up problematic tensions. Contemporary school playgrounds localize and place students, and they “do nothing to encourage resourcefulness, risk competency and freedom of movement” (Thomson, 2005, p. 67). Space is used to mold compliant pupils by teaching them what is acceptable and what is deviant. Over the years, Owen’s moral imperative to “make them happy” has dissolved into a larger concern for keeping young people safe and controlling potentially violent interactions.

Rethinking Spaces of Violence Definitions of violence vary. For example, the term “violence” may refer to a number of different behaviors. Yet by speaking of violence as violence, we imply that it is one thing. Through that one word all the forms and manifestations of violence are said to represent the same social phenomenon. Violence, as it actually becomes visible in real-life situations, is about the intertwining of the human emotions of fear, anger, and excitement in ways that run against the conventional morality of normal situations (Collins, 2008, p. 4). Defining the scale of violent acts and the spaces through which they are perpetrated is central to our discussion. We take as a starting point the idea that violence, like childhood, is not a monolithic idea and can be viewed from different affective angles. Moreover and importantly for what we argue later, the multiplicities of violence are not reducible to particular identities or bodies, as their dimensionality constantly shifts (Aitken, 2006, p. 503). As a result of such movements, violence is decentered and enters into new relations with itself and others. It cannot be contained by schoolyard fences or zerotolerance policies. That said, Dupper and Meyer-Adams (2002) come closest to situating a complex intertwining of space and scale when they suggest that violence, at least at the level of the schoolyard, is complicated by scale and intensity. They suggest, at a first instance, that violence

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is encountered and enacted at a high or a low level. The former, they suggest, is indicative of the most violent and intense acts, including murder, rape, sexual assault, and weapon possession. Low-level violence, on the other hand, is related to less overtly violent behaviors, “such as bullying, peer sexual harassment, victimization . . . and the psychological maltreatment of students” (Dupper and Meyer-Adams, 2002, p. 351). They argue appropriately that the underlying problems associated with low-level enactments are the most common forms of school violence today, despite the prevalence of media and policy attention on highlevel violence and school security initiatives. Problematically, schoolyard shootings, and other dramatic and tragic events, evoke strong public outcries that push for policy solutions based on zero-tolerance and more space-related security.3 While different theories engage with both highlevel and low-level forms of violence, the priority of most school violence studies in recent years is low level, which is a reversal from previous years when gun violence took precedence. In what follows, we suggest that most contemporary studies of schoolyard violence can be grouped into four broadly defined and mutually constitutive categories: (1) schoolyard violence as implicit, (2) schoolyard violence as cultural, (3) schoolyard violence as structural, and (4) schoolyard violence as relational. These ideas about violence also frame the complexities around which a discussion of who participates in violent activities, as well as where and why these activities occur, finds form. Approaches to understanding violence range from practical attempts to “stop bullying” to theoretical attempts to understand how to defuse violent interactions before they can develop. In what follows, we look at each of these categories in turn with the admonition that they are not mutually exclusive and that understanding often flows from a simplistic view of aggression to one that is more complex in terms of space and scale, and that it considers the multiple conditions that enable violent interactions to take place.

Schoolyard Violence as Implicit Some researchers studying violence in the context of young people and schoolyards do not attempt to explain why violent behavior occurs, but rather they set out to define a small part of violent behavior, like bullying, or they reify stereotypes and misconceptions about bullying and bullies (like terrorism and terrorists) by ascribing the identities of “bully” and “victim” to different individuals based on the so-called facts of particular situations. Profiling of potential perpetrators

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is problematic and often comes from surprising sources. After the 1999 Columbine shootings, for example, the U.S. surgeon general published a report based upon a logit regression analysis identifying predominant “risk factors,” including as the first three variables general delinquency, substance abuse, and being male. Aitken and Marchant (2003) address the culture of fear around youth violence that unfairly targets boys from Middle America. They elaborate sexist, classist, and racist biases in reporting, and academic culpabilities in stereotyping perpetrators, victims, and the spaces of violence. Using the case of the murder by stabbing of a girl by another girl from a high school in Santa Monica, California, they show how certain forms of violence are dismissed or covered up, and how moral panics are often misplaced. That the murder occurred at a party in an affluent part of Westwood where students from the high school were gathered does not detract from the schoolyard events in Santa Monica that set the stage for the violence. Contrasting this event with the contemporaneous and highly publicized Santana schoolyard shootings in El Cajon, Aitken and Marchant (2003, p. 162) point out that the dual tendency to vilify and ignore speaks to a highly equivocal reaction to youth violence that greatly depends on where it occurs on the one hand, and on defining the perpetrators and the victims on the other.4 Another problematic geographic blindness is toward the often endemic violence in inner-city public schools. Unfortunately, high-profile shootings by boys in middle-class suburbia often hide a more insidious problem of violence in high-density public schools, such as beatings, stabbings, and gang- and class-related violence. African American, Asian, and Latino youth violence is usually gang- or class-related or caused by personal disputes at schools, but these mostly inner-city minority crimes rarely warrant front-page news. Profiling around mass schoolyard shootings leaves little room for understanding why bullying occurs, and as a consequence this taken-for-granted context of violence can only be approached from the position of intervention (e.g., Benbenishty, Astor, & Estrada, 2008; Small & Tetrick, 2001). Intervention in this sense is problematic because prescriptions for solving violent activity are focused primarily on increasing security at schools and eliminating opportunities for violence. A weakness of strategies related to the zero-tolerance approach, for example, is that all violent acts are generally treated equally—there are few if any distinctions between people who are likely to commit school shootings and those who often fight with their classmates. While this approach can be beneficial because it addresses real-life situations, it is myopic and potentially harmful for coming to

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grips with the mysteries of violence in the long term. It fails to address the primary problems that relate to the complex forces that drive violent behaviors and circumstances. When this approach is related to studies that find violence to be associated with distinct populations or identity groups, then it begins to gain problematic racist tones.

Schoolyard Violence as Cultural As suggested above, many studies of violence cite evidence that the most violent individuals are young males who, because of a particular set of circumstances (e.g., a broken home, poverty, living in Middle America, belonging to a certain ethnicity, growing up urban, etc.), are driven to join violent groups and/or engage in violent behavior. In this way, violence is explained as part of a cultural context, which can be expressed in terms of one identity group or another (see O’Connell, Pepler, & Craig, 1999). While this research may be relevant for elaborating a certain subsection of violent activity and is potent input to simplistic regression analyses, it suffers from the same inherent short-sightedness that bedevils research taking violence for granted. It may not label situations simply in terms of a bully/victim dynamic, but it does take a similar approach to solving problems of violence, which lies in a desire to intervene in the lives of troubled youths. Again, this type of intervention is problematic because it relies on profiling and identifying certain populations based on a set of assumptions, instead of looking more deeply into the social and spatial complexities that create the conditions for violence. In addition, although complexity sometimes shows up in, for example, the distinction between high-level and low-level violence, because of the way it attempts to identify problem cases, the intervention primarily focuses on violence, as if lower forms of violence like bullying are always a gateway to other types of assault. Approaches such as zero-tolerance once again seem appropriate. For example, Leary and colleagues (2003) focus on the likelihood of one-on-one schoolyard bullying resulting in higher-level forms of violence. While it is possible that this type of profiling may be successful, the danger lies in the reification of certain kinds of violence being stereotypically connected to certain kinds of individuals. Also, a successful intervention of this strategy at the local level (e.g., one particular school) has the potential to obscure the understanding of violence at a larger scale (e.g., at the city or national levels). This is also important to point out because school violence is often thought of as a phenomenon local to the United States, but in reality it is a societal feature of many countries across the world.

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Schoolyard Violence as Structural Discussion of schoolyards creates a particular environmental context. Violent-events research studying “schoolyards” focuses less on particular populations of students or on ideals of violence and more on the specific conditions leading to those events. Some of the issues considered when examining the structural nature of school violence include the relationships between students and teachers, and students and their peers; the classroom and schoolyard setting; the makeup of the socioeconomic conditions of the neighborhood; and the institutional functions of the school itself (e.g., the disciplining of youths). These myriad issues are also reflected in ecological models, which explore how violence is transmitted across different levels within a particular social structure from the community to the individual (Dresler-Hawke & Whitehead, 2009). While there is some overlap between cultural and structural studies of school violence, what primarily differentiates the two is the notion that the school already manifests the conditions for violent acts, given the inherent problems in the power structures in place. One of these problems, as Noguera (1995, p. 194) points out, is the “routinization of every aspect of life” similar to that of other controlling institutions like the asylum or prison. Tyner (2011) goes further, arguing that schools are effectively jails and militarized zones where children learn violence, while Thomson (2005, p. 77) notes that primary school children “perimeter walk” playgrounds and play games about “jails” and “gaolers.” LeFebvre (1991) famously notes that the production of space—how it is designed, manufactured, and imagined—is also about the production of rules. Young people learn rules in myriad ways: which chair to sit on, how to approach a teacher, which part of the playground is safe and which should be avoided, when and where to use a mobile phone. The production of space is about disciplining young minds and bodies (see Aitken & Jennings, 2004). The production of space, then, is about power relations. The dominant power in a school institution, wielded by faculty members, counselors, and custodial staff, set them apart from the students, and when punishment or attention is distributed unevenly among the students, certain problems can arise between different students. Although power is often linked to force or violence in a hierarchical sense, a Foucauldian perspective understands power “as something that circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity” (Foucault, 1980, p. 98). The important point that is the crux of our argument in this chapter is that questions of schoolyard

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violence do not revolve around the idea of who has power over people and places, but rather who has power to do certain things in certain places at certain times. This understanding requires us to think of violence as an event. The critical questions of violence as events are not about why violence occurs in schoolyards but are rather about why certain actors continue to perpetrate violent behaviors in, through, and around schoolyards. Questions of this kind refocus attention on dominant actors or institutions as a means of illustrating social practices and relations. Because of unequal power relations in the hierarchy of faculty to students and the expectations for security and concerns of the community, schools are able to pass zero-tolerance policies and thereby treat all violence equally. Unlike implicit and cultural approaches, structural approaches to school violence critique zero-tolerance policies in cases where certain low-level violent activities and student misconducts are treated in the same way as more violent behaviors. Noguera (1995, pp. 200–201), for example, argues that a structural critique points to fear that an overreaction to school violence only perpetuates the problem and that “alternative ways of responding to violent, or potentially violent, behavior would necessarily require a fundamental change in how the institution . . . were conceptualized by those in authority.” It should be noted, however, that while structural approaches explain violence based on the environmental and institutional conditions that shape the schoolyard, they offer a simplistic conceptualization of why violence occurs. That is to say, instead of accepting violence as takenfor-granted or located within a specific culture, a structural critique of violence is still understood as a singular problem. Despite this, structural theories of school violence ultimately bring us to a more complex way of thinking through violent events. The key use of the word “event” here is important because, as we discuss below, relational approaches to violence take into consideration a fuller array of factors that create the opportunities for violence to occur.

Schoolyard Violence as a Relational Event Rather than focusing on a particular population or an environment, a relational perspective is concerned with how a specific set of conditions arises where an individual or a group of individuals are thrown together in a context out of which violence emerges. Whether high-level or lowlevel violence occurs is a less important distinction because relational perspectives attempt to embrace the total complexity of a particular event. Doreen Massey (2005, pp. 149–152) describes thrown togetherness as

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“the politics of the event of place. . . . [Places] pose in particular form the question of our living together.” Schoolyards are, in many ways, primarily a set of relationships. The politics of the event of schoolyard violence begs the question of just how social relations turn up in schoolyards, how relations of power are solidified on the ground and made as real as the space that encapsulates them and gives them form. The question of violent schoolyard events rests, then, with how institutions (legislators, police, parks and recreation boards, school boards, custodial services, families) and individuals connect, given that they are thrown together with baggage (racism, sexism, substance abuse, and so forth) from elsewhere and a predisposition to act. Schoolyards also exist in relation to other properties: parks, classrooms, liquor stores, junkyards. Their influence goes beyond their boundaries, as students leave to enter classes or walk home. Violent events, then, are material, geographic, and comprised of myriad complex relations between youths, adults, institutions, and places. A key figure in relational work on schoolyard violence is Randall Collins (2008, p. 3), who dismisses the notion of violent individuals by suggesting that “even people that we think of as very violent—because they have been violent in more than one situation, or spectacularly violent on some occasion—are violent only in very particular situations.” This may be more indicative of cases of high-level violence because of infrequency in occurrence, but it can also explain low-level behaviors like harassment and bullying. While bullying can seem to be a more pervasive (read: inherent, cultural, or structural) problem, especially in light of the constant connections students have with their peers because of social networking, it is nonetheless necessarily prescribed by a set of relations that precipitate a violent event. For example, although there are cases where students have maintained a consistent “attack” on a classmate via mobile phones or through Internet chat, the primary form of bullying occurs somewhere at school. Because there is a certain geography—a social setting and a physical location—to bullying, it is necessarily a relational problem involving youths and a physical context, such as a schoolyard. That is, two or more people engage in a violent act in a particular place. Collins (2008, p. 8) explains the relations that precipitate “violence [a]s a set of pathways around confrontational tension and fear.” In other words, violence is a series of emotions and circumstances, which play out between different individuals or groups of individuals and ultimately result in a confrontation that is mutual or one-sided. Even if we ascribe the labels “bully” and “victim” to these individuals, both have equal parts in the violent event because “[s]uccessful violence battens on confrontational

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tension/fear as one side appropriates the emotional rhythm as dominator and the other gets caught in it as victim” (Collins, 2008, 19). Hence, while there is a buildup to (and a letdown from) violence, violent events as relational moments are usually very brief, taking the form of a physical altercation or verbal assault. This is an important distinction because the most commonly accepted definition of bullying as a form of violence states that it must be a continuous process of physical or psychological harassment over an extended period of time (Dresler-Hawke & Whitehead, 2009; Dupper & Meyer-Addams, 2002; O’Connell, Pepler, & Craig, 1999). If we understand violence as a relational and discontinuous set of events, then bullying is prescribed as less linear and cumulative. We make this argument not to ignore or demean the problems created by bullying behaviors, but because we think it is important to stop thinking of, and treating it, like other types of violence. Schoolyard bullying as defined in the studies above comes across as either an inherent problem within a particular culture or within a school structure and thus can only be diagnosed as a “global” phenomenon within the school setting. In other words, bullying can only be treated like a disease in a system where only the most stringent and universal policies can eliminate it. Slogans like “stop bullying now” or zero-tolerance policies punish all misconduct and do little to solve the problems that perpetrate violent events because they ultimately ignore, as relational events, the situations and places where bullying first occurs. If we analyze bullying behaviors in terms of violent moments or events, we more effectively determine the nuanced relations that precipitate the problem, and we are less likely to stereotype the individual. For example, if a group of students is harassing an individual student, a policy that approaches each moment of harassment as a violent event may have a more likely chance of success than would labeling a particular student or group of students as violent. On the other hand, if we wait for a pattern to emerge where one group of students becomes bullies and another group of students becomes victims, then the problem can only be treated retroactively. Hence, we have resorted back to the original proposition where bullying is only violence once it has fulfilled the necessary conditions of a group enacting a violent act on an individual or group of individuals. By this point, it may be too late in the process to understand or defuse the problem. While bullying is only one example of school violence that must be reconsidered in terms of a relational approach, it is perhaps the most salient because it is the most commonly associated form of violence on the schoolyard or playground, whatever the age of the population of students. Certainly, bullying and other low-level violent behaviors like fighting occur everywhere within

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the context of the school, but the fundamental characteristics that bring children to the schoolyard (e.g., recess, physical education, after-school activity, etc.) necessarily precipitate an increased opportunity for violence. In this way, the schoolyard’s sociospatial properties become intertwined with other places in and out of the school context, and a more explicit geographical approach to understanding violent interactions can perhaps facilitate the way we think about schoolyard violence.

The Complex Schoolyard Geographies of Violent Events Violent events on schoolyards may result from complex relations presupposing seemingly endless numbers and types of activities that students engage in with peers, adults, and the nonhuman (computers, walls, gates, garbage bins, trees and other plants). This complexity notwithstanding, and in terms that resonate with Massey’s politics of the event of place, Tyner (2011) argues that “power to violence” can be understood in terms of “place-as-disciplined” space, and as such, schoolyards provide a very important venue for understanding violence as a social and spatial practice. He points out that from a very early age we are socialized into a recognition and an understanding of the appropriate use of space, and who has access and rights within particular spaces. Tyner goes on to evoke David Sibley’s (1995) rendering of geographies of exclusion, wherein with any given situation and at any given place, the presence of certain bodies (including nonhuman bodies), as well as specific behaviors and representations, are deemed acceptable or not. Shopping malls are appropriate places for most adult consumers, but people who tend to loiter and not spend money, like groups of teenagers and vagrants, have restricted or no access to them. Today’s schoolyards are secured for enrolled students, teachers, and those who are registered with the school. In most U.S. schools, no unregistered person, including parents and siblings, are allowed on schoolyards, whether children are present or not. Many facilities, particularly in inner-city neighborhoods, are locked down at all times, while some are opened to community use after (and sometimes during) school hours. These security practices extend beyond the schoolyard with buffer zones that exclude liquor stores, pornographic representations, and registered sex-offenders. The microgeography of schoolyard violence is perhaps most closely associated with the sociospatial practices of inclusion and exclusion. Inclusionary violence, while still a very negative consequence of schoolyard activity, is not always a dangerous or an unproductive form of violence. In many ways, inclusionary violence fosters the type of relationships

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understood by geographer Yi-fu Tuan as relationships of “dominance” and “affection.” Exclusionary violence, on the other hand, is the type of lowlevel violence most commonly interpreted as bullying, which when paired with territory creates the possibilities for certain people and practices to be considered “out of place” (Cresswell, 1996). Although the words inclusion and violence do not invite similar connotations, they are nonetheless often linked with a certain tacit recognition. For example, if we think of boxing matches, hockey fights, fraternity hazing, or even political debates, the inclusionary nature of violent relational events is evident. In the case of the schoolyard, a basic example of this is seen in the occasional emotional overflow that leads to bickering, or mutual fighting, over the possession of something like a toy or a ball. The point is that inclusive violence can spontaneously erupt from sport, recreation, and other types of play. This is primarily because, in many of the interactions within the contexts of “play,” a hierarchy emerges based on the capabilities of the individuals in a group, but for the interaction of the play to continue and the hierarchy to persist, all the members of the group must continue to participate. Take, for instance, the infamous notion of someone “picked last”; while this kind of bullying can be psychologically and emotionally damaging, the fact of being included in the game at all sets up a dynamic where an individual is both disempowered and shown affection. As Tuan (1984, p. 164) notes in the context of children’s play, “This power to dominate another—including the power to inflict pain and humiliation on another—is vaguely pleasurable. And yet there is also deep attachment.” This attachment, he notes, is because objects (like toys) and other subjects (e.g., peers) are extensions of the child: “They are his possessions; their worth reflects his worth; praise for them is praise for him.” Many children’s schoolyard experiences are forged within this dominant, and yet often affectionate, relationship. Other forms of this type of relationship include the archetypical example of the bully’s lackey, the sycophantic relationship between members of a clique, or a spontaneous verbal argument about the rules of a game. Much inclusionary violence is benign, although there are certainly larger cultural issues of concern for the ways this violence is institutionalized into adulthood. Still, schoolyard violence by and large only becomes really problematic when it involves the control of space. Tim Cresswell (1996, p. 3) argues that the word “place” turns up as part of the daily vernacular because we are socialized into understanding that “[s]omething or someone belongs in one place and not another.” The idea of belonging to a particular place necessarily creates the potential for violent interaction. This is especially true in conceptualizing the schoolyard in terms of its many microgeographies. When a particular group occupies

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a certain place on the schoolyard, they may set the conditions for use of that space despite state and school regulations. When the individuals using that space come into conflict with the rules of that space, belonging can result in exclusionary practices, which may or may not result in violence. On the schoolyard, exclusionary violence can be as basic as verbal warnings or as dangerous as perpetual bullying to keep someone off a group’s “turf.” Bullying, in the context of exclusionary violence, is very different from the type of bullying that occurs during moments of inclusion. Inclusive bullying is the relationship between the bully and those within the hierarchy, which therefore puts them “in place,” whereas exclusionary bullying occurs between a bully and an outside source. In this situation, exclusion from a place results in the objectification of an individual; he or she literally becomes an object of torment for the bully. This can perhaps be best understood if we look more closely at an example of the microgeographic politics of the schoolyard. Mary Thomas (2009, 2011) focuses on what she calls “misplacement” in a Los Angeles high school schoolyard’s segregated territories of racial-ethnic difference. The violent event that her 2011 book turns upon is a so-called race riot involving Latino and Armenian boys in the school, when several hundred students fought until police arrived in riot gear and locked down the school. Thomas’s focus is on the school’s teen girls and the ways in which their subjectivities surround the event of the riot but also exceed their bodies of difference. The girls who were part of her ethnography understood well the “borderline” that divided the “pretty people” (high-income groups) from “gangsters” (poorer Hispanic students) and Armenians. On the day of the riot, this was the line where students gathered to hurl whatever objects they could find or had (trash cans, milk cartons, golf balls). Thomas followed 26 young women and their feelings and behaviors around the riot, school spaces, sexuality, shopping malls, immigration, families, and home spaces before returning to the riot and the ways it was implicated with and through campus space. The study is relational to the extent that it explores the complex and conflicting relations leading up to and in the aftermath of a violent event. On the schoolyard, the girls expressed discomfort and pain when their racialized bodies entered into the “wrong” segregated territory and were met with stares, racial epithets, or silence, each of which can be characterized as a violent act. In an important sense that echoes the performative work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993), these feelings of discomfort and pain, argues Thomas, indicate the girls’ failure to be fully captured by the categories that mark them. On the schoolyard, she goes on to note, the spatiality of the socialracial body is experienced acutely: “as part of the pressures to conform

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and solidify identification in their teen years, the girls also reproduce racial-ethnic identification and segregation by accepting and often reproducing the same categorizations of difference that pain them” (Thomas, 2009, p. 8). Thomas’s work is liberating in the sense that it relieves girls from the “impossible responsibility” (2011, p. 10) of undoing institutionalized and discursive political identities through empowerment and agency (e.g., “girl power”). She creates a psycho-geographic, postfeminist reading of racialized and sexualized urban spaces that pivot around the schoolyard. Drawing theoretically from psychology (Laplanche and Freud) and identity politics (Butler), Thomas challenges contemporary feminists, psychologists, and policy makers to unburden young women (and men) from the huge responsibility of creating a self that is empowered and engaged. Her point is that although academics interested in identity politics insist that the practices of young subjects are always embodied, these girls’ narratives may also indicate the failure of embodiment to fully represent the subject: “The ‘uncomfortable’ awkwardness of being in the wrong racial territory,” Thomas (2009, p. 17) argues, “marks how complexly the social body is taken up.” Her work on, around, and beyond the schoolyard suggests that boundaries—of bodies or places— and violent events are fluid, intersubjective, and multispatial. This comes together on the schoolyard where the girls’ depictions of their bodies in “other” territories “point to the intersubjective, spatial negotiations at the heart of coming to terms with social relations, norms and differences” (Thomas, 2009, p. 17). There is an inclusivity and exteriority to understanding political embodiment as a precursor to violent events. Moreover, and importantly, Thomas’s girls are not fully and fundamentally invested in social and spatial categories of difference: “They shrug and leave the territories of their ‘friends,’ they live segregated lives, and they claim ethnic-racial identities smoothly and without irony in their self-descriptions and through their casual marking of others’ racial-ethnic identifiers” (Thomas, 2009, p. 18). Political identities always exceed the spaces of their demarcation.

A Concluding Comment Contemporary geographers no longer think of space as merely a container of activities. Space, rather, is all around us. We occupy it, but we also move through it and are changed by, and simultaneously change, it. Indeed, space is not an “it” but an active participant in co-creating our world. As a consequence, we do not think of the schoolyard as a container of young people’s activities for certain periods of time, but rather as a site of

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flows, intensities, and capacities that are hugely important for the relations between young people, adults, and the non-human (bricks, fences, bells, mobile phones). Lefebvre (1991) famously argues that any social order or moral imperative “excretes” space. Space and social relations are produced out of the relations that comprise everyday life, and as such, space and social practices are mutually co-created. Iris Marion Young (1990, p. 62) connects violence to social practices, which Tyner (2011) interprets in terms of its routine and everyday occurrences. Importantly, he goes on to note, violence is a spatial as well as a social practice. It occurs in particular places at particular times to particular people. He argues that violent acts are naturalized and normalized in today’s schoolyards to the extent that we pay them less attention than they deserve. With this chapter, we describe the complex coproduction of social practices and schoolyard spaces that foments the possibility of violent events. Understanding schoolyards as moral spaces opens a critique of violence as inherent, cultural, or structural. It leads to rethinking schoolyards and violence as relational events comprising a multiplicity of affects rather than the acts of particular (disturbed) individuals or gangs. By looking at violent events this way, the politics of the schoolyard is not foreclosed upon, and solutions do not reside in spatial containment (lockdowns) or zero-tolerance, one-size-fits-all determinations. All societies and social orders excrete laws and regulations, which produce space. Laws and regulations are problematic when they become mechanistic and do not accommodate difference. When schoolyards epitomize mechanistic regulations designed to contain children, keep them safe, and avoid litigation, they foreclose upon creativity, innovation, and a politics of everyday living and growing into the world.

Notes 1.╇ After the infamous 1999 Columbine shooting, Los Angeles journalist Mike Males (2001, p. M1) pointed out that “of the 150,000 Americans murdered by gunfire in the last decade, perhaps 150 were killed in or around a school, and only a fraction were White youths. If the U.S.’s overall murder rate was as low as that in high schools, America would be as safe as Sweden.” 2.╇ This perspective may be changing. On October 1, 2010, a series of lawsuits was filed by families in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada, accusing the school board of failing to protect students from abuse, including bullying and taunting by other students and teachers (Nguyen 2010). 3.╇After the 1999 Columbine shooting, myriad entrepreneurial companies found niche markets for products such as metal detectors and threat-assessment systems.

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4.╇ In the wake of criticism about profiling, Dedman (2000) interviewed U.S. Secret Service investigators, who suggested that alienation or persecution drove children to violence. The Secret Service urged adults, instead of looking for traits, to ask about what children say, to understand their grievances and what their friends know, and to assess whether they are depressed.

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CHAPTER SIX

Bullying in Middle School: What Does It Look Like, Why Does It Happen, and Who Does It Hurt? Christine M. Wienke Totura and Carol MacKinnon-Lewis

On a brisk Colorado morning in late April 1999, 2 young gunmen entered their school and opened fire, killing 13 people and then themselves. The reason for this massacre? In addition to reportedly suffering multiple emotional and psychological problems, the gunmen allegedly struggled for years in a school climate that condoned bullying and victimization (Block, 2007). Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold initiated one of America’s most notorious and deadly mass shootings, blowing the research on school violence wide open and forever changing the way the world views bullying as a result. This infamous moment at Columbine High School has served as a marker for how cultures define, anticipate, and deal with the consequences of peer aggression. Columbine is an extreme case of what could happen if bullying goes unchecked. Although most youths who either perpetrate bullying or are victims of it will not become violent, the pervasive and negative impact of bullying remains a critical issue for researchers, practitioners, and parents alike. Trends in estimates show that bullying occurs at all age levels but tends to peak during early adolescence, ages 11–13 (Scheithauer, Hayer, Petermann, & Jugert, 2006). Therefore, middle school is a particularly

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prominent time to focus on the emotional and social impact of bullying and victimization. Most studies conducted over the years have demonstrated that exposure to bullying is a significant risk factor to healthy psychological and physical development for youths, as well as to effective school climates (Haynie et al., 2001; Totura, MacKinnon-Lewis et al., 2009). Of particular importance for school districts, is the consistent finding that bullying disrupts the classroom learning environment—victimization has been linked to declines in student academic motivation, grades, and test scores (Schwartz & Gorman, 2003). Multiple individual and environmental factors influence the frequency of bullying and victimization, as well as the likelihood of youths becoming a bully and/or victim of bullying (Nansel et al., 2001; Totura, MacKinnonLewis et al., 2009). This chapter focuses on providing an overview of the longstanding issues associated with how bullying is defined and classified, how boys and girls in middle school differentially experience bullying, the contexts and consequences of peer aggression, and finally suggestions for building upon existing prevention and intervention efforts. It is important to examine these variables and the relationships among them in order to provide schools with feasible approaches that can be used to improve their environments.

Bullying: â•›A Far Reaching Problem Bullying is a well-documented national and international problem. Estimates of bullying problems vary from study to study and place to place. Worldwide averages estimate that roughly 35% of adolescents age 11–15 report involvement in bullying, with percentages of regular bullying and victimization ranging from 2% in Sweden to almost 50% in Lithuania (Craig & Harel, 2004). Within the United States, researchers estimate that 30% of 6th- through 10th-grade students were involved in moderate to frequent bullying (Nansel et al., 2001). Of those students, 13% were classified as bullies, 11% as victims, and 6% as both bullies and victims. Other studies find higher estimates among rural youths, with 82% reportedly experiencing victimization (Dulmus, Theriot, Sowers, & Blackburn, 2004). When considering the rapid adoption of technology among youths, such as cell phones and social networking websites, national prevalence rates of cyberbullying show that 30% of adolescents report regular involvement (Raskauskas & Stoltz, 2007), with a dramatic increase in online victimization observed since 2000 (David-Ferdon & Hertz, 2007). Despite variability in estimates, it appears that bullying is more prevalent and more severe than many people think (Benbenishty &

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Astor, 2005). The inconsistency in bullying and victimization estimates is likely attributable to how bullying is defined and observed.

What Is Bullying? Researchers have spent years trying to find the best ways to identify bullying and victimization among adolescents. Despite so much focus, no single definition of bullying has emerged as the gold standard. One of the more recent and most widely recognized definitions used to guide identification and assessment of bullying was developed by Olweus (2003). This definition combines several concepts established in earlier bullying definitions and clearly outlines the common characteristics: bullying is (1) a social form of aggression that takes places among youths who encounter each other regularly; (2) physical, verbal, or psychological aggression intended to hurt others and cause distress in a victim; (3) aggression involving the existence of a power differential between the bully and victim; and (4) not a response to aggressive acts (Cook, Williams, Guerra, Kim, & Sadek, 2010). Olweus’s current definition has been used to guide assessments for the model Blueprints Bullying Prevention Program (e.g., Olweus, 2005). To complicate matters further, bullying has also been categorized as either direct or indirect. This distinction between direct and indirect behaviors has had tremendous implications for estimates of bullying and victimization (e.g., Totura, Green, Karver, & Gesten, 2009).

The Many Types of Bullying Behavior Based on definitions of bullying commonly used in the field, researchers have been able to categorize aggression into specific types of behavior: direct and indirect. Direct bullying is as it sounds—the victim has direct interaction with a bully. This mode of bullying generally comprises two types: physical and verbal. Physical forms of bullying include such behaviors as hitting, kicking, pushing, punching, slapping, and spitting on others. These are visibly aggressive behaviors that are universally recognized as bullying by both adults and youths (for a review, see Berger, 2007). Verbal bullying involves making negative and hurtful comments about another. This could include name calling, insults, hurtful teasing, or nasty remarks. As youths enter adolescence, this type of bullying becomes more prevalent than physical aggression (Berger, 2007; Tapper & Boulton, 2005). Indirect bullying, on the other hand, is covert in nature. The victim is not fully aware of who their attacker is because these behaviors are hard to detect and do not occur face to face. This type of bullying takes on

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two forms: relational and cyberbullying. Relational aggression is a form of bullying that also becomes more frequent among early adolescents as they develop instrumental social skills and a reliance on peer approval. Relational aggression involves rumor spreading, manipulation of friendships, and purposeful social isolation of others (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995; Xie, Swift, Cairns, & Cairns, 2002). Cyberbullying is a relatively new form of indirect aggression among youths in which electronics and technology (computers, web blogs, texts, social networking websites, etc.) are used as the medium for intentionally harming others through taunting, threatening, harassment, and intimidation (Berger, 2007; Williams & Guerra, 2007). The viral or rapid-spread nature of this type of aggression can make cyberbullying especially farreaching and damaging for adolescents who rely heavily on their social networks for guidance and approval.

Bullying Roles: Profiling the Bullies, the Victims, and Those Caught in Between Youths can experience bullying in a number of roles, each associated with unique emotional and behavioral profiles (e.g., Olweus, 2003). It is important to examine these profiles to get a picture of the context for bullying, and to unlock clues that could help parents and school personnel prevent problems, as well as intervene when problems arise. Bullies. Adolescents who bully others tend to have a harder time overall in social situations (Haynie et al., 2001). Widespread theories affirm that bullies can be poor at reading social cues and accurately interpreting interactions with peers (Crick & Dodge, 1994). As a result, they are not as likely to identify prosocial solutions to what they misperceive as hostility or threats from others. Bullies, in addition to aggression, often display other problem behaviors, such as hyperactivity, attention difficulties, anger, and rule breaking (Haynie et al., 2001). Bullies also tend to associate with friends who are similar to them—they exhibit a greater frequency of problematic behaviors and greater acceptance of misconduct than other youths (Nansel et al., 2001). Interestingly, despite studies that suggest bullies do not express much emotionality, they tend to have more symptoms of anxiety and depression than students who are not involved in bullying (Haynie et al., 2001; Nansel et al., 2001). These levels, however, are not as high as that of victims. Finally, bullying has been associated with distraction from schoolwork and poorer academic outcomes, findings that are especially important for teachers who may find themselves spending a lot of energy on classroom management instead of instruction (Graham, Bellmore, & Mize, 2006).

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Studies have shown that many bullies view their behavior as reasonable and use skilled methods to exert their control over others (Rose, Swenson, & Waller, 2004). Those who know how to use these skills avoid the peer rejection that less skilled bullies often experience. Indeed, middle school bullies can be popular among their classmates (Keisner & Pastore, 2005), though as they progress into high school, bullies become less popular compared to their more socially skilled peers. Victims. Victims can be divided into two types: passive and reactive. Passive victims are those that receive bullying and tend to present as defenseless and submissive to aggressors (Berger, 2007). Conversely, reactive victims are not defenseless. These youths will respond to bullying with aggression, rather than becoming isolated and withdrawn. Victims often have individual characteristics that make them an easy target (Carney & Merrell, 2001). Psychologically, they are more anxious, depressed, withdrawn, and have lower self-esteem than those who are not bullied (Haynie et al., 2001). As they get older, adolescents are more often harassed and bullied for their suspected or known sexual orientation (Berlan, Corliss, Field, Goodman, & Austin, 2010). Victims, especially those who are withdrawn and shy, are generally less popular in school or bonded with classmates than are other students, even including bullies (Haynie et€al., 2001). Victimization can be associated as well with school avoidance, potentially resulting in greater incidence of truancy, which can have a negative impact on academic performance (Kochenderfer & Ladd, 1996). Interestingly, victims can also display behavior problems, such as delinquency, substance use, and acceptance of misconduct, although often not to the same degree as bullies (Sullivan, Farrell, & Kliewer, 2006). Bully/Victims. Recent studies have found that bully/victims (youths who both bully others and are bullied) represent a distinct group, although typically much smaller in size and frequency than the groups of bullies and victims (Haynie et al., 2001; Nansel et al., 2001). Bully/victims, also known as aggressive victims or provocative victims, are not to be mistaken for reactive victims. Their bullying behavior is not a reaction to an incident of victimization, but rather is a separate and purposeful bullying act (Pelligrini & Long, 2002). These youths are considered the most at-risk bullying group—they tend to have more overall behavioral and emotional problems and poorer social abilities than other youths (Totura, Green et al., 2009). Academically, bully/victims also have the poorest performance, likely a result of poor adjustment and lack of bonding with teachers and clasmates (Haynie et al., 2001; Nansel et al., 2001). Often at a greater rate than bullies, bully/victims display deviant and defiant

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behavior, including cigarette and alcohol use and truancy, as well as verbal and physical aggression (Nordhagen, Neisen, Stigum, & Kohler, 2005). Unlike bullies who tend to progress from physical to indirect forms of bullying as they age, bully/victims primarily engage in physical aggression throughout childhood and adolescence (Unnever, 2005). The peer group-observers. Bystanders are peers who observe victimization and either pretend to ignore it or downplay it, inadvertently contributing to an environment that tolerates youth aggression. Demonstrated intervention efforts have worked toward transitioning bystanders from passive observers into active defenders of victims (Salmivalli, 2001). These efforts capitalize on environmental approaches to changing the context in which bullying occurs, rather than focusing solely on changing the behavior of bullies or victims’ coping abilities. Henchmen/ contributors are peers who serve as contributors to bullies and also help to create an environment in which bullying is tolerated, but in a much more active manner. These youths are observers who engage in teasing, taunting, or other forms of indirect aggression alongside the primary bully. Henchmen are part of a network of peers that assist bullies in establishing dominance and power over others (for a review, see Berger, 2007; Olweus, 2003). Defenders, though rarer than other observer groups, are youths who buck the common trend of contributing to or passively observing bullying situations by stepping up to support and defend victims. These youths are instrumental in taking a stand to shift the peer culture that may tolerate bullying, and they can be key players in school prevention and intervention efforts (Salmivalli, 2001).

Cultural Differences in Expressions of Bullying There is a range of bullying roles that adolescents may take and of peer contexts that are conducive to bullying; however, in order to better understand the experiences of bullying, it is important to consider cultural variations in the prevalence and expression of bullying. Research has identified a number of factors that can influence bullying roles and behaviors; notable among them are gender, race, and ethnicity. Evidence on gender differences in bullying has evolved but is still somewhat inconclusive. Early research reported that more boys are bullies and victims than are girls and that bullying decreases with age (Berger, 2007). More recently, research confirmed that boys are more often bullies and that physical aggression decreases with age but that other forms of aggression (e.g., relational, social) reported to be more prevalent among girls increase

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during the middle school years (Malecki, 2003; Williams & Guerra, 2007). Physical and verbal aggression, as well as cyberbullying, tend to be more common among middle school boys, and relational aggression is more typical of girls (Crick & Werner, 1998; Giles & Heyman, 2005; Kowalski & Limber, 2007). Interestingly, even though boys and girls appear to be at equal risk of being bullied, middle school boys are more frequently victimized (Olweus, 2003). Both boys and girls tend to be crueler to their samesex peers than to the opposite sex (Ladd, 2005). However, when there is gender crossover, boys tend to bully girls more than the reverse (Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter, & Silva, 2001). Researchers both nationally and internationally have examined variations in bullying and victimization by race and ethnicity. For instance, African American youths are more often identified as bullies than victims, as compared to Caucasian and Hispanic youths (Graham & Juvonen, 2002). While ethnic bullying has become problematic in some communities among boys and girls, particularly if students have not been exposed to cultural diversity issues, evidence suggests that race or ethnicity does not necessarily put a youth at risk of peer aggression. Bullying appears to be more prevalent within ethnic/racial groups than between them (Bellmore, Witkow, Graham, & Juvonen, 2004; Berger, 2007). In fact, a large-scale study found that only a small proportion of adolescents felt that their race or ethnicity was a factor in bullying (Nansel et al., 2001). While some cultural trends have emerged in the incidence of bullying, gaps in the research preclude definitive conclusions. Indeed, there is much to be learned about the gender, racial, and ethnic variants of bullying among adolescents. These effects need to be examined further to gain a better understanding of how culture impacts the significance, consequences, and prevention of bullying.

Consequences: What Happens to Bullies, Victims, and Bully/Victims? By all counts, aggression in middle school has future negative outcomes. By high school, bullies find that their overtly aggressive behavior is less the norm among peers and that individuals whom they used to pick on often find friends (Laursen, Finkelstein, & Betts, 2001). Many bullies don’t learn adaptive social skills for negotiating difficult peer interactions and thus become increasingly unpopular as they get older. At a minimum, bullying is associated with other disruptive behaviors, both in and out of school, such as delinquency, alcohol and drug use, and adjustment problems (Nansel, Overpeck, Saluja, & Ruan, 2004; Prinstein, Boergers, &

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Vernberg, 2001). More seriously, bullying has also been linked to violent behaviors, including weapon carrying, frequent fighting, and violencerelated injuries (Nansel et al., 2001). Given these behaviors, future criminal behavior in adulthood is a greater likelihood as well (Olweus, 1999). Aggressive girls suffer from unique problems, including dating violence and teenage pregnancy (Putallaz & Bierman, 2004). Perhaps most problematic among bullies is the potential for suicidal thoughts and intentions. Studies have found that older adolescents, especially boys, have a fourfold greater incidence of suicidal thoughts than do other youths (KaltialaHeino, Rimpela, Marttunen, Rimpela, & Rantanen, 1999). Victims, as well, experience significant disruptions to their developmental course, especially if victimization is chronic and involves multiple types (e.g., “ploy-victimization”; Finkelhor, Ormrod, Turner, & Hamby, 2005). Victimized youths feel anxious about attending school and often try to avoid going, which has a negative impact on future educational achievement and job attainment (Macmillan & Hagan, 2004). Bullying, especially severe and chronic, has been a factor in several recent suicides among youths and young adults. Peer aggression appears to be doubly impactful for youths who are gay or lesbian (Rivers, 2001), or even perceived to be so by their peers, thereby contributing to ongoing trauma and potentially suicide (Friedman, Koeske, Silvestre, Korr, & Sites, 2006). When considering the rarity of homicide among youths, such as the Columbine tragedy, a common factor threading such incidents together has been a repetitive and longstanding bully-victim cycle. In many of the past two decades’ school shootings, the perpetrators were often teenagers who had hit their limit of teasing, ridicule, and torment from classmates (Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002). For those who are not pushed to the fatal acts of suicide or homicide, victimization has long-term consequences. These adolescents grow up with progressively worsening anxiety and depression, along with fears of social interactions. These fears often lead to isolation from others and potentially future victimization into adulthood (Troop-Gordon & Ladd, 2005). Young adolescents who experience both bullying and victimization are by far the most troubled among their peers. These youths are likely to have the poorest trajectories into adulthood because even when they try to improve their social skills, they remain rejected by surrounding social supports among peers, at school, and at home (Bierman, 2004). Given what is known about the long-term impact of bullying, it is easy to see why preventing it should be a priority among schools, parents, and teenagers. It is important to consider where the bully-victim

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cycle starts in order to identify early risk factors that make some youths vulnerable to bullying and/or victimization, as well as factors that can protect them.

Risk Factors: What Contributes to Bullying and Victimization? Although not an exhaustive list, researchers have looked at risk factors such as physical appearance and demeanor, genetic predispositions, and certain contextual factors in homes and schools that increase the likelihood that youths will become a bully or be bullied. Interestingly, many consequences of bullying have also been found to be predictors of it, creating a sort of “chicken and egg” scenario of peer aggression that researchers and practitioners are still trying to disentangle. Several studies examined the relationship between bullying and victimization and youth adjustment among adolescent boys and girls. In terms of physical appearance and presentation, bullies and victims are more often boys than girls (Olweus, 2003). However, with more and more research accumulating on the effective assessment of relational and indirect aggression, girls bully more than expected, but most research still finds that boys bully more than girls (Berger, 2007). Victims and bully/victims differ from other youths in that they are frequently younger adolescents, in the first year of middle school, with lower self-esteem. Additionally, youths with a physical or learning disability may be at risk for victimization, especially in school climates that tolerate bullying (de Monchy, Pijl, & Zandberg, 2004). A recent review concluded that physical size and perceived “power” are important risk factors, especially for boys— bigger kids victimize smaller kids, and stronger kids pick on kids they see as weaker (Berger, 2007). It is important to note that “power” can mean physical strength but also social stature, a characteristic particularly salient for adolescent girls (Casey-Cannon, Hayward, & Gowen, 2001). Expression of anger, while a consequence of bullying, is also a powerful predictor of it (Bosworth, Espelage, & Simon, 1999). Researchers have recently begun looking at genetic precursors to bullying and victimization. Some characteristics, such as temperament and predispositions to anger, do have genetic components. However, these characteristics do not manifest and result in aggression in isolation (Van Goozen, 2005). Studies have shown that babies with difficult temperaments do not automatically become angry and aggressive or highly fearful youths (Kagan & Snidman, 2004). Whatever the genetic foundation, emotional and behavioral risk factors of bullying and victimization reach their potential when they are triggered by an environment that fosters aggression (Van Goozen, 2005).

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Environments That Make a Difference Adolescents come in contact with many environments on a daily basis. Naturally, it is important to examine the characteristics of these environments in combination with youths’ individual characteristics to better identify what puts them at risk for bullying and victimization. For the purpose of this chapter, the focus will be on the two common contexts that youths experience: home and school. Family context. Much work has been done on the relationship between parenting and peer aggression. Parents can influence their children’s social development both directly (e.g., modeling and social reinforcement for aggression) and indirectly (e.g., shaping of perceptions and attitudes about aggression). Ambivalent family connections, harsh discipline practices, and inconsistent and demanding parenting styles are associated with bullying, while overprotective or coercive parenting is associated with victimization. Additionally, many parents of bullies usually provide minimal supervision and typically lack empathy and effective problem-solving skills (Curtner-Smith, 2000; Duncan, 2004). Simply put, these parents are not good role models for learning how to get along with others and solve problems (Walden & Beran, 2010). Conversely, some victimized youths have parents who are rather involved in their daily lives, but this involvement may not be emotionally supportive (Haynie et al., 2001). Much work has shown that negative family environments can be detrimental to youths’ social development. On the other hand, good parenting has a protective effect—it can prevent future problem-solving difficulties among at-risk youths (Simons-Morton, Hartos, & Haynie, 2004). When parents are able to model prosocial behavior and effective solutions to social difficulties, they decrease the likelihood that their children will engage in bullying or become bullied. School climate. The prevalence of bullying is an important consideration for school administrators—bullying and group norms favoring bullying contribute to a lack of engagement in academic activities and lower overall achievement (Brody, Kim, Murry, & Brown, 2005). Early adolescents experience unique environmental changes as they move from elementary to middle schools. Middle school student bodies tend to be larger and more diverse than in elementary school, and students transition frequently throughout the day among multiple classrooms and teachers. A school’s social-emotional climate can facilitate or deter bullying (Espelage, Holt, & Henkel, 2003). Teachers play a critical role in shaping the structure and values of school ecologies (Rodkin & Hodges, 2003). Schools in which aggressive behavior is tolerated by teachers and students can cultivate a

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climate that is associated with higher rates of bullying (Espelage, Holt, & Henkel, 2003). In contrast, the protective effect of a positive school climate can assuage bullying and victimization for middle school students (Kuperminc, Leadbeater, & Blatt, 2001). Quality friendships and supportive relationships at school go a long way toward protecting adolescents from the negative outcomes of bullying and victimization (Schwartz, Dodge, Pettit, Bates, & The Conduct Problems Prevention Group, 2000). Also, students who are engaged, and in a sense “fit,” with their school environment are less likely to experience aggression and bullying (Nansel, Haynie, & SimonsMorton, 2003). These findings highlight the pivotal role that a supportive school environment plays on adolescents’ socioemotional development.

Prevention and Intervention: What Can Be Done? It is clear that bullying is a big problem for youths, parents, and schools—now what? Research over the last couple of decades has laid the groundwork for figuring out what works to prevent bullying and what doesn’t. Many theories have guided the development and evaluation of programs designed to reduce aggressive behavior. One of the most well-founded theories, social-information processing (SIP), indicates that programs should target children’s attributional (beliefs about intent) and affective (emotional) deficits (Crick & Dodge, 1994). These theories suggest that how youths process social cues impacts whether they will respond to situations in an aggressive or nonaggressive manner (MacKinnonLewis, Lamb, Hattie, & Baradaran, 2001). One aspect of SIP shown to be particularly important for understanding aggression is the “hostile attribution bias” (Crick & Dodge, 1994). Researchers have shown that in situations where a peer’s intent is vague, youths with a hostile attribution bias are inclined to believe that the peer intended harm and will respond aggressively (Orobio de Castro, Merk, Koops, Veerman, & Bosch, 2005). Early research focused on looking at attributional biases and physical aggression, but more recent work demonstrates the applicability of the SIP model with relational aggression as well (Crick, Grotpeter, & Bigbee, 2002). Affective, or emotional, aspects of the SIP model are also important for decreasing aggression, by focusing on the ability to accurately interpret emotional cues, especially anger, and regulate (or control) emotional responses (Crick & Dodge, 1994). As such, emotion regulation techniques, in addition to addressing attributional biases, are important components included in interventions aimed at reducing physical (e.g., Anger Coping Program; Lochman, 1992) and relational aggression (Crick et al., 2002).

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It is important to note that not all youths who bully others suffer from attributional biases or emotional regulation difficulties. Some youths use aggressive means instrumentally to control others because they (1) lack more effective social skills for negotiating relationships, or (2) are rewarded for using aggression to manipulate peers in seeking approval or popularity (e.g., Rose et al., 2004). This is where bystanders of bullying can play a key role in either reinforcing or dissuading aggression (Salmivalli, 2001), an important consideration for schools since they play a critical role in modeÂ� ling appropriate interactions and creating an environment that rewards positive behavior rather than bullying. What works and what doesn’t work? Scores of programming and techniques, some well researched and some not, have been devoted to reducing bullying and victimization among adolescents. A few select evidence-based programs will be described in this section, followed by recommendations for program enhancement. Starting with early prevention among youths, the Roots of Empathy program has been shown to have a dramatic effect in reducing aggression by developing empathy for others’ experiences (Gordon & Green, 2008). Designed for kindergarten to grade 8, a neighborhood infant (accompanied by a parent) serves as the “lever” to teach children perspective-taking skills as well as fostering the development of empathy. The program, which began in Canada, has expanded to other countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Among first- to third-grade program participants, proactive aggression was found to be reduced by 88%, with similar reductions in both proactive and relational aggression among fourth through seventh graders (Schonert-Reichl, 2007). Incredible Years is another early prevention program with demonstrated effects in reducing the cycle of youth aggression, a contributor to later bullying behavior (Webster-Stratton et al., 2001). By working with families of preschool and early elementary children, both parents and at-risk youths learn prosocial problem-solving skills. This successful program has been extended to schools in which teachers are taught effective behavior management skills to be applied universally within classrooms. Several programs have also been employed with older children and adolescents to intervene with existing bullying problems in schools. Using a variety of intervention strategies, Second Step Violence Prevention has been successful in reducing the incidence and tolerance for both relational and physical aggression and for improving youths’ social skills (Frey, Nolen, Van Schoiack Edstrom, Hirschstein, 2005). The program focuses on changing maladaptive attitudes about aggression by increasing empathy, perspective taking, problem-solving skills, and anger management

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abilities among elementary and middle school students. Further, the Anger Coping (Lochman, 1992) and BrainPower (Hudley, 1994) programs have successfully taught physically aggressive youths emotional regulation and to more accurately evaluate the intentions of others in social situations. Moreover, Leff and colleagues’ (Leff et al., 2009) Friend to Friend program, an adaptation of the Anger Coping and BrainPower programs, specifically targets relational aggression and has been shown to be effective at reducing hostile attributional biases, as well as relational and physical aggression among highly relationally aggressive girls (Leff et al., 2009). One of the most effective programs developed to date is the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (Olweus, 2005). This Blueprints for Violence Prevention model program uses a whole-school approach to decrease bullying and victimization by improving awareness of these behaviors among teachers, students, and parents. Core components of the program are directed toward restructuring the existing school environment to reduce opportunities and rewards for bullying at the school, classroom, and individualstudent levels. Longitudinal data from students and teachers have shown the program to be remarkably effective in substantially reducing by almost 50% the incidences of bullying and victimization (Olweus, 2005). Although the Bullying Prevention Program primarily targets physical forms of aggression, its emphasis on promoting awareness among teachers, students, and parents, along with strategies for behavior management, may be effective in reducing other forms of aggression and victimization. Despite the promising outcomes described above, preventions and interventions are less effective in environments in which aggression is tolerated (Aber, Jones, Brown, Chaundry, & Samples, 1998). Effective structure and monitoring of student behavior by school staff has positive implications for how adolescents learn to get along and form peer relationships. Accordingly, one of the first goals of any school-based program should be to educate students, teachers, and other school staff about the negative consequences of aggression with the goal of creating a more positive school climate. Broadly applying zero-tolerance policies or peer mediation or simply suggesting that victimized youths take a stand against bullying are ineffective prevention strategies (Fox, Elliott, Kerlikowske, Newman, & Christeson, 2003). Zero-tolerance policies typically result in bullies receiving suspensions and unsupervised time at home, rather than providing an opportunity to truly understand the causes of bullying. Encouraging victims to stand up to bullies may actually put them at greater risk of future bullying. Finally, peer mediation does nothing to address the power that bullies have over victims and could lead to further emotional damage by assuming that victims have accountability in the aggression perpetrated against them.

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Lessons learned. As a result of developmental research, much is known about bullies and victims, though intervention strategies have met with somewhat limited success (Rigby, 2005). However, researchers have continued to develop and refine preventive interventions to address bullying behavior, many of which are school based. Unfortunately, few school interventions have undergone scientific evaluation (Berger, 2007), a shortcoming that must be rectified. Moreover, much of the field’s past prevention and intervention research focused on boys’ physical aggression (Crick & Zahn-Waxler, 2003). Since research shows that both boys and girls can be physically and relationally aggressive, attention to how gender differences translate into the expression of aggression will lead to more sensitive and effective interventions (Ostrov et al., 2009). While much progress is left to be realized, effective programming has demonstrated common elements: (1) programs targeting youths’ social-information processes and the connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the most promising; (2) effective programs work on both the individual and environmental levels and involve multiple components (e.g., teacher training, parent consultation, youth social-skill training); (3) programs that are successful across genders are specifically addressing female culture and relational aggression; (4) well-implemented school-based programs deal with school systemic issues that can pose challenges, such as leadership buy-in, demands on teacher time, teacher perceptions of student bullying, and available resources. Despite some universal emphasis on these common elements across programs with empirical evidence, outcomes from many prevention and intervention efforts have been less than promising. Bullying is a multifactor, complex problem that involves effectively intervening with tightly intertwined developmental and social processes—doing this well is very difficult. The resulting lack of robust change in rates of bullying and victimization underscores the need to be sure that programs are firmly planted in sound behavior change theory and are embraced by all key players who have a stake in their success. By utilizing a social-ecological framework, in which efforts are targeted at youths and take into account the contextual factors that shape their lives, program developers adopt a holistic approach to involving the people and environments that impact youth behavior (Swearer, Espelage, Vaillancourt, & Hymel, 2010).

Future Directions for Research and Practice: Where Do We Go from Here? With youths becoming increasingly tech savvy and with more and more bullying occurring in virtual formats, prevention and intervention programming must remain as innovative as the technologies adolescents are

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using to victimize their peers (Berger, 2007; Raskauskas & Stoltz, 2007). Over the years, studies have increasingly incorporated technology into assessments and observations of youth behavior as it occurs, including use of such devices such as pagers, cell phones, video cameras, and digital recorders (e.g., Tapper & Boulton, 2005). Not only does this provide a wealth of information about peer relationships, but the information is collected in real time without reliance on traditional observation, nomination, or survey techniques. This is a natural phenomenon—as time goes on, technology becomes more advanced and available, and youths are inherently the first market to be fully dialed into these advances. Thus, it seems a logical progression that technology would come to the forefront of prevention and intervention as well, in addition to its successful utility in the assessment of youth behaviors. As it happens, the limited success of many behavior-change intervention programs has prompted some to question whether new strategies are needed to effectively reach youths (Baranowski, Buday, Thompson, & Baranowski, 2008). Initial evidence, though rare, suggests that computerbased applications hold great promise as an effective channel for targeting youth behavior change, primarily because adolescents find them to be engaging and they are already being used for social, entertainment, and educational purposes (Bers, 2006). Wilkinson, Ang, and Goh (2008), in their comprehensive review of the history and emergence of the Internet and video game literature, explore how recent technological and cultural innovations can be used to treat a host of mental health challenges. Despite an initial backlash by some scholars with concerns about the possible harmful effects of video games for therapeutic purposes, several program developers are identifying methods for harnessing youth attraction to video games and the communicative possibilities of the Internet in treating aggression (Bosworth, Espelage, DuBay, Daytner, & Karageorge, 2000). These pioneering efforts are opening new doors for innovative preventive interventions that have not previously been considered. Future researchers should consider how innovative technological approaches might be used in the dissemination and implementation of preventive interventions targeting bullying behavior.

References Aber, J. L., Jones, S. M., Brown, J. L., Chaundry, N., & Samples, F. (1998). Resolving conflict creatively: Evaluating the developmental effects of a school-based violence prevention program in neighborhood and classroom context. Development and Psychopathology, 10, 187–213.

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Totura, C. M. Wienke, MacKinnon-Lewis, C., Gesten, E. L., Gadd, R., Divine, K. P., Dunham, S., & Kamboukos, D. (2009). Bullying and victimization among boys and girls in middle school: The influence of perceived family and school contexts. Journal of Early Adolescence, 29, 571–609. Troop-Gordon, W., & Ladd, G. W. (2005). Trajectories of peer victimization and perceptions of the self and schoolmates: Precursors to internalizing and externalizing problems. Child Development, 76, 1072–1091. Unnever, J. D. (2005). Bullies, aggressive victims, and victims: Are they distinct groups? Aggressive Behavior, 31, 153–171. Van Goozen, S. H. M. (2005). Hormones and the developmental origins of aggression. In R. E. Tremblay, W. W. Hartup, & J. Archer (Eds.), Developmental origins of aggression (pp. 281–306). New York: Guilford. Vossekuil, B., Fein, R. A., Reddy, M., Borum, R., & Modzeleski, W. (2002). The final report and findings of the safe school initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attacks in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education. Walden, L. M., & Beran, T. N. (2010). Attachment quality and bullying behavior in school-aged youth. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 25, 5–18. Webster-Stratton, C., Mihalic, S., Fagan, A., Arnold, D., Taylor, T. K., & Tingley, C. (2001). The incredible years: Parent, teacher, and child training series. Blueprints for Violence Prevention Series, Book Eleven, BP-011. Boulder, CO: Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. Wilkinson, N., Ang, R., & Goh, D. (2008). Online video game therapy for mental health concerns: A review. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 54, 370–382. Williams, K. R., & Guerra, N. G. (2007). Prevalence and predictors of Internet bullying. Journal of Adolescent Health, 41, 14–21. Xie, H., Swift, D. J., Cairns, B. D., & Cairns, R. B. (2002). Aggressive behavior in social interaction: A narrative analysis of interpersonal conflicts during early adolescence. Social Development, 11, 205–224.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Teachers and Teen Bullying Deborah James, Maria Lawlor, Niamh Murphy, and Ann Flynn

Introduction This chapter examines the ways that teachers influence school bullying. The first section outlines how teachers can influence the levels of bullying in schools in both a positive and negative manner. The second section outlines strategies and techniques that teachers can apply to prevent and respond to bullying. It covers general bullying and relational aggression and provides a rationale for why they should be dealt with in slightly separate ways.

Why Do Schools Vary in Their Levels of Bullying? School bullying has been found to have diverse and negative effects on those victimized (James, Sofroniou, & Lawlor, 2003; Kim, Koh, & Leventhal, 2005; Skues, Cunningham, & Pokharel, 2005). Many countries have developed and introduced programs to combat bullying with mixed results (Olweus, 1993; Ortega, Del Rey, & Mora-Merchain, 2004; Stevens, De Bourdeaudhuij, & Van Oost, 2000). Research shows that interventions that focus on whole school antibullying efforts are more effective than curriculum-based approaches or social-skills training on their own (Swearer, Espelage, Vaillancourt, & Hymel, 2010). Efforts to understand differences in why interventions produce differing results have examined factors such as social climate, urbanization, catchments

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area, and school and class size (Galloway & Roland, 2004; Olweus, 1993; Swearer et al., 2010). Some researchers have advocated that bullying in schools should be tacked in a more holistic manner by examining the social climate (Siann, Callaghan, & Lockhart, 1993; Swearer et al., 2010). Studies examining effective schools have found that they are characterized by effective leadership, high expectations of students, students feeling supported and respected, consensus and cohesion among staff, a sense of community, staff modeling appropriate behavior, and members knowing, caring, and supporting one another (Ma, Stewin, & Mah, 2001; Swearer & Doll, 2001). “Successful” schools are associated with declines in bullying-related problems (Kasen, Berenson, Cohen, & Johnson, 2004), students liking school, more student empathy, greater academic motivation, and more altruistic behavior (Battisitch & Hom, 1997; Solomon, Watson, Battisitch, Schaps, & Deiucchi, 1992). Schools characterized by high conflict and poor student/teacher morale had higher levels of bullying (Kasen et al., 2004; Roland & Galloway, 2004). Research shows that teachers are central to the development and maintenance of school climate.

Teacher Attitudes toward Bullying Studies have also shown that when teachers provide social support, students show better academic achievement, school adjustment, and mental health (Colarossi & Eccles, 2003; Flaspohler, Elfstrom, Vanderzee, & Sink, 2009). When students believe that teachers care about them, bullying was found to be lower (Lee, Buckthorpe, Craighead, & McCormack, 2008); they were less likely to engage in sex, alcohol, or drugs; and they were more likely to hold higher life satisfaction (Huebner, Funk, & Gilman, 2000). Support from teachers is protective, particularly when there is low parental support (Connors-Burrow, Johnson, Whiteside-Mansell, Mckelvey, & Gargus, 2009). When students feel that teachers are fair and caring, students feel that they have a stake in making the school safe (Hyman & Perrone, 1998), and they trust teachers to protect them from victimization (Doll, Song, & Siemers, 2004). In terms of managing bullying in the school, children observe how the teacher responds (Aceves, Hinshaw, Mendoza-Denton, & Page-Gould, 2010), and this reinforces their beliefs as to whether teachers are people they can turn to and whether bullying is taken seriously in the school. Responding early is necessary to help students to feel safe (Doll et al., 2004; Meese, 1997). When teachers tolerate or dismiss bullying, it sends a message to all students (regardless of their involvement) that bullying is

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condoned (Hoover & Hazler, 1994). If bullies believe that their behavior is condoned or supported, it may escalate (Plaford, 2006; Salmivalli, 2001). Although many antibullying programs advocate a “whole school” approach to the management of bullying, they tend to focus on behaviors between students and rarely focus on the quality of other relationships in the school, namely student to teacher, teacher to student, and teacher to teacher. If teachers bully students or are victimized by them, this is likely to influence the underlying culture of the school and may make antibullying strategies that concentrate solely on students ineffective.

Do Teachers Bully Students? In one study (James et al., 2008) 30% of students reported being bullied by a teacher. The behaviors cited included being ignored, called names, threatened, physically hurt, and sexual harassment. While this sounds alarming, taking all reports of teacher bullying at face value may be too simplistic. It is possible that what teachers perceive as acceptable disciplinary measures may be seen by students as bullying behavior. For example, ignoring a student who is attention seeking may be an effective method for managing class discipline, but is it bullying? Ignoring a student for no reason or “picking on them” because they are disliked by the teacher is not appropriate. Stating the consequences of not completing work or of misbehavior, while appropriate, may be perceived by students as threatening behavior. Students may also perceive confiscation of their belongings as bullying, thus inflating the numbers reporting bullying by teachers. On the other hand, some of the behaviors described by students, such as name calling, physical abuse, and put downs are unequivocally bullying behaviors and fall within the category of “psychological maltreatment” (Hyman & Perrone, 1998; Sarno, 1992). This has huge implications for the well-being of students, in particular their emotional state and educational attainment, and affects the way in which they respond to teachers. To reduce misunderstanding in relation to this issue, it is important that bullying is discussed openly in the school, that all parties are aware of their actions, and that standards of acceptable behavior are met. This sounds simple, but in discussions with teachers, it appears that there is no clear-cut line between bullying and discipline. Some teachers view such behaviors as shouting at students and sarcasm as necessary classroom-management strategies. Often there is a difference of opinion among teachers as to whether these behaviors are acceptable. There is no way of knowing how many teachers engaged in bullying students in these studies. It is likely that extreme behaviors were perpetrated by a few individuals, but many of the behaviors mentioned are unequivocally

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bullying and need to stop. (See section on managing bullying in the school for ways to prevent misunderstandings.) The power/authority that teachers have may make the effects of bullying worse for the individual. Most researchers agree than an incident of bullying involves an imbalance of power between the people involved (Olweus, 1997). In a classroom setting, teachers have an automatic power in the relationship (McEvoy, 2005) that does not apply when bullying is between two peers. Between students there is a theoretical possibility for the power to shift from one individual to another. Teachers may claim that their behavior is justified, either as a necessary classroom strategy or because they were provoked by their targets (McEvoy, 2005), thus drawing attention away from the unacceptable behavior. Bystanders are also less empowered to intervene in bullying between a teacher and students without involving another adult. Indeed, abusive behaviors by teachers send a message of fear to the others in the class, which enhances their vulnerability (McEvoy, 2005). If a teacher is bullying a student in a classroom, it is likely that there is an audience. This may make the situation more difficult for the person bullied in a number of ways: it increases the humiliation through its public nature and also sends a message to the others in the class that this person is unworthy of better treatment. This has the potential to set up the person for other forms of bullying. On the other hand, it may be possible to shrug off a put-down from a teacher more easily because his or her opinion may be less important than those of friends, but on the whole, it appears that being bullied by a teacher may have greater implications for young people than bullying by their peers.

Do Students Bully Teachers? Students are also culpable of engaging in bullying teachers. Behaviors directed toward teachers include ignoring them, insolence, name calling, noncooperation, physical threats and theft of belongings, lack of preparation for or attention in class, verbal abuse, threats, insolence, sexual harassment, damage to their property, and rumors (James et al., 2008; Terry, 1998; TUI, 2006). Research shows that student misbehavior constitutes one of the major sources of stress for teachers (Borg & Falzon, 1989; Boulton, 1997; Smilansky, 1984), leaving them feeling drained and stressed, and lowering their morale (TUI, 2006). Some may simply shrug it off, but others may internalize or externalize the effects, which in turn may provoke a maladaptive response. Either way, it is unacceptable that teachers have to endure such behavior from their students. The high level of aggression and low level of respect for teachers is likely to substantially

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affect the level of discipline and subsequently the standard of teaching in the classes of teachers where these conditions prevail. In the TUI study, teachers estimated that dealing with threatening or intimidating behavior took more than 10 minutes of class time to deal with. Considering that teachers experienced disruptive behavior on a weekly and often daily basis, this adds up to a considerable amount of time that is not being used for teaching. In classes where these situations are common, such behavior must impact educational attainment. It also has implications for the effectiveness of antibullying programs. If students witness, or engage in, bullying teachers, then they are unlikely to respect that teacher or believe in that teachers’ ability to mange bullying or help them with a bullying problem. It is difficult for anyone to admit that they are being bullied, and for teachers it is particularly difficult as they are alone in the classroom and are expected to deal with it. Admitting to being bullied to a colleague or management could be seen as failure.

Teachers Managing Bullying There is no doubt that teachers are under increasing stress from disruption and harassment by students. However, teachers are the adults in the dynamic and, acting in loco parentis, have a role in directing the development of young people (Hart, 1987). They should be striving to create an environment that treats students with firmness, respect, and understanding. Without this, teachers may be seen as adversaries rather than positive role models (Twemlow, Fonagey, Sacco, & Brethour, 2006). Managing bullying is a difficult task, and as research shows, many teachers are unable to deal with it. There is a need for increased training at both preservice and in-service levels. Without the awareness and willingness to deal with bullying, it will continue to flourish. The role that teachers can play in the management of bullying is also highly dependent on the level of practical support provided by senior management. Without the support of the principal, antibullying programs will not work. Parents also have an important role in supporting teachers. If they have an understanding of bullying and are supportive of antibullying and disciplinary procedures, this aids teachers in managing bullying (Plaford, 2006).

Can Bullying Be Eradicated? Smith & Brain (2000) state that “bully/victim problems are normative in the strictly limited sense that they are likely to be found in any relatively enduring human group, bullying is found in many societies, and although

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normative does not mean that they are socially acceptable.” If this is true, it may be unrealistic to expect that bullying can be totally eradicated from our society and therefore must be managed. If we accept that bullying cannot be totally eradicated from our society, that it is difficult to encourage teenagers to tell someone about bullying, and that increased awareness results in more reporting (or realization that what is happening really is bullying), then program interventions need to focus on how bullying is dealt with in the school environment as well as aiming to reduce the frequency of bullying behaviors. In general, initiatives designed for primary schools show more positive results than those aimed at adolescents (Rigby, 2002; Smith & Sharp, 1994). Cognitive development may have an impact. Younger children are more amenable to obeying directives from adults, and many stop bullying behaviors when asked to do so. They are also more likely to tell an adult if another child hits them, takes their belongings, or excludes them from games. Management of bullying is easier at the elementary level. Teachers are usually responsible for one class and can concentrate their efforts. Implementation of programs is more difficult at the middle/ high school level, as there are more complex timetables and more complicated organizational structures, such as more students, student groups varying by subject, and more teachers (Weissberg, Caplan, & Harwood, 1991; Weissberg, Caplan, & Sivo, 1989). Teenagers are also less likely to seek adult help (Boulton & Underwood, 1992). A culture of secrecy surrounds bullying and, coupled with the reluctance to be thought of as a snitch, makes it difficult to encourage adolescents to tell about bullying (Boulton & Underwood, 1992; Melton et al., 1998; O’Moore, Kirkham, & Smith, 1997; Rigby & Barnes, 2002; Rivers & Smith, 1994; Whitney & Smith, 1993). Ortega & Lera (2000) suggest that older children, especially those involved in bullying or other antisocial behavior, may reject teacher influences and the values advocated by the school and therefore continue to bully, even though it goes against the rules of the school. Therefore, it is imperative that schools implement a planned and consistent approach to the management of bullying. Studies show that many teachers do not have a good understanding of bullying and how to manage it (Bauman & Del Rio, 2005; Boulton, 1997). This is reflected in the views of students who indicate that they are skeptical about their teachers’ ability to identify or respond appropriately to bullying (Hanish & Guerra, 2000; Houndoumadi & Pataeraki, 2001). In one study (Charach, Pepler, & Zieler, 1995) 70% of teachers thought they intervened “almost always” while only 25% of the students agreed. In

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another study (Harris, Petrie, & Willoughby, 2002), it was found that only 35% of students thought that their teachers were interested in stopping bullying, and only 25% thought that school administrators were interested in stopping bullying. Students are also skeptical of teachers’ abilities to respond appropriately or to make a difference (Harris et al., 2002; Hoover, Oliver, & Hazler, 1992).

Telling about Bullying Is Not So Easy The reluctance of teenagers to tell a teacher is unsurprising given their skepticism of teachers’ abilities to deal with bullying effectively. Telling someone that you are being victimized is difficult to do. Many do not tell because they are ashamed to admit (to themselves as well as others) that it is happening. Others believe that the situation will get worse if they tell or that nothing will be done. Rigby & Barnes (2002) concluded that interventions by teachers could make matters worse unless handled in a competent and sensitive way. If students are to be encouraged to tell about bullying, then teachers need to be seen as people who are interested in finding out about bullying and who deal with it confidentially, sensitively, and competently. As Galloway & Roland (2004) suggest, the manner and effectiveness of interventions that show a teacher’s ability to create a climate of security and to maintain constructive social relationships is crucial. For discipline and antibullying strategies to be effective in schools, there needs to be agreed-upon standards of behavior for both staff and students. If a standardized approach is taken across the school, then this lessens the opportunity for getting away with inappropriate behavior.

Managing Bullying in Schools As mentioned earlier, antibullying strategies that encompass the whole school are generally found to be more effective. In successful schools, the staff have bought into the idea that they can play a constructive role in managing bullying. This involves proactive and reactive interventions by teachers. Even in the best-run schools, bullying will continue to occur, and staff have to consistently and continually demonstrate to students that they take it seriously and are prepared to deal with it. Experience in working with schools has demonstrated that antibullying strategies will never reach optimal success without the support of principals and others in a management role. Schools where the principals have invested time and effort into managing bullying have been shown to increase results (Limber, Nation, Tracy, Melton, & Flerex, 2004). School

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management has an important task not only in setting the agenda that bullying is unacceptable and initiating responses that demonstrate that they are prepared to deal with it, but also in enabling staff to deal with it effectively. This involves: • Providing on-going in-service training for teachers, especially new staff. • Providing the time and resources for staff to investigate and respond to incidents. • Scheduling regular antibullying-awareness weeks/days. • Monitoring effectiveness of strategies and procedures. • Developing and reviewing antibullying and code-of-discipline policies in conjunction with staff. • Provision of parents’ awareness nights. • Providing/accessing support for victims of bullying. • Providing/accessing support for those involved in bullying others.

As mentioned earlier, in order to prevent the types of misunderstandings associated with acceptable/unacceptable disciplinary strategies, it is advisable to hold staff meetings or in-service training days where acceptable/ unacceptable behaviors are discussed and agreed upon by all staff. These should cover student-to-student, student-to-teacher, teacher-to-student, teacher-to-parent, and parent-to-teacher behaviors. It can also be useful to set up a personal safety committee (ideally made up of management and interested staff members), whose function is to oversee the antibullying strategies and responses within the school. Ideally, schools should aim to hold an antibullying/friendship week at least once a year to reinforce the message that bullying is unacceptable and will be dealt with, and to remind students of the ways to support one another and to seek support from staff. This is an ideal time to teach antibullying curricula on both general and relational bullying (James, Flynn, Lawlor, & Murphy, 2010).

A Conceptual Model for Managing Bullying A useful model for dealing with bullying behavior is offered by the concept of restorative versus retributive justice. Restorative justice provides a holistic view that seeks to restore the balance of relationships between students in the school. In addition to supporting the victim, a restorative approach also takes into account the needs of the person who is bullying (Morrison, 2002). Table 7.1 compares the framework for restorative justice versus retributive justice.

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Table 7.1â•… Retributive versus restorative justice. Retributive Justice

Restorative Justice

Misdemeanors defined as Misdemeanor defined as violation of a â•… violation of school rules â•… person’s right by another Focus on establishing blame Focusing on problem solving by â•… expressing feelings and needs first, and â•… then how to meet those needs Adversarial relationship Dialogue and negotiation—everyone â•… involved, listening to each other Punishment to deter/prevent Restitution, reconciliation, and â•… restoration as a goal Accountability defined as Accountability defined as understanding â•… taking punishment â•… the impact of the action, deciding to put â•… things right, and making reparation Conflict seen as individual Misdemeanors recognized as interpersonal â•… versus the school â•… conflicts; value of conflict as potential â•… opportunity for learning is recognized

Teenagers are often afraid and reluctant to tell an adult that they are being bullied; therefore, to manage bullying effectively within a school, teachers have to take a proactive role. There are many opportunities to address bullying, both formally and informally. Informal networking between teachers on a day-to-day basis provides opportunities for preempting and monitoring. Where a specific technique is being used to respond to a particular situation in class, it is important that all teachers involved with the class be informed of the approach being taken and be given appropriate feedback. In any approach to resolving bullying, care should be taken to ensure that information supplied to or by a teacher is not used to further torment a victim. The following three strategies can be used as preventative measures as well as for investigating incidents.

Confidential Questionnaires Confidential questionnaires are the simplest way of discovering who needs help in dealing with bullying. A short questionnaire can be completed in class time. Table 7.2 provides a template for a class questionnaire. A more confidential method would be to allow the same question to be answered at home, signed by parents, and returned in a sealed envelope. Some schools do this on a regular basis.

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Table 7.2â•… Template for class questionnaire. â•…Name: â•…Class: â•… Would you like to talk to someone about bullying?

No

Yes

Class Observation Class observation involves all subject teachers recording behavior over an agreed-upon time period, pooling the information, and deciding on a course of action. This observation is carried out unobtrusively. Class observation is a useful tool for discovering the dynamics at work in the group. (Note that in relational aggression the dynamics may be too subtle to be observed using class observation alone.) Teachers may find class observation useful when bullying is suspected, but more evidence is required to determine its source. In cases where bullying has been reported and there is a risk of retaliation, this strategy protects confidentiality and enables evidence to be gathered through direct teacher observation. It may also be used to gather information when a teacher is being bullied, especially by a group of students. Aims of Class Observation • To improve class atmosphere, by protecting the rights of students and teachers. • To coordinate teachers’ responses to bullying behavior. • To identify and encourage constructive influences in the class. • To record problematic behavior systematically. • To identify students who need support, including those engaged in questionable behavior. • To provide management and parents with accurate information on bullying. • To enable teachers to establish standards of what is acceptable and unacceptable, and to implement these.

Class observations are best carried out discreetly and confidentially with the support of the principal, who can facilitate teachers meetings to pool information and ensure follow-up (see table 7.3). Steps for Implementation • Convene an initial meeting of teachers and outline the nature of the problem. • Explain the procedure and how you propose to use it.

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Table 7.3â•… Sample class observation form. Time

Name

Behavior

2:15 3:30

John Phillip Ann Sarah

Sniggered when Harry asked a question Joined in and made more comments Rolled her eyes and made sighing noises Defended Mary who was being teased

Directed toward Harry Harry Harry

• Emphasize confidentiality. • Fix a date for returning completed forms. Two weeks should suffice, but urgent issues should be dealt with immediately under school procedures. • Gather evidence and record on observation forms. • Convene follow-up meeting of teachers and pool information. • Decide on appropriate response in line with the school’s policies and procedures. • Interview students concerned. (See guidelines on conducting interviews.) • Review progress with class teachers.

Behavior in the corridors, playgrounds, toilets, changing rooms, etc., should also be included. Ancillary staff may be aware and knowledgeable about what is going on, and their observations and comments should be included.

Bullying Sociogram A sociogram is a useful strategy for exploring relationships in a class or group. The method employed is to ask each individual a series of questions designed to uncover the social dynamic in a class, thus identifying positive and negative influences in the group. Aims of the Sociogram Preventative • To prevent bullying by adopting a pastoral approach. The direct intervention of an individual teacher will build trust and confidence in the school’s antibullying policy and inspire better relationships among the students themselves. Awareness of the unacceptability of bullying will be raised even if there are no problems in the group. • To provide a safe structure that encourages disclosure of bullying situations, thereby uncovering emerging or previously undetected cases. • To establish a clear picture of the social dynamic operating within the class by identifying:

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• The power structure among students • Levels of bullying and victimization • Students involved • Students at risk

To identify strengths within the group. To empower bystanders, and to encourage mutual support between students. This will give the teacher firsthand information and a better understanding of the hidden subculture of the group. Reactive • To investigate reported incidents of bullying. This includes one-to-one bullying or incidents involving a group. • To stop bullying by providing an immediate response, and to reduce the possibility of retaliation.

Procedural • To embed antibullying measures into teachers’ classroom practice. Information may also be used as an early warning system to form the basis of a team response by other subject teachers. • To fit in with the school’s discipline structure by allowing teachers to establish standards of acceptable behavior. • To facilitate the noting, recording, and investigating of bullying.

When to Use the Sociogram The sociogram can be used as a powerful preventative measure in the first grade, before serious patterns of negative behavior take hold and when students are beginning to form relationships. Students will be reassured by the experience of a teacher who is supportive and is encouraging a safe and friendly atmosphere, and who is prepared to act with authority when necessary. The sociogram can be used at regular intervals as part of the pastoral element of the school. It can be used in cases where bullying has occurred as a nonconfrontational intervention. Steps for Implementation Consult with school management, antibullying support team, or pastoral care team. Decide who should administer the sociogram. Seek the cooperation of the subject teacher and arrange for a double class period if possible. At the appointed time, explain the purpose of the sociogram to students. Inform the whole class that you are going to talk to everyone about their

Teachers and Teen Bullying

experience of the class atmosphere and whether it needs to be improved. Explain that this measure is part of the school’s antibullying measures. Tell the class that you will give them feedback. The subject teacher continues to work with the class, thus ensuring minimum disruption. Individual students are interviewed privately (see sample form for key questions). Each student is informed of the confidential nature of the interview, reassuring them that they will not be identified as providing the information. Be clear that all students will be asked the same questions. This protects victims from retaliation on the basis that the picture you have formed comes from the contributions of the whole class. Have the class list on hand to record information. You may find it useful to make a visual representation of the information on a chart, especially where there is a recurring problem. Record the details. A clear picture of the class dynamic will emerge. Discuss general findings with the whole class. Identify ways in which the class is working well in terms of cooperation and friendships. If this is overwhelmingly positive, the preventative aspect of the strategy will still have come into play. Praise the class for their cooperative spirit and reward them if possible. If problems have been identified, deal with the problem behavior immediately after interviewing all students. Discuss evidence privately with students who were identified as behaving in a bullying manner using the restorative approach. Be specific about the problem behavior, explain why it is wrong, and challenge the inappropriateness of it. Be clear that it is totally unacceptable in the school. Seek agreement on facts and future behavior, and arrange a follow-up meeting. It may be useful to have a tutor or year head witness the agreement. Inform the young person that this will be monitored and that other teachers will be made aware of the situation. Arrange a time to review progress. Mention the rights of others. Explain to the student that being popular in class is more likely to arise from being admired by others, rather than being feared. Emphasize that you have formed an opinion on his or her behavior by talking to everyone in the class. No one should be singled out for revenge or retaliation. This also applies to friends of the offending student. Make it clear that you will be checking up on this. Make a record of the interview. Negotiate a whole-class agreement regarding future acceptable behavior. Provide the results of the sociogram to teachers and decide on a strategy for supervision and monitoring. Arrange to review progress with the class and class teachers.

Table 7.4 presents sample questions for the sociogram, and table 7.5 provides a template for the sociogram.

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Table 7.4â•… Sample questions for the sociogram. • Are you happy with the atmosphere in the class? • Who are your friends? • Are you being bullied in any way? (If the answer is yes, get the details and reassure the student that the problem will be addressed.) • Is there anyone in the class who is being picked on or having a hard time? • Is there anyone being left out or ignored? • Is there anyone spreading rumors or gossip? Or using notes, phone calls, texts, emails, etc. to make others feel bad about themselves? • Is anyone being unfair to others? • Is there a group of students making life difficult for others? • Are students from other classes giving anyone in this class a hard time? • Can you give examples? • What do you think is causing the problem? • What can you do to help students who are having a hard time? • Have you been bullying anyone?

What Can You Do When Young People Are Being Bullied? Listen. Listening is therapeutic in itself. Being available to listen is the first step in supporting the victims. Allow victims to tell their stories in their own words. Take notes. These form the basis of the report for dealing with the incident. Include such details as the nature of the incident, date, time, location, names of those involved, names of witnesses, and other relevant information. Reassure. Affirm that they have done the right thing by coming forward and assure them that help is available and action will be taken. Reassure them that nothing is wrong with them and that they don’t have to face it alone. Table 7.5â•… Sample bullying sociogram form. Who is bullying?

What is the behavior?

Who is it directed toward?

John Kicking, calling names Mentioned Keith and Sam Niamh, Orla Used to be friends with Mary, now excluding her from the group Mentioned by Mary and Liz

Tom Mary

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Ensure students’ safety. Ensure that students are not in any immediate danger. If there is a risk, ask the parents to collect them from the school, or make arrangements to keep the potential assailant from carrying out the attack. The school should also ensure that there is adequate supervision if the young person’s safety has been compromised. Negotiate confidentiality. Discuss with students the limits of confidentiality. Explain that while you will endeavor to maintain confidentiality, there are times when you have to discuss the matter with other staff to ensure the safety of all students. For example, in certain circumstances you may need to talk to the alleged bullies, parents, witnesses, other teachers, and school management as appropriate. Explain that you will only tell those who need to know and give a reason for why they have to be told. Clearly outline how you will build safeguards for the victims’ safety and privacy. For example, the young people can be told that the perpetrators will be warned not to retaliate and that you will be checking up on this. Tell the students that you will keep them informed. Let them know how you are going to proceed and how you will keep them informed.

Making the Intervention Decide who to consult.╇ Be clear about the school’s policies and procedures, as these will vary from school to school. Information and advice may be available from the following: • Class tutor • Year head • Antibullying coordinator/team • Management • School counselor • Parent/s of victim • Parent/s of bully • Outside agencies

Decide Whom to Interview On the basis of the information you have, decide whom to interview. This will most likely include the victim, witnesses (either students or staff), and the alleged bully. It is advisable to interview the person with the most power in the group last. It may also be useful to interview students who are not involved. This may provide you with an unbiased perspective. Take a calm, problem-solving approach. Deal with conflict in a nonaggressive, nonconfrontational manner.

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Conducting an Interview within a Restorative Justice Approach There are a number of points to keep in mind when working within a restorative justice framework. • Make sure all participants have an opportunity to tell their story. Ensure that the victim’s experiences, needs, and feelings are respected and that they are given space to acknowledge their harm/loss. • Focus on rebuilding relationships. Give the perpetrators an opportunity to hear in a safe and respectful forum how their behavior affected the victim. • Success requires exploration of the complexities of the issue, a common understanding being reached, acceptance of responsibility, and acknowledgement of effort and compromise. • Confront and disapprove of wrongdoing. Hold the bullies accountable for their actions while still supporting and valuing their inherent worth. • Offer the perpetrators the opportunity to repair the harm they have caused. Reparation should be appropriate and within their capacity to fulfill. All participants should be encouraged to learn from the experience and move on.

Other important points to keep in mind include: Privacy. Students usually disclose more in private because they feel safer. Dealing with incidents in public may cause unnecessary embarrassment for the victim, increase his or her vulnerability, and encourage confrontation and denial on the offender’s side. Privacy is also important for witnesses and other members of the class; threats may have been made, or they may be under pressure to support one side or the other. It might be useful to enlist the support of a colleague to help with interviewing the members of the group individually. Nonconfrontational approach. Welcome the students, thank them for their cooperation, and let them know that you see yourself as facilitating a problem-solving approach rather dishing out punishment. Refer to the behavior as being unacceptable, as opposed to labeling the person as a bully. Be calm and constructive, and allow enough time for the interview. Most young people respond to patience and the opportunity to talk, rather than to pressure, anger, or impatience. What Not to Do! Don’t blame or finger-wag! Don’t lose your cool. Don’t accuse—ask for details.

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Don’t come to conclusions without hearing all sides of the story from all sources. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from colleagues.

Examples of possible opening statements are the following: • There seems to be difficulty between yourself and Mary. I am here to help resolve the situation. I need your cooperation to get it sorted. I feel your contribution to the problem is extremely important; your help is going to make all the difference. (Allow time to respond.) • If you have made a mistake in your behavior, even if it is a serious one, I want to help you work things out. The most important thing from everyone’s point of view is that it never happens again. I think it is very important that it is settled here and now. (Allow time to respond.) • This talk is between the two of us at the moment, and I don’t want to involve the principal or parents at this point. (Note that serious cases may need to be dealt with immediately.) • We have dealt with a lot of different kinds of situations, and we usually manage to sort things out, even serious problems. (Allow time to respond.)

At this point, it should be clear to the teacher whether the student is responding to the approach. Check that the student understands what you are saying and what your approach is. Ask whether you need to clarify or repeat anything. Give the student time to think over what you have said. Some questions you might like to use when seeking further information include: • How do you get along with the other student/s? • Did you know one another before the incident took place? • How long have you known each other? • Is there a history to the problem, or did it come out of the blue? • Do you think it will be easy to get back on good terms with the other person?

Offer a choice between talking about what happened or writing it down. Writing can be less confrontational, especially for young people who might regard a one-to-one interaction with a teacher as adversarial. Let’s have a look at the incident now. I need to understand your involvement. Can you help me fill in the details from your point of view? This is what I need to be clear about. • What happened? • When and where did it take place?

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• Who was involved? • What part did you play? • Was there more than one person involved on either side? • Were there any witnesses? • Did this take place more than once? • Have you been involved in anything like this before?

Encourage the young person to focus on taking responsibility for his or her own actions, rather than assigning blame to others in the group. Don’t accept standard techniques for saving face, such as “I was only messing” or “We were all doing it.” Ask the young person to talk about his or her specific role at the time. For example: • What did you actually say or do? • How would someone who witnessed the incident describe your actions? • Would you do the same thing again or act differently? • What did you do wrong? • Do you understand what was wrong about it? • What was the problem with what you did?

When you have the information recorded, the conversation needs to focus on making restitution in the spirit of the restorative approach. Some questions to consider include: • How do you feel about the situation? • Are you worried about what is going to happen? • What do you think is fair in this situation? • This is what I think is fair. (Outline a fair outcome, such as apologizing, agreeing to mediation, signing an agreement with a parent present, agreeing to meet with a counselor, paying for damage, returning money or the equivalent value of property, serving time in detention or suspension.)

Invite a comment from the young person. A cooperative attitude should be praised. If the solution to the problem is agreed by all concerned, the matter may be concluded.

What If There Is Complete Denial? Cases will arise from time to time where there is complete denial of involvement. Repeat the evidence as you see it and try again. It may be necessary to protect the confidentiality of your information. Stay focused

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on what you believe actually took place. Do not accuse the young person of lying: • This is the situation as I see it. (Give details.) • Anybody who examined it would think the same about your responsibility. • I do not accept that I am hearing the full story from what has been said so far.

Explain your role again (as above) and let the young person know that this is an opportunity for him or her to be forthright and honest. If there is still denial, explain that you are not going to let the matter rest until it has been resolved, and outline what the next steps are according to school policy, for example: • Reporting to the principal • Initiating a wider investigation • Contacting parents • Contacting outside agencies, such as the juvenile liaison officer of the police. Psychology service may have a role if there appears to be psychological difficulties.

Where there is an admission of responsibility, it is crucially important to be unequivocal about the immediate and future behavior of the young person. • The behavior should cease immediately. • The young person is aware that disciplinary implications already apply in the situation. • Agreement should be sought about not taking revenge against the victim or others who the bully suspects may have provided information for teachers. • If agreement is not forthcoming, a warning should be made that also extends to the friends of the bully. • Measures need to be taken by the school to ensure the safety of the victim and to supervise the behavior of the others involved. A case discussion involving school management and other relevant personnel will decide on possible sanctions. • If bullying continues, management have to choose between suspension/ expulsion or referral of the offender for psychological assessment. An assessment will point to whether the young person has psychological or psychiatric difficulties contributing to the behavior and whether anger management training might be a useful next step. • Discuss with the parents the possibility for counseling for their son/daughter. • Keep a record of the interview.

In cases where the bullying requires the imposition of sanctions, the cooperation of parents is crucial. Agreement should be sought from

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parents and the student involved in relation to future behavior. If the incident remains unsolved at the school level, the matter should be referred to the school’s board of management. Failing this, it should be referred to the appropriate educational authority.

Management of Relational Aggression Over the last several years, researchers have examined more subtle forms of aggression known as relational aggression (James, Flynn, Lawlor, & Murphy, 2010). They describe behaviors that harm others through damage or threat of damage to friendships or group inclusion. These can include manipulative, controlling, belittling, demeaning, rejecting, and exclusionary behaviors in a social context. They also include damage or threat of damage to reputation. Behaviors many be verbal or nonverbal, direct or indirect. They are often subtle and have a profound effect on the victim but may be less easy for an outsider to identify. Although relational aggression in girls comes to the attention of parents and teachers, it is known that boys also engage in this form of aggression, particularly in late adolescence and adulthood (James, Flynn, Lawlor, & Murphy, 2010). Although not all incidents of relational aggression are bullying, we contend that when done in a systematic, repeated way it becomes bullying. There are many reasons suggested for why young people engage in relational aggression (retaliation, popularity, control, fear of being targeted, power, inadequate conflict resolution skills) (James, Flynn, Lawlor, Courtney, et al., 2010; James, Flynn, Lawlor, & Murphy, 2010). However, these reasons may be the symptoms of more complex behaviors, which may be conscious or unconscious. Relational aggression is modeled by parents, peers, and the media and is often portrayed as being a useful tool “for getting what you want” ( James, Flynn, Lawlor, & Murphy, 2010). Parents may be relationally aggressive, using threats to the security of the parent-child relationship to force children to cooperate. Children may learn to use this type of behavior to force peers to comply with them. Children also experience and learn negative conflict-resolution skills from parents (Grynch & Fincham, 1990). Secure parental attachment is associated with social competence and subjective well-being. Poor attachment may lead children to feel insecure in their relationships with others. They may use socially aggressive strategies to protect personal status and may have learned that manipulating a relationship is a good way of achieving their needs. Children with attachment difficulties are often hyper-vigilant to signs of unavailability and become clingy to ensure proximity. They may also be sensitive to threats of rejection and may use withdrawal and the

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silent treatment to express anger (James, Flynn, Lawlor, & Murphy, 2010). We believe that relational aggression is not as straightforward as general bullying. While some of the behaviors may be deliberate, others may be an unconscious reaction to dynamics in the relationship. Young people may perceive an action as a threat to their sense of self and react aggressively to protect their sense of self. They may also remain in unhealthy relationships in the mistaken belief that these behaviors are part of normal friendships or because they are afraid to lose the friendships. As teachers, it can be more difficult to determine when an individual needs help and support around relational aggression. Many of the behaviors are subtle and hard to distinguish from normal adolescent behavior. It is hard for a teenager to admit to general bullying, but it is even more difficult for them to discuss relational aggression. Many young people do not understand the dynamics involved in relational aggression and blame themselves. They are often ashamed and embarrassed to admit that their friendships are not working well. There are a number of symptoms that teachers can be aware of: • Changes in appearance • Changes in engagement in class activities • Changes in academic performance • Social withdrawal • Sitting apart from friends that used to be close • School absence • Reluctance to attend certain classes or places • Frequent illnesses • Fearfulness • Anxiety • Panic attacks • Dropping of usual hobbies and interests • Uncharacteristic outbursts of anger • Excessive sensitivity to criticism

As a teacher, if you see any of these changes in a student, it may be worth checking in with the student. Relational aggression is complex and often involves circular escalating patterns, where individuals alternate between being bully and victim. The “who did what and when” model of investigation may not be a particularly useful strategy in resolving the issue. Getting to the root of the problem may not be possible. In many cases, those involved are unable to pinpoint the beginning, and the behaviors have developed as a response to the situations that they find themselves in. Some responses may be a deliberate

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effort to exercise control, dominance, or manipulation; others may occur as a defense against feeling threatened (James, Flynn, Lawlor, Courtney, et al., 2010). As an outsider with limited knowledge of the individuals concerned, it may be impossible to tell why an individual is behaving in this way. That said, if an incident of relational aggression presents itself to you, you still have a duty to investigate and try to resolve it. (Note that not all incidents can be resolved, and the best-case scenario might be that individuals agree to have nothing more to do with each other.) The principles of restorative justice apply, and many of the interviewing techniques described above are useful, but there are a number of additional points you may wish to take into consideration. Working with the perpetrators: • Start by stating that there seems to be a problem—someone is very hurt—can you throw any light on what is going on? • Adopt a problem-solving approach. State that you are not here to apportion blame, but rather to reach a resolution. • Refer to the power of a group and how it can be used or abused, and explore with the individuals their use of power and whether they are using it effectively. • Refer to what it might feel like to be a victim of exclusion or isolation. Explore whether they have experienced this and how they may have coped. Explore whether this is how they want to make others feel. • Focus on the leadership qualities that the perpetrators may have—how they can get others to do their bidding and how this gives them great responsibility. Ask them to consider how they can use these skills to help the situation. • If there is clear evidence of bullying, get it stopped. • Ask for their cooperation to ensure there is no more bullying in the group, and ask for their ideas as to how they may do this. • Explain to them that you will be checking in regularly with the group to monitor progress and changes. • Praise prosocial behavior.

Working with the people excluded: • Listen to the story and be particularly empathic, as it is very difficult for a young person to admit to or talk about relational aggression. Admitting that you cannot solve problems in a relationship, or that you have been rejected by your friends, is shameful and embarrassing. • Ask what led up to the exclusion, but do not get too caught up in “who did what.” Make your judgment based on the stories of all involved. • Explain that friendships change and that people have a right to make new friends. (This may be an important albeit painful point for some to accept.) • Explain that you need to establish if the behavior is bullying, as everyone has the right not to be bullied.

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• Ascertain if bullying is happening. (It may not; it may simply be a case of friendships ending.) • If there is bullying behavior, ensure that it is stopped. • Discuss options—what does he/she really want? “If you could wave a magic wand . . .” • Explain that parting is painful but not life-threatening! • Discuss the possibility of the victim making new friends. Encourage her/him to make the first move toward possible new friends. If appropriate, partner the individual with students who are likely to be supportive. This may be done during class/project work or through extracurricular activities. (You may need to enlist the support of other staff in this.) • Check in with the student on a regular basis.

In some cases you may have to talk to the parents concerned and make a referral to appropriate services, if this is warranted.

Conclusion Although dealing with bullying may seem like a daunting task, there is evidence to show that making the effort to ensure that students feel safe and cared for by the school can reap benefits in terms of a more positive school atmosphere, better academic performance, and better student/teacher relationships. There are many strategies that can be utilized to prevent and respond to bullying. Teachers play a range of important roles in the way bullying is dealt with in the school. Their behavior can act as a positive or a negative role model for students. If students believe that their teachers are bullies, are seen to condone bullying, or are ineffective in dealing with it, then they are unlikely to feel safe in school and will have no faith in the school’s response to bullying. On the other hand, teachers are ideally placed to inspire confidence in students by developing and demonstrating codes of acceptable behavior, by implementing prevention strategies, and by intervening appropriately. In order for antibullying strategies to be effective, they have to fully encompass the concept of a whole-school approach and evaluate the role of schools in the dynamics. As teachers are central to the workings of the school, it makes sense that antibullying strategies should start by examining the roles that teachers play.

References Aceves, M. J., Hinshaw, S. P., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Page-Gould, E. (2010). Seek help from teachers or fight back? Student perceptions of teachers’ actions during conflicts and response to peer victimisation. Journal of Youth Adolescence, 39, 658–669.

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Battisitch, D. K., & Hom, A. (1997). The relationship between students’ sense of their school as a community and their involvement in problem behavior. American Journal of Public Health, 87, 1997–2001. Bauman, S., & Del Rio, A. (2005). Knowledge and beliefs about bullying in schools. School Psychology International, 26, 428–442. Borg, M. G., & Falzon, J. M. (1989). Primary school teachers’ perception of pupils’ undesirable behaviors. Educational Studies, 15, 251–260. Boulton, M. J. (1997). Teachers’ views on bullying: Definitions, attitudes and ability to cope. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 67, 223–233. Boulton, M. J., & Underwood, K. (1992). Bully victim problems among middle school children. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 62, 73–87. Charach, A., Pepler, D. J., & Zieler, S. (1995). Bullying at school: A Canadian perspective. Education Canada, 35, 12–18. Colarossi, L. G., & Eccles, J. S. (2003). Differential effects of support providers on adolescents’ mental health. Social Work Research, 27, 19–30. Connors-Burrow, N. A., Johnson, D. A., Whiteside-Mansell, L., Mckelvey, L., & Gargus, R. A. (2009). Adults matter: Protecting children from the negative impacts of bullying. Psychology in the Schools, 46, 593–604. Doll, B., Song, S., & Siemers, E. (2004). Classroom ecologies that support or discourage bullying. In D. L. Espelage & S. M. Swearer (Eds.), Bullying in American schools: A social-ecological perspective on prevention and intervention (pp. 161–184). Mahwah: NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Flaspohler, P. D., Elfstrom, J. L., Vanderzee, K. L., & Sink, H. E. (2009). Stand by me: The effects of peer and teacher support in mitigating the impact of bullying on quality of life. Psychology in the Schools, 46, 636–649. Galloway, D., & Roland, E. (2004). Is the direct approach to reducing bullying always the best? In P. K. Smith, D. J. Pepler, & K. Rigby (Eds.), Bullying in schools. How successful can interventions be? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grynch, J. H., & Fincham, F. D. (1990). Marital conflict and children’s adjustment: A cognitive-contextual framework. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 267–290. Hanish, L. D., & Guerra, N. G. (2000). Children who get victimised at school. What is known? What can be done? Professional School Counselling, 4, 113–119. Harris, S., Petrie, G., & Willoughby, W. (2002). Bullying among 9th graders: An exploratory study. NASSP Bulletin, 86, 630. Hart, S. N. (1987). Psychological maltreatment in schooling. School Psychology Review, 16, 169–180. Hoover, J. H., & Hazler, R. J. (1994). Bullies and victims. Elementary School Guidance and Counseling, 25, 212–220. Hoover, J. H., Oliver, R., & Hazler, R. J. (1992). Bullying: Perceptions of adolescent victims in the midwestern USA. School Psychology International, 13, 5–16. Houndoumadi, A., & Pataeraki, L. (2001). Bullying and bullies in Greek elementary schools: Pupils’ attitudes and teachers’ and parents’ awareness. Educational Review, 53, 19–27.

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Huebner, E. S., Funk, B. A., & Gilman, R. (2000). Cross-sectional longitudinal psychosocial correlates of adolescent life satisfaction. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 16, 53–64. Hyman, I. A., & Perrone, D. C. (1998). The other side of school violence. Educator policies and practices that might contribute to student misbehavior. Journal of School Psychology, 36, 7–27. James, D. J., Flynn, A., Lawlor, M., Courtney, P., Murphy, N., & Henry, B. (2010). A friend in deed? Can adolescents be taught to cope with relational aggression? Child Abuse Review. doi:10.10021.car.1120 James, D. J., Flynn, A., Lawlor, M., & Murphy, N. (2010). Relevance of relational aggression to boys. Submitted for publication. James, D. J., Lawlor, M., Courtney, P., Flynn, A., Henry, B., & Murphy, N. (2008). Bullying behavior in secondary schools: What roles do teachers play? Child Abuse Review, 17, 160–173. James, D. J., Sofroniou, N., & Lawlor, M. (2003). The response of Irish adolescents to bullying. Irish Journal of Psychology, 24, 22–34. Kasen, S., Berenson, K., Cohen, P., & Johnson, J. G. (2004). The effects of school climate on changes in aggressive and other behaviors related to bullying. In D. L. Espelage & S. M. Swearer (Eds.), Bullying in American schools: A socialecological perspective on prevention and intervention (pp. 187–210). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kim, Y. S., Koh, Y., & Leventhal, B. (2005). School bullying and suicidal risk in Korean middle school students. Pediatrics, 115, 357–363. Lee, C., Buckthorpe, S., Craighead, T., & McCormack, G. (2008). The relationship between the level of bullying in primary schools and children’s views of their teachers’ attitudes to pupil behavior. Pastoral Care in Education, 26, 171–180. Limber, S. P., Nation, M., Tracy, G. B., Melton, G. B., & Flerex, V. (2004). Implementation of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Programme in the south eastern United States. In P. K. Smith, D. Pepler, & J. K. Rigby (Eds.), Bullying in schools: How successful can interventions be? (pp. 55–80). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ma, X., Stewin, L. L., & Mah, D. L. (2001). Bullying in school: Nature, effects and remedies. Research Papers in Education, 16, 247–270. McEvoy, A. (2005, September). Teachers who bully students: Patterns and policy implications. Paper presented at the Hamilton Fish Institute’s Persistently Safe Schools Conference, Philadelphia, PA. Meese, R. L. (1997). Student fights: Proactive strategies for preventing and managing student conflict. Intervention in School and Clinic, 33, 26–33. Melton, G. B., Limber, S. P., Cunningham, P., Osgood, D. W., Chambers, J., Flerex, V., et al. (1998). Violence among rural youth. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Morrison, B. (2002). Bullying and victimisation in schools: A restorative justice approach. Australian Institute of Criminology: Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 219, 1–6.

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Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do about it. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Olweus, D. (1997). Bully/victim problems at school: Knowledge base and an effective intervention programme. Irish Journal of Psychology, 18, 170–190. O’Moore, M., Kirkham, C., & Smith, M. (1997). Bullying behavior in Irish schools. A nationwide study. Irish Journal of Psychology, 18, 141–169. Ortega, R., Del Rey, R., & Mora-Merchain, J. A. (2004). SAVE Model: An antibullying intervention in Spain. In P. K. Smith, D. Pepler, & J. K. Rigby (Eds.), Bullying in schools: How successful can interventions be? (pp. 167–186). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ortega, R., & Lera, M. J. (2000). The Seville Anti-Bullying School Project. Aggressive Behavior, 26, 113–123. Plaford, G. (2006). Bullying and the brain. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Rigby, K. (2002). New perspectives on bullying. London: Jessica Kingsley. Rigby, K., & Barnes, A. (2002). The victimised student’s dilemma: To tell or not to tell. Youth Studies Australia, 21, 33–36. Rivers, I., & Smith, P. K. (1994). Types of bullying and their correlates. Aggressive Behavior, 20, 359–368. Roland, E., & Galloway, D. (2004). Professional cultures in schools with high and low rates of bullying. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 15, 241–260. Salmivalli, C. (2001). Group views on victimisation: Empirical findings and their implications. In J. Juvonen & S. Graham (Eds.), Peer harassment in schools: The plight of the vulnerable and the victimised (pp. 398–420). New York: Guilford. Sarno, G. (1992). Emotional distress by school teacher or administrator. American Journal of Proof of Fact, 18, 103. Siann, G., Callaghan, M., & Lockhart, R. (1993). Bullying: Teachers views and school effects. Educational Studies, 19, 307–321. Skues, J. L., Cunningham, E. G., & Pokharel, T. (2005). The influence of bullying behaviors on sense of school connectedness, motivation, and self esteem. Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 15, 17–26. Smilansky, J. (1984). External and internal correlates of teachers’ satisfaction and willingness to report stress. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 84–92. Smith, P. K., & Brain, P. (2000). Bullying in schools: Lessons from two decades of research. Aggressive Behavior, 26, 1–9. Smith, P. K., & Sharp, S. (1994). School bullying: Insights and perspectives. London: Routledge. Solomon, D., Watson, M., Battisitch, D. K., Schaps, E., & Deiucchi, K. (1992). Creating a caring community: Educational practices that promote childrens’ pro-social development. In F. K. Oser, A. Dick, & J. L. Patry (Eds.), Effective and responsible teaching: The new synthesis (pp. 383–396). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Stevens, V., De Bourdeaudhuij, L., & Van Oost, P. (2000). Bullying in Flemish schools: An evaluation of anti-bullying intervention in primary and secondary schools. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70, 195–210.

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Swearer, S. M., & Doll, B. (2001). Bullying in schools: An ecological framework. Journal of Emotional Abuse, 2, 7–23. Swearer, S. M., Espelage, D. L., Vaillancourt, T., & Hymel, S. (2010). What can be done about school bullying? Linking research to educational practice. Educational Researcher, 39, 38–47. Terry, A. (1998). Teachers as targets of bullying by their pupils: A study to investigate incidence. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 68, 255–268. TUI. (2006). Survey examining teacher perception of student disruption in their schools. Dublin: Teachers Union of Ireland. Twemlow, S. W., Fonagey, P., Sacco, F., & Brethour, J. R. (2006). Teachers who bully students: A hidden trauma. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 52, 187–198. Weissberg, R. P., Caplan, M. Z., & Harwood, R. L. (1991). Promoting competent young people in competence enhancing environments: A systems-based perspective on primary prevention. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59, 830–841. Weissberg, R. P., Caplan, M. Z., & Sivo, P. J. (1989). A new conceptual framework for establishing school based social competence programmes. In L. Bond & B. E. Compas (Eds.), Primary prevention of psychopathology: Primary prevention and promotion within the schools (Vol. 12, pp. 255–296). London: Sage. Whitney, I., & Smith, P. K. (1993). A survey of the nature and extent of bullying in junior/middle and secondary schools. Educational Research, 35, 3–25.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls by Peers, Teachers, Employers, and Internet Predators Michele A. Paludi and Ashley Kravitz

Introduction: Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls Reaches Epidemic Proportions In 2002, Girls Scouts of the United States of America released a research study entitled: “The Net Effect: Girls and New Media.” This study surveyed 1,000 adolescent girls aged 13 to 18 to examine three major issues: (a) trends in adolescent girls’ Internet habits; (b) adolescent girls’ skills in dealing with difficult or emotional situations online; and (c) advice on how parents can empower adolescent girls to have online experiences that are safe. Girls Scouts reported that 30% of the teens indicated they have been sexually harassed in an Internet chat room. Examples of harassment included demands for bra size, requests for cyber sex, and receipt of unsolicited photos of naked men. Of these teens who reported they had experienced sexual harassment: a. Seven percent indicated that they told their parents about the incidents; b. Thirty percent said they kept quiet about the harassment; c. Twenty-one percent indicated that they experience sexual harassment “all the time, and it is no big deal”; d. Four percent said, “Nothing is that bad online because it is not really real.”

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In addition to experiencing sexual harassment in chat rooms, adolescent girls experience this form of victimization in schools from peers, teachers, and other school employees. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) (1992, 2001) conducted the first scientific national studies of academic sexual harassment of children and adolescents by their peers. Their 1993 study included 1,632 girls and boys in grades 8 through 11 from 79 schools across the United States. The 2001 study was based on 2,064 students in grades 8 through 11. Both AAUW studies reported a high incidence of sexual harassment of girls in schools. For example, the 2001 study found that 85% of girls reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment during their school lives. Girls experienced more sexual harassment than boys and were also more afraid of being sexually harassed. Furthermore, boys perpetrated more than twice as much sexual harassment than girls. Sexual harassment reported by girls included name calling, graffiti written about them in school bathrooms, the dissemination of offensive drawings, unwanted touching, sexual rumors, and pressure for sex. Allen, Young, Ashbaker, Heaton, and Parkinson (2003) reported that, based on their study with 58 school bus drivers, 67% stated that they observed students engaging in sexual harassment of girls, with 46% of the bus drivers reporting the victimization to the school’s principal or assistant principal. Behaviors reported included sexual joking, mooning, flashing, and sexual comments. In the 2001 AAUW study, 38% of girls reported being harassed by a teacher or other school employee. Research subsequent to this study by the U.S. Department of Education (2004) found approximately 10% of public school students were targeted with unwanted sexual attention by teachers and other school employees. Timmerman (2002) reported that 27% of sexual harassment of students was perpetrated by school employees, with teachers comprising 81% of the offenders. Research has also been conducted on adolescents’ experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace. Research by Strauss and Espeland (1992) reported that 30% of female vocational students had been sexually harassed at work. Most adolescents work in movie theaters, fast-food chains, and construction companies. Fineran (2002) found that 35% of part-time employed adolescents experienced sexual harassment. More recently, Fineran and Gruber (2009) reported that more than half of the 260 adolescent employees experienced sexual harassment at their workplace. Compared to adult women employees, adolescents in Fineran and Gruber’s study experienced more harassment and experienced it in a shorter time frame.

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The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received sexual harassment complaints from 268 adolescents in 2003, constituting 2% of the total number of complaints received. This incidence quadrupled in 2004 to 8%. Drobac (2007) noted that these incidence rates have continued to rise. Types of sexual harassment reported to the EEOC by employed adolescents include verbal harassment, unwanted touching, requests for sex, and repeated groping. The statistics are alarming, as are incidence rates for other forms of gendered violence against adolescent girls (Paludi, 2011). Violence against adolescent girls, including sexual harassment, has been recognized as a major public health (Fineran & Bolen, 2006) and human rights issue (Paludi, Martin, & Paludi, 2007) that requires a coordinated response from parents, teachers, counselors, and providers in the teen’s community. This violence has been explained by unequal power relations and patriarchal values. In addition, factors embedded in the adolescent culture that influence as well as support violence include alcohol and drug use, religious influences, media portrayal of violence, devaluation of subordinated groups, and the sexualization of violence (Paludi, 2011). Furthermore, research has identified that violence against adolescent girls exists along a continuum, from incivility and microaggressions to hate crimes, including assault and murder (Nadal, 2010; Paludi, 2010). The present chapter addresses sexual harassment of adolescent girls, including its impact on girls’ emotional and physical health, interpersonal relationships, self-concept, and career development. We will address sexual harassment by peers, teachers, employers, and Internet predators. We begin with an overview of the legal definitions and behavioral examples of sexual harassment to which we will refer throughout this chapter.

Legal Definition of Sexual Harassment A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination. Betty Friedan

Sexual harassment is legally defined as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature” when any one of the following criterion is met (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1990): a. Submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of the individual’s employment or academic standing.

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b. Submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment or academic decisions affecting the individual. c. Such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or learning performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work or learning environment.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), U.S. Department of Education defined sexual harassment similarly: Unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature by an employee, by another student, or by a third party, which is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive to limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from an education program or activity, or to create a hostile or abusive educational environment.

These legal definitions describe two types of sexual harassment: quid pro quo sexual harassment and hostile environment sexual harassment. Quid pro quo sexual harassment refers to an individual with organizational power who either expressly or implicitly ties an academic or employment decision or action to the response of an individual to unwelcome sexual advances. For example, a high school teacher may promise an adolescent student a reward for complying with a sexual request, such as an A for the course or a letter of recommendation for college. Another example of quid pro quo sexual harassment would be a teacher who threatened a student for failing to comply with the sexual requests, such as threatening to fail the student. Hostile environment sexual harassment involves a situation where an atmosphere or climate is set up by teachers, staff, or other students in the school or school-sponsored event that makes it difficult or impossible for a student to study and learn because the student perceives the climate to be hostile, offensive, and/or intimidating. Both quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual harassment of students is prohibited by Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, which states: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal assistance.

Title IX is an antidiscrimination statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity receiving financial assistance. Title IX extends to recruiting of students, admissions, educational

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activities and programs, course offerings, counseling, financial aid, health and insurance benefits, scholarships, and athletics. Employed students, as are adults, are protected from quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual harassment from Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1999), sexual harassment of employees includes the following: a. The victim as well as the harasser may be a woman or a man. The victim does not have to be of the opposite sex. b. The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, an agent of the employer, a supervisor in another area, a coworker, or a non-employee. c. The victim does not have to be the person harassed but could be anyone affected by the offensive conduct. d. Unlawful sexual harassment may occur without economic injury to or discharge of the victim. e. The harasser’s conduct must be unwelcome.

Furthermore, sexual harassment may be physical, verbal, written, or visual. Sexual harassment may occur between individuals of the same sex or opposite sex.

Behavioral Examples of Sexual Harassment Sexual harassment includes but is not limited to: Unwelcome sexual advances Sexual innuendos, comments, and sexual remarks Suggestive, insulting, or obscene sounds Implied or expressed threat of reprisal for refusal to comply with a sexual request Pinching, patting, brushing up against another’s body Sexually suggestive books, magazines, objects, email, photographs, screen savers displayed in the school/work area Actual denial of an academic- or employment-related benefit for refusal to comply with sexual requests (Paludi et al., 2007)

Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls by Peers and Teachers: Schools Are Not Safe Havens The solution of adult problems tomorrow depends in large measure upon the way our children grow up today. There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing that, when we save children, we save ourselves. Margaret Mead

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Peer Sexual Harassment As we discussed earlier in this chapter, the AAUW reported results of the first national study of adolescents’ experiences with peer sexual harassment. In this study, students were asked the following questions, based on the legal definition of sexual harassment presented above: During your whole school life, how often, if at all, has anyone (this includes students, teachers, other school employees, or anyone else) done the following things to you when you did not want them to? Made sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks. Showed, gave, or left you sexual pictures, photographs, illustrations, messages, or notes. Wrote sexual messages/graffiti about you on bathroom walls, in locker rooms, etc. Spread sexual rumors about you. Said you were gay or lesbian. Spied on you as you dressed or showered at school. Flashed or “mooned” you. Touched, grabbed, or pinched you in a sexual way. Pulled at your clothing in a sexual way. Intentionally brushed against you in a sexual way. Pulled your clothing off or down. Blocked your way or cornered you in a sexual way. Forced you to kiss him/her. Forced you to do something sexual, other than kissing.

Eighty-one percent of students reported that they experienced one or more of these examples of sexual harassment during their school lives. Gender comparisons revealed that 85% of girls and 76% of boys reported experiencing sexual harassment. In addition, African American boys (81%) were more likely to have experienced sexual harassment than White boys (75%) and Latinos (69%). For girls, 87% of Whites reported experiencing sexual harassment compared with 84% of African American girls and 82% of Latinas. Thus, girls were more likely to report experiencing sexual harassment, regardless of race. The types of sexual harassment most reported by girls in this research were: Sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks. (76%) Touched, grabbed, or pinched in a sexual way. (65%)

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Intentionally brushed against in a sexual way. (57%) Flashed or “mooned.” (49%) Had sexual rumors spread about them. (43%) Had clothing pulled at in a sexual way. (38%) Sexual pictures, photographs, illustrations, messages, or notes were shown, given, or left for them to find. (31%)

Adolescents in this research reported experiencing behaviors that constitute hostile environment sexual harassment, especially in the hallways as they were going to class. The AAUW study also found that adolescents’ experiences with sexual harassment were most likely to occur in the middle school or junior high school years of sixth to ninth grade. Similar results were obtained by AAUW in its 2001 study. Furthermore, smaller, independent studies of peer sexual harassment of adolescents have confirmed the incidence rate initially reported by the AAUW. For example, Roscoe (1994) reported a significant percentage of early adolescents’ experiences with peer sexual harassment. They reported that 50% of adolescent girls had been victimized, significantly more than the percentage of boys (37%). Fineran and Bennett (1999) reported that 87% of girls in their study were sexually harassed by their male peers. Research by Murnen and Smolak (2000) found adolescent girls at school commonly experienced having an entrance blocked and being stared at. Other studies indicate between 50% and 90% of adolescent girls are victims of sexual harassment by peers (e.g., Brown & Leaper, 2008; Fineran & Bennett, 1999; Fineran & Bolen, 2006; Roscoe, Strouse & Goodwin, 1994; Stratton & Backes, 1997). Similar to the AAUW findings, all of these studies indicate that girls report experiencing sexual harassment more frequently than boys and that boys perpetrate more sexual harassment than girls. Walsh, Duffy, & Gallagher-Duffy (2007) noted that comparable results to the AAUW study were obtained in their study with Canadian students in grades 7–12. They found that 70% of students reported being sexually harassed in school more commonly by a current or former student. When schools fail to intervene in peer sexual harassment, students get the message that sexual harassment is accepted at the school. Strauss (2010) noted that this acceptance can be a “catalyst for increased sexual violence within the school and the community” (p. 189). Data supportive of Strauss’s contention was obtained by Pellegrini (2002): students who bullied their peers in sixth grade engaged in sexual harassment in seventh grade. Furthermore, Klein (2006) noted that in school shootings in the United States over a six-year period, 11 out of 13 of the victims were girls.

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Klein highlighted that sexual harassment was instrumental in instigating the shootings. According to Klein (2006, p. 148): Violence against girls is easy to render invisible because the behavior that precedes actual incidents is often perceived as normal; even after fatalities have occurred, the gendered components of crimes do not seem to register. . . . ‘[N]ormal’ violence against girls—indeed, social acceptance of male hostility towards girls—tends to aid in concealing even the most dramatic incidents.

Stein (cited in Bogart, Simmons, Stein, and Tomaszewski, 1992, p. 208) reported girls’ experiences with sexual harassment. For example: One female in diesel shop refused to go to lunch during her last two years of shop because she was the only young woman in the lunchroom at that time. When she went to the cafeteria, she was pinched and slapped on the way in, and had to endure explicit propositions made to her while she ate lunch. A particular shop’s predominantly male population designated one shop day as National Sexual Harassment Day, in honor of their only female student. They gave her non-stop harassment throughout the day, and found it to be so successful (the female student was forced to be dismissed during the day), that they later held a National Sexual Harassment Week.

Girls’ responses to the Seventeen magazine survey (Stein, Marshall, & Tropp, 1993) reported the following responses: Being harassed myself—I did not realize it at the time. I knew it was wrong and I know I felt horrible. Me? I would be trapped under tables and bothered by at least four guys. They thought it was all fun and games. It wasn’t. These guys would grab my breasts and touch my butt. It always happened in Industrial Arts. (16-year-old) I had four boys harassing me. . . . I felt like they thought I was a slut. I even thought the whole bus thought I was a slut, because they would give me dirty looks. I hated it! I told the harassers to stop, but they wouldn’t. So, I wrote them a note saying it was sexual harassment, and if they didn’t stop I would report them. They started saying “It isn’t sexual harassment, we didn’t lay a hand on you.” (14-year-old)

It is significant to note that only 15% of the girls (as opposed to 31% of the boys) in the AAUW study reported that their lives were untouched by sexual harassment (i.e., never been harassed and never harassed others).

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Psychological Dimensions of Peer Sexual Harassment Hill and Silva (2005, p. 22) offered reasons that boys identified for why they engage in sexual harassment of girls: I thought it was funny. I thought the person liked it. My friends encouraged/pushed me into doing it. I wanted something from that person. I wanted that person to think I had some sort of power over them.

Stein (1996) argued that peer sexual harassment is tolerated and characterized as “normal” by school administrators. Phinney (1994) also noted that sexual harassment is a “dynamic element” in the lives of adolescent girls since schools perpetuate this male dominance through pedagogical techniques and sports. We return to this issue subsequently in this chapter.

Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls by Teachers The schools play an important role when it comes down to protecting children against violence. Violence is one of the principal reasons why children don’t go to school. It’s also one of the causes of the alarming school dropout rates. Shakira

In 1992, Bogart, Simmons, Stein, and Tomaszewski reported their review of sexual harassment complaints brought by students against teachers that were filed with the Massachusetts Department of Education. The following are two complaints they included in their report (p. 197): A science teacher measured the craniums of the boys in the class and the chests of the girls. The lesson in skeleton frame measurements were conducted one by one, at the front of the class, by the teacher.

The print shop teacher, who was in the habit of putting his arms around the shoulders of the young women, insisted, when one young woman asked to be excused to go to the nurse to fix her broken pants’ zipper, that she first show him her broken zipper. She was forced to lift her shirt to reveal her broken pants’ zipper.

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Several studies have been conducted concerning the incidence of sexual harassment of adolescents by teachers. For example, Wishnietsky (1991) reported that 14% of high school students indicated that they had been coerced into sexual intercourse with a teacher. Strauss and Espeland (1992) found that 30% of high school students were sexually harassed by a teacher. Sexual harassment included sexually related remarks, staring, touching, gestures, and propositions. In their 2001 research, the AAUW reported that, of students who had been harassed, 38% identified teachers or other school employees as perpetrators. As another example, the U.S. Department of Education (2004) found approximately 10% of high school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees, including teachers. While sexual harassment of adolescents by peers is more common than by teachers, incidence data may be difficult to obtain. Criminal rape laws and child abuse statutes may be filed against the teacher if the teen is younger than 18 years (Shakeshaft & Cohen, 1995). Behavioral examples of sexual harassment by teachers include a variety of forms (Strauss, 2010), including discussing girls’ legs, commenting on their sex lives, touching a girl’s breasts, fondling, and tickling.

Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls on the Internet If you believe email, blogs, and instant messaging are a completely harmless way for teens to communicate, think again! Kate Fogarty

There are a variety of behaviors that constitute online sexual harassment of adolescents, including unwelcome physical, verbal, or nonverbal behavior. For example, online sexual solicitation includes asking adolescents to discuss sex practices and requesting that the teen engage in a sexual act. Similar to child abductors who use a “confidence assault” (see Paludi & Kelly, 2010), online harassers engage in an organized plot to lure the teen into sexual solicitation. For example, online harassers initially try to gain the trust and confidence of the teen who is the targeted victim. This trust is then used to manipulate the teen into physical and psychological vulnerability. Then, by the time the teen realizes the individual is violent, her attempts at stopping the behavior are limited. The harasser continues the confidence assault by convincing the teen that she is a participant in the crime and/or caused the crime.

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L. Dewey (2002, cited in Fogarty, 2009) and the Polly Klaas Foundation (2006, cited in Fogarty, 2009) noted, with respect to online sexual solicitation of adolescent girls: a. Thirty percent had been sexually harassed while they were in a chat room. b. Thirty-seven percent received links to sexually explicit content online. c. Thirty percent have discussed meeting someone they met online. d. Thirty-three percent had been asked about sexual topics online.

Research commissioned by Cox Communications and the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children (2005) reported: a. Fifty-one percent of parents do not have or are unaware of computer software that monitors their adolescents’ online behavior. b. Forty-two percent of parents did not review the content of email sent to their adolescents, nor their chat room discussions or instant messaging.

Online sexual harassment of adolescent girls has indicated the following with respect to the most vulnerable targets of the victimization: a. Girls between the ages of 14 and 17. b. Girls with major depressive symptoms. c. Girls who have experienced life transitions, including changing schools, not having many friends, or worrying about parents divorcing. d. Girls who have close online relationships. e. Girls with high Internet use. f. Girls with emotional problems are more likely to have formed online sexual relationships, been asked for face-to-face encounters, and attended such encounters. g. Girls whose Internet safety awareness is low.

The Girls Scouts of America’s (2002) study discussed earlier in this chapter has noted that “internet communication technology is a pervasive part of girls’ lives. On average, girls report going online two to three times a week, with dedicated users going online several times a day. . . . Girls appear to spend the majority of their time online socializing” (p. 9). According to the girls in their study (p. 15, 16): A guy threatened to come to my town if I didn’t have cyber sex with him. (13-year-old girl) Some guy kept asking me if we could have cyber sex and I kept saying no but he kept asking. I got really scared and blocked him. He was so persistent

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and scary that he wouldn’t go away. If it wasn’t for the blocking feature, I probably wouldn’t feel that safe. (15-year-old girl) I was chatting with two people who were friends (with each other) and after talking to them for like an hour, one of the guys (I didn’t know them) told me that his friend had hacked into my computer and knew where I lived, and he told me that he was incredibly horny and was going to come find me. (16-year-old girl)

Berson, Berson, and Ferron (2005) reported that 74% of adolescent girls spend the majority of time online in chat rooms, sending emails, and/ or sending instant messages. Similar to research findings with school harassment of girls, girls who experience online sexual harassment are reluctant to tell their parents. This reluctance stems from fearing retaliation from their parents, including banning them from online socializing. Adolescent girls as well as boys want opportunities to vent about problems they experience, which is a normative part of this stage of the life cycle (Paludi, 2002). Banning them from using the Internet is thus perceived by adolescents as blocking them from having friends. Online sexual harassment is not identical to cyberstalking (Chisholm, 2006). Stalking involves being persistently watched or followed. Cyberstalkers bombard their targets with emails at work, on mobile devices, or at school. Because the online stalker remains anonymous, adolescents feel threatened. Online harassers and stalkers may engage in both forms of victimization against teen girls.

Adolescent Employment and Sexual Harassment My character is fictional, but she is based on all the women who fought the sexual harassment case, and everything you see in the film actually happened. Charlize Theron

In 2009, PBS broadcasted the program Is Your Daughter Safe at Work. In this program, adolescent girls who experienced sexual harassment and other forms of gendered violence shared their experiences. This program announced that approximately 200,000 adolescents are assaulted at their jobs annually. One of these incidents took place in the early 2000s. The EEOC had received a complaint from a 16-year-old girl who alleged sexual harassment at her job at Pennsylvania Mexican Restaurant (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2010a). In her complaint, this young

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woman said that her shift supervisor asked her to come to work even though she was not scheduled to do so. At the restaurant, she noticed that she and this supervisor were the sole employees present. She claimed that the supervisor sexually assaulted her. The young woman reported this incident to the general manager of the restaurant on the following day. Her report was met with laughter and accusations of her fabricating the sexual assault. When the general manager asked the supervisor to respond to this complaint, the supervisor denied that he had sexually assaulted or sexually harassed the new employee. The general manager did suspend this supervisor the following day. The young woman never returned to work at the restaurant. In addition, she reported the assault to local law enforcement. The supervisor admitted to the police that he had “sexual contact” with the girl. He pled guilty to “corruption of a minor.” Consequently, he was fired from his job at the restaurant. The EEOC filed a lawsuit against the restaurant indicating that the restaurant had violated federal law because it did not fire the supervisor after the assault. This case was resolved in 2003. The EEOC required the restaurant to train all employees on sexual harassment. In addition, the EEOC received $1,500 to facilitate educational programs for adolescent employees in the food industry about sexual harassment. The young woman received payment of $150,000. As another example, three adolescent girls, who were employed as servers and bussers at a yacht and golf club restaurant in northern California, filed formal employment discrimination complaints with the EEOC (2010b), which subsequently filed a lawsuit against the employer after investigating the adolescents’ reports. The girls’ complaints included male coworkers making inappropriate sexual jokes, requests for lap dances, and solicitation for sex. In addition, the girls stated that these men grabbed their breasts and buttocks. When reporting these incidents to older women servers, the girls were met with responses that were dismissive, indicating that they should expect such behavior to occur when working in restaurants. Managers failed at their attempts to cease the sexual harassment of these girls. The lawsuit filed by the EEOC settled in 2004. It resulted in: Termination of the two alleged harassers. A $75,000 payment to the adolescents. Training of all employees of the restaurant on sexual harassment. Sexual harassment training for club board members. Posting of the settlement of the lawsuit at the restaurant.

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When asked about the results of the settlement, one of the girls stated: Some people might be afraid if they report sexual harassment, that they will be asked what they did to deserve it—“blaming the victim.” But I’m glad we filed our complaint with the EEOC, and I hope this will encourage other women to step forward if they face a similar situation. (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2010b, p. 1)

Mortimer (2005) reported that approximately 80–90% of adolescents are employed during high school, especially in fast-food restaurants, retail sales, grocery stores, and health care. Strauss and Espeland (1992) found that 30% of 250 female vocational students surveyed from four Minnesota school districts had reported experiencing sexual harassment at their jobs. Fineran (2002) found that 35% of 332 part-time employed adolescents experienced sexual harassment, with girls being more likely to be victimized than boys (63% vs. 37%). Fineran and Gruber (2009) indicated that out of 260 adolescents in a New England private high school, 52% of girls stated that they experienced sexual harassment at work, with the majority of perpetrators being coworkers. The types of sexual harassment reported by these girls included unwanted sexual attention and sexual and sexist comments. Fineran and Gruber (2009) further noted that adolescent girls experienced more sexual harassment than did adult employed women and college women.

Mental Health Impact of Sexual Harassment on Adolescents There is an ancient Indian saying: “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” If we use this ethic as a moral compass, then our rendezvous with reality can also become a rendezvous with opportunity. Patricia Schroeder

Research has indicated a significant impact on adolescent girls’ mental health following experiencing quid pro quo and/or hostile environment sexual harassment by peers, employers, teachers, or individuals in online chat rooms. For example, students in the AAUW study (1992) reported the following experiences: Embarrassment Self-consciousness

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Being less sure of themselves or less confident Feeling afraid or scared Doubting whether they could have a happy romantic relationship Feeling confused about who they are Feeling less popular

Larkin (1994) pointed out that adolescent girls’ decline in self-esteem may be attributable to the sexual harassment they frequently experience. In addition, Murnen and Smolak (2000) reported that adolescent girls were more likely than boys to perceive sexual harassment as frightening. Timmerman (2002) and Duffy, Wareham, and Walsh (2004) also found that sexual harassment of adolescent girls contributed to their lower selfesteem and poorer psychological health. Girls in their research reported embarrassment, fear, and self-consciousness, all of which prevented them from fully participating in class. Fineran and Gruber (2004) noted that adolescents who were sexually harassed experienced depression, sadness, anxiety, anger, helplessness, nightmares or disturbed sleep, isolation from family, and loss of friends. Fineran and Gruber (2004) further found that adolescents who experienced sexual harassment had increased post-traumatic stress as a result of their diminished emotional well-being. Sheffield (1993) argued that sexual harassment and other forms of gendered violence encourage adolescent girls to feel fearful, what she described as “sexual terrorism.” In addition, the Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2007) reported that sexual-minority adolescents who experienced sexual harassment had higher suicide rates than did heterosexual adolescents. Stein (1986, cited in Bogart, Simmons, Stein, & Tomaszewski, 1992) noted that sexual harassment victims often experience a second victimization while seeking resolution for the sexual harassment. Girls are frequently blamed for their own victimization as a consequence of individuals defining sexual harassment as seduction. Furthermore, stereotypes abound that girls do not tell the truth. In addition, Paludi and Barickman (1998) summarized research that indicates that adolescents do not label their mental health impact responses as being caused or contributed to by sexual harassment. Their responses are often attributed by their family, friends, and school administrators to other events in their lives, especially those related to hormonal changes and adolescent mood swings. In addition to the mental health impacts of sexual harassment on adolescent girls, research indicates that girls withdraw from school and from

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friends. In addition, girls experience lowered grades, lost educational opportunities, and more limited career choices (Paludi et al., 2007). Furthermore, compared to adolescent girls who have not reported experiencing sexual harassment, adolescent victims of sexual harassment report nightmares, disturbed sleep, eating disorders, lower self-esteem, poor body esteem, and lower life satisfaction (e.g., Lindberg, Grabe, & Hyde, 2007). Stein (1993) also indicated that another impact of sexual harassment for adolescent girls is that it teaches them to accept sexual assault and other forms of gendered violence. According to Stein (1996): If school authorities do not intervene and sanction students who sexually harass, the schools may be encouraging a continued pattern of violence in relationships: Schools may be the training grounds for the insidious cycle of domestic violence. (p. 22)

This is especially true when students’ voices are not heard by school personnel, an issue to which we now turn.

Responsibilities of Schools and Workplaces in Preventing and Dealing with Sexual Harassment of Adolescents Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture. Charlotte Bunch

Sexual harassment demands that schools intervene since, under Title IX, sexual harassment is an organizational responsibility with respect to prevention and reactive measures.

“Reasonable Care” in Preventing and Dealing with Sexual Harassment of Adolescent Girls Paludi and Paludi (2003) recommended that schools should exercise “reasonable care” to ensure a sexual harassment–free environment and retaliatory-free environment for students. This “reasonable care,” adapted from the Supreme Court ruling in Faragher v. City of Boca Raton (1998), includes the following. School districts should: a. Establish and disseminate an effective antisexual harassment policy. b. Establish and disseminate an effective investigatory procedure. c. Offer training in sexual harassment in general and in the school’s policy and procedures specifically.

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Reasonable care is required of employers as well. With respect to sexual harassment, the EEOC has maintained: It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.

Each of these components of reasonable care will be addressed below. The focus of this section will be on schools’ responsibilities for preventing sexual harassment. The recommendations we offer are for employers of adolescents as well. We recommend consulting the following for additional information regarding school districts’ responsibility to students for creating and maintaining a sexual harassment–free and retaliatory-free environment: Sandler & Stonehill (2005), Stein (2003), and the Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education (1997). We also recommend the following for preventing sexual harassment of employed adolescents: Fineran (2002) and Fineran & Gruber (2009). Sexual Harassment Policy In order to promote effective and equitable resolution of sexual harassment complaints, it is necessary to have an explicit policy adopted by the school in compliance with the provision of Title IX. According to the OCR (1997), Title IX does not require a school to adopt a policy specifically prohibiting sexual harassment or to provide separate grievance procedures for sexual harassment complaints. However, its nondiscrimination policy and grievance procedures for handling discrimination complaints must provide effective means for preventing and responding to sexual harassment. Thus, if, because of the lack of a policy or procedure specifically addressing sexual harassment, students are unaware of what kind of conduct constitutes sexual harassment or that such conduct is prohibited sex discrimination, a school’s general policy and procedures relating to sex discrimination complaints will not be considered effective. A grievance procedure applicable to sexual harassment complaints cannot be prompt or equitable unless students know it exists, how it works, and how to file a complaint. Thus, the procedures should be written in language appropriate to the age of the school’s students, easily understood, and widely disseminated. Distributing the procedures to administrators, or including them in the school’s administrative or policy manual, may not by itself be an effective way of providing notice, as these publications are usually not widely circulated to and understood

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by all members of the school community. Many schools ensure adequate notice to students by having copies of the procedures available at various locations throughout the school or campus; publishing the procedures as a separate document; including a summary of the procedures in major publications issued by the school, such as handbooks and catalogs for students. In addition, the OCR (1997) stated the following: A policy specifically prohibiting sexual harassment and separate grievance procedures for violations of that policy can help ensure that all students and employees understand the nature of sexual harassment and that the school will not tolerate it. Indeed, they might even bring conduct of a sexual nature to the school’s attention so that the school can address it before it becomes sufficiently serious as to create a hostile environment.

Recommendations identified as effective policies by the OCR have been translated by attorneys, human resource management specialists, and social scientists (see Paludi et al., 2007). The components of effective policy statements for students are the following: a. Statement of Purpose b. Legal Definition c. Behavioral Examples d. Statement Concerning Impact of Discrimination on Individuals and Organization e. Statement of Individual’s Responsibility in Filing Complaint f. Statement of Organization’s Responsibility in Investigating Complaint g. Statement Concerning Confidentiality of Complaint Procedures h. Statement Concerning Sanctions Available i. Statement Concerning Retaliation j. Statement of Sanctions for Retaliation k. Statement Concerning False Complaints l. Identification and Background of Individual(s) Responsible for Hearing Complaints

In addition, Paludi and Barickman (1998) offered a series of questions for school districts to address when reviewing their policy statement for effectiveness. Examples of checklist questions include: a. Is there a policy statement for dealing with sexual harassment? b. Does the policy forbid peer harassment or is it limited to harassment by individuals who hold organizational power over the victim?

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c. Is the policy statement well publicized? Is it circulated periodically among all members of the institution? d. How do individuals in the school district/organization learn whom they should see to discuss sexual harassment? e. Are there specific individuals to whom individuals can go for help with sexual harassment issues? f. Are remedies clear and commensurate with the level of sexual harassment? g. What services are available at the school/organization to individuals who have experienced sexual harassment? h. Does the school/organization foster an atmosphere of prevention by sensitizing individuals to the topic of sexual harassment? i. Is the policy drafted in sex neutral terms?

Investigatory Procedures The sexual harassment literature has also identified components for effective complaint procedures. These include all of the following at a minimum: a. Informing students that the organization will not ignore any complaint of harassment. b. Informing students that the investigator of complaints will not make determinations about the complaint based on the reputations or organizational status of the individuals involved. c. Informing students that investigations of complaints will be completed promptly. d. Informing students that witnesses to incidents and/or to changes in the parties’ behavior will be interviewed. e. Informing students that all documents presented by the complainant, alleged harasser, and witnesses will be reviewed. f. Informing students that the complainant and the accused will be interviewed in detail.

Victims of sexual harassment must be guaranteed effective protection (Paludi et al., 2007). Monitoring of all parties to a complaint needs to be followed until the danger of new attempts at sexual harassment has passed. School administrators and teachers have an important responsibility to safeguard the victim at school. Student victims must be able to trust that their school administrators and teachers will protect them and provide help to them (Paludi & Barickman, 1998). If student victims are not taken seriously by school personnel, the situation will become worse. The names and contact information for Title IX coordinators and sexual harassment counselors should be publicized and easy to find on the school’s website.

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Training Programs Schools are legally required to facilitate training programs on sexual harassment awareness. Goals of effective training programs include (Paludi & Barickman, 1998; Paludi et al., 2007; Paludi & Paludi, 2003): a. Defining quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual harassment. b. Discussing the physical and emotional reactions to being sexually harassed. c. Discussing peer sexual harassment. d. Discussing means of resolving complaints of sexual harassment.

At the conclusion of training programs, students should be able to: a. Assess their own perceptions of sexual harassment. b. Label adequately behaviors as illustrative of sexual harassment, or not illustrative of sexual harassment. c. Identify peer sexual harassment. d. Describe the effects of sexual harassment on students. e. State components of the school’s policy statement on sexual harassment. f. State the proper procedure to follow if sexual harassment occurs.

Research has indicated the following with respect to training programs on sexual harassment awareness for adolescents: a. Training increases their tendency to perceive sexual harassment (Moyer & Nath, 1998). b. Training increases students’ knowledge acquisition and attitude change (Roscoe, 1994). c. Training increases the reporting of sexual harassment (Roscoe, 1994).

Paludi and Barickman (1998) noted that adolescents’ level of cognitive development must be taken into account when schools are designing training programs (as well as policies and procedures). Thus, teens may need to be provided with concrete examples rather than hypothetical, theoretical situations in order for them to understand the legal and psychological issues involved in sexual harassment.

Additional Educational Programs Additional educational programs for adolescents have been identified in the sexual harassment literature (e.g., AAUW, 2001; Paludi & Paludi, 2003):

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a. Include training on sexual harassment in new student/teacher orientation programs. b. Report annually on sexual harassment cases. c. Encourage teachers to incorporate discussions of sexual harassment in their classrooms. d. Encourage students to start an organization with the purpose of preventing sexual harassment. e. Facilitate a “sexual harassment awareness week” and schedule programs for students and teachers, including guided video discussions, guest lecturers, and plays. f. Provide educational sessions for parents about sexual harassment and the school district’s policy and procedures.

Reactive Measures In order to be legally adequate, an investigation of a school and workplace sexual harassment complaint requires much more than a cursory look at events that may have taken place and an informal settlement of problems identified. As Levy and Paludi (2002) stated: “Specifics must be adhered to if the employer is going to be able to use the affirmative defense provided by the Supreme Court in hostile environment cases. Proper training and preparation for the investigation are invaluable in carrying out a process that will handle the situation appropriately and that will adequately remedy any problems that are uncovered” (p. 117). Characteristics of Investigators Schools and workplaces select the individual(s) who will be charged with investigating complaints of discrimination (e.g., Title IX coordinator, ombudsperson, human resource director). Several researchers and attorneys (e.g., Levy & Paludi, 2002; McQueen, 1997; Paludi & Paludi, 2003) have identified characteristics of effective investigators, including: a. Have credibility in sexual harassment, including knowledge and formal training in legal and psychological aspects of sexual harassment. b. Be accessible for individuals seeking assistance. c. Have skill in verbal and nonverbal communication. d. Have skill in eliciting information from individuals. e. Be at ease with discussing matters of sexual harassment and power, including issues involving sexuality and sexual assault. f. Report directly to the individual who will determine the organization’s response (e.g., principal or president). g. Not permit any party in the investigation procedure to pressure him/her to reveal confidential information or to become one party’s advocate.

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h. Not allow any personal feelings to interfere with effectiveness. i. Be sensitive to collective bargaining agreements. j. Maintain a distance from individuals involved in the investigation in order to be viewed as objective. k. Be prepared for discussions to become emotional and be a calming force for these discussions. l. Know that the organization has a legal as well as ethical obligation to make the school/workplace an environment free of sexual harassment and free of the fear of retaliation for speaking about sexual harassment.

Women or Men as Investigators Research has indicated that investigators report gender comparisons in individuals discussing workplace discrimination, especially with respect to sexual harassment and sexual orientation (see Levy & Paludi, 2002; Paludi & Paludi, 2003). Males may be more comfortable, for example, having a woman investigator when they are reporting sexual harassment by other men. Girls and women may also be reluctant to discuss their experiences with a man because of the explicit sexual nature of complaints of sexual harassment. Paludi and Paludi (2003) recommended including both a woman and man as coinvestigators for complaints of sexual harassment. According to Paludi and Paludi (2003): “The team of investigators can rely on each other for support. . . . It is also important to have a second investigator should a complaint be filed against the other. Without two investigators, the complainant has no option. Of course, if the complainant files against one member of the investigation team, the accused must exclude herself or himself from the investigatory process” (p. 190). Thus, the comfort of the complainant must be paramount. An organization should not want its process to be a problem in and of itself, either in creating a hostile environment or in taking away the opportunity to use the affirmative defense (Levy & Paludi, 2002). In addition, according to the EEOC (1999), an investigatory process that is reasonably believed to be ineffective or unnecessarily intimidating or burdensome will negate the ability of the employer to claim the affirmative defense if an employee fails to use internal report mechanisms.

Mediation Some organizations have built into their grievance procedures a mediation technique whereby complaints may be resolved informally between the individuals involved (Stockdale & Sagrestano, 2011). In mediation, the complainant and accused typically meet together with

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a mediator to attempt to resolve the discrimination/harassment. Some students and employees may prefer mediation to a formal complaint process for several reasons, such as the perception of faster resolution, preservation of confidentiality, and avoidance of the stress of a formal investigation. We note, however, that mediation may become volatile. Individuals have powerful emotions associated with the situation. In addition, mediation assumes that both individuals are of equal power in the organization. However, most victims of sexual harassment hold less organizational and/or cultural power than their perceived harassers. Furthermore, research indicates that employees who believe that they have experienced sexual harassment want to flee the perceived harasser, not sit face to face with them. They fear that the mediation will become an extension of the sexual harassment. We recommend Stockdale and Sagrestano (2011) for further information about alternative dispute methods.

Legal Requirements for Investigating Discrimination and Harassment Complaints Once a school district or employer is made aware of an alleged incident of sexual harassment, an investigation must be undertaken and completed as quickly as possible (Dowling, 2011; Levy & Paludi, 2002; Paludi et al., 2007). In addition, a school or employer is required to investigate when a teacher or manager is told of sexual harassment, even if this individual is not the official designated complaint officer and even if the complaint is not made in an “official” manner. Thus, once the school or employer knows, the requirement of responsive action begins. The EEOC (1990) has identified three fundamentals in investigating complaints of harassment and discrimination: promptness, confidentiality, and impartiality. We also recommend these for investigating complaints of academic sexual harassment.

Promptness Unless there are extenuating circumstances, the investigation process should begin as soon as the complaint is received. The investigation should be completed within two weeks. During the course of an investigation, the potential for further problems is great, and the stress levels of the parties involved in the complaint are high. It is therefore in the best interests of the employer as well as the employees that the “immediate corrective action” (EEOC, 1990) be followed.

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Confidentiality Investigations into complaints of harassment should be kept as confidential as possible. This includes having a separate filing system for investigation files. All personnel must be continually trained and monitored about their responsibilities in maintaining the confidentiality of investigations. According to the EEOC (1999): An employer should make clear to employees that it will protect the confidentiality of harassment allegations to the extent possible. An employer cannot guarantee complete confidentiality, since it cannot conduct an effective investigation without revealing certain information to the alleged harasser and potential witnesses. However, information about the allegation of harassment should be shared only with those who need to know about it.

Impartiality It has been recommended in the literature on sexual harassment that a neutral party conduct investigations (Levy & Paludi, 2002; Smith & Mazin, 2004). In addition, investigators should be trained in the legal and psychological aspects of sexual harassment and determining credibility. Part of harassment training for investigators includes the following components if it is to be effective (Levy & Paludi, 2002; McQueen, 1997; Paludi & Paludi, 2003): a. Psychological issues involved in dealing with harassment b. Physical and emotional reactions to being harassed c. The complainant’s perspective d. Psychology of the victimization process e. Internally and externally focused strategies f. The accused’s perspective g. Differential evaluations of identical behavior h. Interviewing techniques i. Determining credibility

According to the EEOC (1990), an investigative process that is reasonably believed to be ineffective or is unnecessarily intimidating or burdensome will negate the ability of an employer to claim the affirmative defense if an employee fails to report internally.

Retaliation Victims of sexual harassment worry about retaliatory behavior taken toward them as a result of filing a complaint of harassment, such as receiving a failing grade or not receiving a letter of recommendation from teachers

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or school administrators (Sammons, in press). The failure to provide complainants with a complete and accurate description of an employer’s/ school’s investigatory procedures will contribute to increased concerns of retaliation. As stated by the EEOC (1999): An employer should make clear that it will not tolerate adverse treatment of employees because they report harassment or provide information related to such complaints. An anti-harassment policy and complaint procedure will not be effective without such an assurance.

Resources for investigating complaints of sexual harassment, including questions to ask of complainants, accused individuals, and witnesses and how to determine credibility, may be found in Levy and Paludi (2002), Paludi and Barickman (1998), and Paludi and Paludi (2003).

Office for Civil Rights and Resolution of Sexual Harassment Complaints The OCR conducts investigations of complaints of sexual harassment brought by students who have initially sought resolution through their school or who seek resolution first through the OCR (Herskowitz & Kallem, 2003). When its investigations indicate that a violation of Title IX has occurred, the OCR offers the school district an opportunity to voluntarily correct the problem. If the school refuses, the OCR initiates enforcement action. Such remedies include: a. Psychological counseling b. Compensatory education to make up for time lost from the educational program as a result of the sexual harassment c. Adjustment of grades impacted by the sexual harassment and/or the opportunity for a student to repeat a course with a different teacher d. Discipline of the harasser e. Individualized training programs

Other Issues But the issue of sexual harassment is not the end of it. There are other issues— political issues, gender issues—that people need to be educated about. Anita Hill

Bullying versus Sexual Harassment in Schools School districts have increasingly been focusing their attention on bullying (Stein, 2005a). Bullying prevention is important, given findings by

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Espelage and Holt (2001) and Lund, Ertesvag, and Roland (2010), among others, that suggest at least 30% of adolescents are involved in bullying as bullies, victims, or both. In addition, victims score within the clinical range on standard depression and anxiety measures (Sandler & Stonehill, 2005). Focusing on bullying prevention is also important given findings by Lund, Ertesvag, and Roland (2010) indicating that adolescents identify nonsupportive school personnel to be the major explanation for why bullying occurs. A third reason to focus on bullying prevention concerns recent research that links workplace bullying to childhood and adolescent bullying that was never addressed properly (Daniel, 2009). Almost 30 years after the project on the Status of Education of Women used the term “hidden issue” to describe sexual harassment, we have a backlash again because schools are focusing on bullying instead of sexual harassment. Despite the high incidence of various forms of sexual harassment and other forms of gendered violence against adolescent girls in schools, sexual harassment of girls is once again being “hidden” because it is being overshadowed by bullying (Paludi et al., 2007). In some school districts, sexual harassment is subsumed under bullying, which, according to Stein (2005a), further degenders peer aggression. Sandler and Stonehill (2005) noted that while sexual harassment may be seen as a form of sexual bullying, when schools focus on bullying prevention, they are not likely to remember to deal with sexual harassment since they consider bullying and sexual harassment to be independent of each other. Stein (2003) noted that focusing on bullying ignores the fact that most victims of sexual harassment are girls and instead deals primarily with boys’ experiences of being bullied. According to Stein (2005b): state legislators have been passing laws on school bullying which may serve to placate the general public. Concurrently, however, there has been an increase of incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools, along with greater frequency of violence in teen dating relationships. Unfortunately, the bullying focus may serve to both degender the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence and to take attention away from the increasing severity of these problems. (p. 7)

Furthermore, attention to bullying rather than sexual harassment helps remove the school’s responsibility in preventing and dealing with this form of violence against girls. Bullying is seen as an interpersonal problem that involves helping a pathological bully or group of bullies. Sexual harassment, on the other hand, is illegal and requires schools to both prevent and deal with sexual harassment when it occurs

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(Paludi et al., 2007). It is paramount to deal with sexual harassment from an institutional level of analysis, not an individual level (Paludi & Barickman, 1998; Stein, 1996). While the U.S. Department of Education has offered a definition of sexual harassment (as we discussed earlier in this chapter), it has not defined bullying but provides definitions of bullying from researchers. While sexual harassment is illegal, bullying is not. This fact has implications for adolescents seeking resolution to their complaints. If they define their experiences as sexual harassment, they can use the OCR’s resolution procedures (see above). If, on the other hand, adolescents define their experiences as bullying, they do not have the same federal recourse. Stein (2003) has noted that state antibullying laws do not offer protection to adolescents that is identical to federal laws. During the completion of the writing of this chapter, the OCR issued a statement identifying the need to deal with sexual harassment as well as bullying. This statement may be obtained by reviewing the following link: http://www2.ed.gov/ocr/letters/colleague-201010.html.

Cognitive Maturity of Adolescent Girls When the lives and the rights of children are at stake, there must be no silent witnesses. Carol Bellamy

Girls Scouts of America (2002) concluded its report as follows: All too often, these computer-savvy teenage girls are still naïve and emotionally vulnerable, as they grapple with issues such as how to react to sexual online content they unwittingly encounter. (p. 2)

The cognitive maturity of adolescent girls must be acknowledged in designing training programs, as we addressed earlier in this chapter. Part of sexual harassment prevention for adolescents also includes school personnel recognizing and addressing Elkind’s (1967) components of egocentrism that are characteristic of adolescence: imaginary audience and personal fable. The imaginary audience refers to adolescents feeling that they are the focus of attention; it is imaginary in that peers are actually not that concerned with the adolescent’s thoughts, as they are focused on their own. This concept has been used to explain why adolescent girls are selfconscious about their clothing and body image, spend many hours

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primping in front of mirrors, and feel that they are on “display” and thus engage in eating disorders (Halpern, Udry, Campbell, & Suchindran, 1999; Pipher, 1994). Ferron (1997) noted that approximately 75% of American adolescent girls in her sample believed that they would be happier in their lives if they had a “flawless” body. Happiness was defined by these girls as having more friends, having an easier life, being accepted by a peer group, and finding love. As a consequence of being absorbed with their own feelings, adolescents believe that their emotions are unique. Their belief in their uniqueness is expressed in a subjective story that they tell themselves about their “special qualities.” This subjective story is referred to as the personal fable. Evidence of the personal fable is evident in diaries kept by adolescents; it includes stories about how they are immune from dangers suffered by others, so they can dispense with using seat belts and contraceptives and allow themselves to binge and purge. This is done because they are cognitively convinced that they are special, that nothing bad will happen to them. Elkind (1967) noted that adolescent egocentrism disappears when girls have the role-taking opportunities that will help replace the imaginary audience with a real one and a subjective fable with an objective story. Egocentrism has been hypothesized to be declining by the time adolescents are 16 or 17 years old. However, adolescent girls may not be given the role-taking opportunities at home or in school or encouraged to speak up about abuse, including their own and peers’ victimization, because of stereotypic beliefs about becoming argumentative, assertive, and, therefore, unattractive as dates and potential mates (Leaper & Brown, 2008; Paludi, 2002). Thus, adolescent girls seriously harm themselves and others in their struggle to “fit in” with a peer group that demands silence about violence, including sexual harassment. Sexual harassment prevention programs for adolescents must address these issues if the goal is to intervene before, during, and after incidents. We recommend a variation of the bystander education program developed for rape prevention by Banyard, Plante, and Moynihan (2005). Such a program can assist adolescents in understanding the importance of assisting themselves and others who are experiencing sexual harassment and other types of violence, including intimate partner violence. Research on egalitarian and traditional gender role orientations and intervening in sexual harassment is promising. Leaper and Brown (2008) found in their study of 600 adolescent girls aged 12 to 18 that those who learned about feminism from their teachers, their parents, or the media were more likely to recognize sexism, including sexual harassment, than those who did not. Furthermore, according to Leaper and Brown (2008):

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Exposure to feminism did not lead to increased reports of sexism for all girls equally. Feminist messages appeared to be most powerful for girls who either held moderately egalitarian attitudes or who were at least moderately discontent with gender norms. Thus, girls may need to be somewhat responsive to questioning the status quo for feminist messages to be most influential. (p. 699)

These results support in-class training programs for secondary students that utilize pedagogy that will provide the skills necessary for them to make connections among sexism, sexual harassment, illegal behavior, and reporting their experiences to school administrators. Such pedagogy includes case studies/scenarios to encourage adolescents to learn through guided discovery and teach them to think critically about discrimination (Carter, 2002). The major objective of the training modules and pedagogical techniques is to facilitate transference to the classroom, other school-sponsored activities, and the workplace. Transference can be accomplished by: a. Association: having participants associate the new information with something with which they are already knowledgeable; b. Similarity: presenting information that is similar to material that participants already know; i.e., it revisits a logical framework or pattern; c. Degree of original learning: the degree of original learning for the participants was high; d. Critical attribute element: the information learned by the participants contains elements that are extremely beneficial and/or critical at school and/or on the job (Paludi et al., in press).

Paludi, Martin, and Paludi (2007) noted that part of this training must deal with confronting hidden biases and stereotypes about females, males, sex, and power. Without these issues being discussed, they will remain unchallenged by adolescents. Finally, we recommend including adolescents in designing training programs and in revising policies and procedures to promote their own empowerment as well as positive interaction among students. Adolescents experience sexual harassment. They want to be part of the solution. Girls in the AAUW study (2001), when asked “What could your school do to address sexual harassment,” stated: “Maybe if they had an assembly about sexual harassment and expulsion for those who violate rules.” “I’d just like them to, if the matter comes up, deal with it swiftly and fairly; taking in all considerations.”

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“Make aware what exactly it is and what to do about it if you are offended.” “Seminars, a definite policy in the handbook.” “Have the same no-tolerance policy as knives or guns and make an example of anyone who does commit sexual harassment, so maybe it will stop others.” (p. 17)

We need to listen to adolescent girls and address what they ask of us in order to protect them and nurture their healthy emotional development throughout adolescence and into their adulthood.

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Daniel, T. (2009). Stop bullying at work: Strategies and tools for HR and legal professionals. Alexandria, VA: Society for Human Resource Management. DeSouza, E. (2004, July). Intercultural and intracultural comparisons of bullying and sexual harassment in secondary schools. Paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Gender Equity Leadership in Education, Washington, DC. Dowling, J. (2011). Conducting workplace investigations. In M. Paludi, C. Paludi, & E. DeSouza (Eds.), Praeger handbook on workplace discrimination. Westport, CT: Praeger. Doyle, J., & Paludi, M. (1995). Sex and gender: The human experience. New York: McGraw Hill. Drobac, J. (2007). I can’t to I Kant: The sexual harassment of working adolescents, competing theories, and ethical dilemmas. Albany Law Review, 70, 675. Duffy, J., Wareham, S., & Walsh, M. (2004). Psychological consequences for high school students of having been sexually harassed. Sex Roles, 50, 811–821. Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38, 1025–1034. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (1990). Policy guidance on sexual harassment. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (1999). Enforcement guidance: Vicarious employer liability for unlawful harassment by supervisors. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (2010a). Sixteen-year-old claims she was harassed at Pennsylvania Mexican Restaurant. Retrieved on October 8, 2010, from http://www.eeo.gov/youth//case2.html. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (2010b). Teenagers report sexual harassment at California golf club. Retrieved on October 8, 2010, from http://www.eeoc.gov/youth//case6.html. Espelage, D., & Holt, M. (2001). Bullying and victimization during early adolescence. Journal of Emotional Abuse, 2, 123–142. Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 725 (1998). Ferron, C. (1997). Body image in adolescence: Cross-cultural research-results of the preliminary phase of a quantitative survey. Adolescence, 32, 735–744. Fineran, S. (2002). Adolescents at work: Gender issues and sexual harassment. Violence Against Women, 8, 953–967. Fineran, S., & Bennett, L. (1999). Gender and power issues of peer sexual harassment among teenagers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 15, 626–641. Fineran, S., & Bolen, R. (2006). Risk factors for peer sexual harassment in schools. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 21, 1169–1190. Fineran, S., & Gruber, J. (2004, July). Research on bullying and sexual harassment in secondary schools: Incidence, interrelationships and psychological implications. Paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Gender Equity Leadership in Education, Washington, DC. Fineran, S., & Gruber, J. (2009). Youth at work: Adolescent employment and sexual harassment. Child Abuse and Neglect, 33, 550–559.

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Murnen, S., & Smolak, L. (2000). The experience of sexual harassment among grade-school students: Early socialization of female subordination? Sex Roles, 24, 319–327. Nadal, K. L. (2010). Gender microaggressions: Implications for mental health. In M. Paludi (Ed.), Feminism and women’s rights worldwide: Vol. 2. Mental and physical health (pp. 155–175). Westport, CT: Praeger. Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education. (1997). Sexual harassment guidance: Harassment of students by school employees, other students, or third parties. Retrieved on October 9, 2010, from http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list /ocr/docs/sexhar00.html. Paludi, C., et al. (in press). Exercising “reasonable care”: Policies, procedures and training programs. In M. Paludi, C. Paludi, & E. DeSouza (Eds.), Praeger handbook on workplace discrimination: Legal, management and social science perspectives. Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, C., & Paludi, M. (2003). Developing and enforcing effective policies, procedures, and training programs for educational institutions and businesses. In M. Paludi & C. Paludi (Eds.), Academic and workplace sexual harassment: A handbook of cultural, social science, management, and legal perspectives (pp. 176– 198). Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Paludi, M. (2010, October). The continuum of campus violence: Applying “Broken Windows Theory” to prevent and deal with campus violence. Paper presented at the U.S. Department of Education National Meeting on Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention in Higher Education, National Harbor, MD. Paludi, M. (2011). Introduction. In M. Paludi (Ed.), The psychology of teen violence and victimization. Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., & Barickman, R. (1998). Sexual harassment, work, and education: A resource manual for prevention. Albany: State University of New York Press. Paludi, M., & Kelly, K. (2010). Missing children and child abductions: An international human rights issue. In M. Paludi (Ed.), Feminism and women’s rights worldwide (pp. 47–80). Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., Martin, J., & Paludi, C. (2007). Sexual harassment: The hidden gender equity problem. In S. Klein (Ed.), Handbook for achieving gender equity through education (2nd ed.) (pp. 215–229). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. PBS. (2009). Is your daughter safe at work? Retrieved on October 9, 2010, from http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/508/index.html. Pellegrini, A. (2002). Bullying, victimization, and sexual harassment during the transition to middle school. Educational Psychologist, 37, 151–163. Phinney, G. (1994). Sexual harassment: A dynamic element in the lives of middle school girls and teachers. Equity and Excellence in Education, 27, 5–10. Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York: Ballantine. Roscoe, B. (1994). Sexual harassment: An educational program for middle school students. Elementary School Guidance and Counseling, 29, 110–120.

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PART III

Teen V↜iolence by Family and Mates

CHAPTER NINE

No Safe Haven: Sexual Abuse of Teens by Family Members Jeanette Krenek, Joanna L. Goodwin, Paula K. Lundberg-Love, Lindsay Marie Pantlin, and Britney Hilbun

Child sexual abuse is a pervasive and underreported social tragedy. Intrafamilial abuse, or incest, is a particularly insidious crime against children and adolescents because of the violation of trust in an intimate family relationship. While once considered an unspeakable problem on the fringe of society, the 2009 movie Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire, brought the experience of incest to national attention when it won two Academy Awards. Precious chronicles the resilience of an illiterate teenager, and survivor of incest, impregnated twice by her father. Many similar stories of adolescent incest survivors go unreported every year. Unlike victims of extrafamilial abuse, a teenage victim of incest cannot seek the support of caregivers at home, where sexual abuse is typically endured. Perpetrators of incest include any adult relative as well as siblings. While the legal definition of child abuse is a function of state law, usually it includes children and teenagers under 18 or sometimes 16 years of age. However, teenage victims experience unique and often unrecognized challenges as incest survivors due to their developmental stage.

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What Is Incest? The experience of incest differs from other experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Victims of incest tend to be younger when the abuse first occurs, and the abuse is more likely to be of longer duration (Gannon, Gilchrist, & Wade, 2008; Kristensen & Lau, 2007). Despite an increasing awareness of female perpetrators, researchers agree that most victims of incest are female and most perpetrators are male. However, other research findings are complicated by differences in defining incest. While there is no universal definition of incest in research literature, the most common definition of incest is “all sexual behavior whose purpose is the sexual gratification of the adult” (Carlson, Maciol, & Schneider, 2006). However, research definitions of incest offenders range from only including blood relatives, including relatives by adoption or marriage, to individuals who have a parental role in a child’s life, such as a foster parent (Gannon et al., 2008). This wide array of definitions complicates the process of deriving meaningful conclusions and comparisons based upon the current research data. Courtois’s (1997) definition of incest includes sexual contact occurring between related individuals, especially when the initiator is more powerful vis-à-vis the victim (e.g., size, age, money). Acts of incest may be grouped based upon the level of bodily contact. Acts of contact incest range in severity and include fondling, digital penetration, attempted or completed oral sex, anal sex, or rape (Burns Loeb et al., 2002). Noncontact incest includes voyeurism, the unwanted viewing of a child’s private parts, and exhibitionism, the unwanted viewing of an offender’s private parts (Finkelhor, Hammer, & Sedlak, 2008). Incest does not occur in a vacuum. Often it accompanies other family dysfunctions, such as spousal violence, physical and emotional abuse, substance abuse, and mental illness (Courtois, 1997).

How Common Is Incest? There is a consensus in the literature that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 10 men in America are sexually abused prior to the age of 18 (Anderson, 2006). However, the stigma involved in sexual abuse, and particularly incest, results in substantial underreporting. No statistics can illuminate the full extent of the problem. In a 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, 285,400 children under the age of 17 were sexually assaulted in 1999. Of these assaults, 10% were perpetrated by a family member, with 4% perpetrated by the father and 5% by a brother. Of the total assault victims, 81% were adolescents, between the ages of 12 and 17 (Finkelhor

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et al., 2008). In a 2000 report, with data provided by the National IncidentBased Report System (NIBRS), 33% of all sexual-assault victims were between the ages of 12 and 17 (Snyder, 2000). Among adolescent sexual assault victims between the ages of 12 and 18, 90.9% were female. Fourteenyear-old females were at the greatest risk of forcible rape. In 24.3% of the cases, a family member was the perpetrator of adolescent females, and the same was true for 23.7% of cases for adolescent males. Perpetrators of adolescents were five times more likely to be family members when the assault occurred in a residence (Snyder, 2000).

Sibling Incest Definition While father-daughter incest is the most common focus of research, sibling incest is now thought to be more common, despite the current lack of comprehensive available research (Carlson et al., 2006; Haskins, 2003). There is no universally accepted definition of sexual abuse by a sibling due to the difficulty in differentiating between sexual abuse and normal sexual exploration. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, sibling incest is defined as “sexual acts initiated by one sibling toward another without the other’s consent, by use of force or coercion, or where there was a power differential between the siblings” (Righthand & Welch, 2004). To discriminate normal sexual play from sibling incest, the minimum age difference between a sibling perpetrator and the victim is usually defined as between two to five years difference (Carlson et al., 2006). Despite research showing that some sexual exploration between siblings is a part of normal development, some researchers simply define sibling incest as any form of sexual activity between siblings without taking into account age differences or the use of coercion (Brennan, 2006). However, more commonly, sibling incest can be described as traumatic sexual contact that may include “physical touching, fondling, indecent exposure, attempted penetration, intercourse by coercion or force, or oral and anal sex” (Haskins, 2003).

Sibling Incest in Context Sibling incest tends to be a manifestation of a severely dysfunctional family (Haskins, 2003). Individuals in abusive families often have “low selfesteem, high impulsivity, low frustration tolerance, an inability to identify or meet needs, a lack of problem-solving skills, affective and expressive

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problems, communication deficits, feelings of helplessness and futility, frequent and unresolved losses, and isolation” (Haskins, 2003, p. 341). In a comparison study of 32 adolescent sibling and nonfamilial sex offenders, Worling (1995) found that sibling offenders “reported significantly more parental physical punishment, a more negative and argumentative family environment, greater feelings of parental rejection, heightened marital discord, and less overall satisfaction with their family relationships” (p. 639). In violent families, sibling incest often develops out of a mutual need for nurturance. However, in this circumstance, the experience may become traumatic as an adolescent develops a sexual identity and a sense of shame about the sexual relationship (Brennan, 2006). In an exploratory study of 41 survivors of sibling incest, 46.3% reported that the experience began consensually and later involved coercion or force, particularly during adolescence (Carlson et al., 2006). While there is a need for more research on sibling incest, many researchers suggest that the experience of sibling incest may be more severe than that of incest by a father. In a study by M. O’Brien, comparing 170 juvenile sibling offenders to a control group of nonfamilial offenders, sibling perpetrators committed a greater amount of total sexual offenses, abused their victims for longer periods of time, and abused multiple victims (as cited in Righthand & Welch, 2004). In this sample, 46% of sibling offenders vaginally or anally penetrated their victims, as compared to 24% of extrafamilial offenders. Despite their more significant history of abuse, only one-third of sibling perpetrators had court-ordered treatment, while three-quarters of extrafamilial perpetrators received such treatment (Righthand & Welch, 2004). Similarly, in a study of 72 incest victims, 70.5% of incest cases perpetrated by a brother involved intercourse, as compared to 34.8% of abuse involving intercourse by fathers (Cyr, Wright, McDuff, & Perron, 2002). Because most sexual abuse is committed by men or boys against girls or women, most of the research literature is based upon data involving male-perpetrated abuse. With the recent increase in research on child sexual abuse, a need for research on mother-child perpetrated sexual abuse has been discovered. Prevalence for mother-child abuse is uncertain but estimated at approximately 20% for male children and approximately 5% for female children, with mother-daughter incest being more commonly reported (Courtois, 1997). In some cases, it is the mother who actually reports herself. The aftereffects of mother-child sexual abuse are, for the most part, similar to those of other forms of incest. It has been found, however, that there is often greater confusion with regard to identity formation in girls abused by their mothers. Women abused by their mothers reported

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chronic problems with poor self-esteem and having experienced during adolescence debilitating bouts of depression, suicidal behavior, selfmutilation, substance abuse, and sexual acting out (Ogilvie & Daniluk, 1995). People abused by their mothers tended to have difficulty trusting others. Kim Etherington (1997), of the University of Bristol, says, “Our capacity to form a durable bond with a member of the opposite sex later in life is largely dependent on the success or failure of the primal bond between a mother and her child.” Sexual abuse of a child by his or her mother affects every aspect of the person’s life, even down to whether or not he or she is able to have fulfilling relationships. The knowledge that a mother who is usually the protector of her children is capable of harming them in this way is incomprehensible.

What Are the Effects of Incest? Developmental Effects Adolescence is a challenging time of physical, emotional, and social development for all teenagers. While incest occurring at any age may have a devastating developmental impact, adolescent incest victims experience particularly challenging developmental consequences (Burns Loeb et al., 2002). Teenagers with a history of sexual abuse may experience abnormal hormone levels associated with earlier onset of puberty and hyperarousal. These biochemical abnormalities may lead to high-risk sexual behaviors during adolescence and the possibility of sexual revictimization (Burns Loeb et al., 2002). The trauma of incest can impact the still-developing adolescent brain. The frontal lobes of the brain are responsible for advanced logical thinking and impulse control. The adolescent brain does not have fully developed frontal lobes. Immaturity of the frontal lobes results in the tendency of adolescents to be impulsive and rely on emotional thinking rather than logical thinking. Abused adolescents tend to have less cortical development. Their ability to survive trauma typically occurs at the cost of cortical development, which results in more impulsive behavior and lack of emotional regulation (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2009). Typical female adolescent development includes sexual development, learning to make appropriate sexual decisions, and developing satisfying romantic relationships. The physical changes beginning at puberty require adequate psychological and social adjustments for males and females (Cole & Putnam, 1992). Adolescents whose first incestuous experience occurs after puberty may have a lower risk of psychopathology in adulthood than those abused before puberty. However, for many adolescents the incest

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experience begins in childhood and continues through adolescence (Cole & Putnam, 1992). The trauma of incest may result in an adolescent who does not develop a stable identity and uses self-destructive coping strategies, such as substance abuse. Lindberg and Distad (1985) concluded that the self-destructive behaviors of adolescent incest survivors, such as substance abuse, suicide attempts, perfectionism, isolation, and depression, are “logical and predictable survival responses” (p. 523). However, these behaviors become maladaptive when the adolescent is no longer in an incestuous situation.

Dissociation and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) The DSM-IV-TR defines dissociation as “a disruption of normally integrated function of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of environment or one’s body.” Individuals who experience long-term, uninterrupted abuse are at an increased risk of dissociative symptoms. To survive ongoing incest, individuals dissociate in order to distance themselves from reality (Courtois, 1997). Research has shown that women who experience incest as compared to extrafamilial sexual abuse tend to experience a greater degree of psychopathology. In a study of Turkish university students, incest was reported by 6.3% of 535 students. Students who reported incest also had significantly higher scores on the Dissociative Experiences Scale. In a study of 45 female incest victims from ages 13 to 18, Johnson and Kenkel (1991) found girls with the greatest level of psychopathology tended to cope by dissociation. Incest severity, which includes the duration, level of violence, degree of coercion, escalation, and penetration, as well as the experiences of multiple perpetrators, and disclosure without intervention, are related to a higher degree of dissociation. Cyr, Wright, McDuff, & Perron (2002) found that girls abused by their fathers and brothers reported more dissociative symptoms than girls abused by stepfathers. In a survey study of college students, Ullman, Townsend, Filipas, and Starzynski (2007) found that students abused by a family member experienced significantly more post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms than did individuals abused by a stranger or acquaintance. Students abused by a family member who delayed disclosure had higher rates of PTSD symptoms than did individuals abused by a nonfamily member who also delayed disclosure. The traumatic betrayal of incest may be one reason for higher occurrences of PTSD and dissociative symptoms as compared to those who experience extrafamilial sexual assaults (Ullman et al., 2007).

No Safe Haven

Obesity and Eating Disorders A prospective study of 84 female victims of childhood sexual abuse showed that they were more than twice as likely to be obese by the time they reached young adulthood when compared to a group of nonabused females (Noll, Zeller, Trickett, & Putnam, 2007). However, there was no difference in weight gain prior to young adulthood. Weight gain starts occurring in adolescence when teens may start dating and being sexually active. Researchers speculate that the manners in which incest victims cope with associated conditions, such as depression, may mediate their higher rates of obesity (Noll et al., 2007). Researchers in Australia conducted a birth cohort study of 2,461 young adults who experienced childhood sexual abuse by the age of 16. Despite controlling for “maternal education and income, marital circumstances, maternal lifestyle and mental health, childhood and adolescent behavioral problems, and family dysfunction,” women who experienced penetrative sexual abuse had significantly higher body mass index (BMI) measurements at age 21 than did women who experienced nonpenetrative abuse and men who experienced penetrative and nonpenetrative abuse (Mamun et al., 2007). Miller, McClusky-Fawcett, and Irving (1993) identified 72 women using the Bulimic Investigatory Test who had a high likelihood of having bulimia nervosa. The sexual-abuse histories of these women were compared to 72 control subjects. Women who were abused during adolescence by an adult relative were significantly more likely to be bulimic. This higher likelihood of adolescent incest survivors to be bulimic may be related to negative feelings regarding their bodies (Miller et al., 1993).

Psychological Effects While not every victim of incest will experience adverse long-term effects, the trauma of incest is a significant risk factor for many adverse psychological outcomes. Factors that increase the risk of adverse outcomes include incest beginning at puberty, duration of abuse lasting longer than four years, the use of violence or coercion, blaming the victim, physical penetration, the existence of more than one perpetrator, and a traumatic intervention (Courtois, 1997). According to the cognitive model of therapy, the psychological wellbeing of an individual who experiences a traumatic event is related to the way that he or she perceives and processes that event. Internal attributions consist of “self-blame” attributions that relate the cause of an event to something about oneself, while external attributions attribute the cause

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of the abuse to an outside source, such as a perpetrator. Some cognitive therapists also believe an individual who can find meaning in a traumatic event, or answer the question of “why,” may also have better psychological outcomes. Morrow (1991) compared female adolescent incest victims’ internal attributions, external attributions, and ability to find meaning in the abuse to their levels of self-esteem and depression. Of the 87 participants, 16.7% made internal attributions such as “It was my fault,” “I was dressed inappropriately,” and “I was being punished” (p. 479). Thirty-three and one-third of the participants made external attributions, such as “Because he was drinking,” “My stepfather has a problem,” and “I guess he was sick” (p. 479). There was no significant difference in the self-esteem and depression scores of girls who found meaning in their abuse and those who did not. However, girls who had internal attributions about their incest experience had lower self-esteem scores and high levels of depression compared to girls who had external attributions or who found no meaning in their abuse. There was a significant association between girls whose abuse involved intercourse and those who made internal attributions. Internal attributions may be an adaptive way of coping with the incest experience by distorting what really happened and allowing a child or adolescent to feel in control of the abuse. However, such self-blame is a common factor in future psychological maladjustment, the possibility for sexual revictimization, and the potential for self-harm (Morrow, 1991).

Conclusion The trauma of incest is damaging at any point in life, but its occurrence during adolescence is particularly developmentally disruptive. While all sexual abuse during adolescence is damaging, incest involves intimate betrayal and a loss of safety at home. Incest is a significant risk factor for many future psychological problems. Adolescence is a turbulent and defining time in an individual’s life. The challenges of adolescence are much more difficult to successfully navigate after experiencing the trauma of incest. Despite increasing public awareness, the majority of incest cases are underreported and perpetrators unpunished. It is impossible to determine the social cost to each survivor of incest. The majority of current research on incest does not take into account the unique situation of adolescents. More research is needed to determine appropriate interventions for adolescent survivors of incest. Adolescents, particularly males, are more likely to experience shame about incest. Through increased societal education, victims of incest are more likely to speak out and receive appropriate treatment.

No Safe Haven

References Anderson, K. M. (2006). Surviving incest: The art of resistance. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 87, 409–416. Brennan, S. (2006). Sibling incest within violent families: Children under 12 seeking nurture. Health Sociology Review, 15, 287–292. Burns Loeb, T., Williams, J., Vargas Carmona, J., Rivkin, I., Wyatt, G. E., Chin, D., & Asuan-O’Brien, A. (2002). Child sexual abuse: Associations with the sexual functioning of adolescents and adults. Annual Review of Sex Research, 13, 307–348. Carlson, B. E., Maciol, K., & Schneider, J. (2006). Sibling incest: Reports from 41 survivors. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 15, 19–34. Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2009). Understanding the effects of maltreatment on brain development. Retrieved August 16, 2010, from www.childwelfare .gov/pubs/issue_briefs/brain_development. Cole, P. M., & Putnam, F. W. (1992). Effect of incest on self and social functioning: A developmental psychopathology perspective. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 60, 174–184. Courtois, C. A. (1997). Healing the incest wound: A treatment update with attention to recovered memory issues. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 51, 464–496. Cyr, M., Wright, J., McDuff, P., & Perron, A. (2002). Intrafamilial sexual abuse: Brother-sister incest does not differ from father-daughter and stepfatherstepdaughter incest. Child Abuse and Neglect, 26, 957–973. Etherington, K. (1997). Maternal sexual abuse of males. Child Abuse Review, 6, 107–117. Finkelhor, D., Hammer, H., & Sedlak, A. J. (2008). Sexually assaulted children: National estimates and characteristics. National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children. Retrieved from www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ojjdp. Gannon, T. A., Gilchrist, E., & Wade, K. A. (2008). Handbook of social work in child and adolescent sexual abuse (pp. 71–101). New York: The Haworth Press. Haskins, C. (2003). Treating sibling incest using family systems approach. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 25, 337–350. Johnson, B. & Kenkel, M. (1991). Stress, coping and adjustment in female adolescent incest victims. Child Abuse and Neglect, 15, 293–305. Kristensen, E., & Lau, M. (2007). Women with a history of childhood sexual abuse: Long-term social and psychiatric aspects. Nord Journal of Psychiatry, 61, 115–120. Lindberg, F. H., & Distad, L. J. (1985). Survival responses to incest: Adolescents in crisis. Child Abuse and Neglect, 9, 521–526. Mamun, A. A., Lawlor, D. A., O’Callaghan, M. J., Bor, W., Williams, G. M., & Najman, J. M. (2007). Does childhood sexual abuse predict young adults BMI? A birth cohort study. OBESITY, 15, 2103–2110. Miller, D. A., McCluskey-Fawcett, K., & Irving, L. M. (1993). The relationship between childhood sexual abuse and subsequent onset of bulimia nervosa. Child Abuse and Neglect, 17, 305–314.

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Morrow, K. (1991). Attributions of female adolescent incest victims regarding their molestation. Child Abuse and Neglect, 15, 477–483. Noll, J., Zeller, M., Trickett, P. & Putnam, F. (2007). Obesity risk for female victims of childhood sexual abuse: A prospective study. Pediatrics, 120, 61–67. Ogilvie, B., & Daniluk, J. (1995). Common themes in the experiences of motherdaughter incest survivors: Implications for counseling. Journal of Counseling and Development, 73, 598–602. Righthand, S., & Welch, C. (2004). Characteristics of youth who sexually offend. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 13, 15–32. Synder, H. N. (2000, July). Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: Victim, incident, and offender characteristics. U.S. Deptartment of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1–17. Ullman, S. E., Townsend, S. M., Filipas, H. H., & Starzynski, L. L. (2007). Structural models of the relations of assault severity, social support, avoidance coping, self-blame, and PTSD among sexual assault survivors. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 23–37. Worling, J. R. (1995). Adolescent sibling-incest offenders: Differences in family and individual functioning when compared to adolescent nonsibling sex offenders. Child Abuse and Neglect, 19, 633–643.

CHAPTER TEN

Child Sexual Abuse and Adolescent Sexual Assault and Revictimization Kate Walsh and David DiLillo

Child sexual abuse and adolescent sexual assault are significant societal problems that can result in a host of negative outcomes for victims. From a public health perspective, child and adolescent sexual abuse not only engender immediate costs in terms of police and child-welfare agency involvement, medical examinations and treatment, and mental health assessments and intervention, but also result in long-term costs associated with early sexual abuse. For instance, sexual abuse victims tend to have greater difficulty maintaining employment as adults, and mental and physical health barriers appear to account for associations between sexual abuse and adult employment problems (Lee & Tolman, 2006). Although the focus of the present chapter is exclusively on the risk factors for and consequences of sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence, it is important to recognize that the adverse outcomes of these experiences are potentially far-reaching, in many cases lasting into adulthood. Here, we review definitions of sexual victimization during both childhood and adolescence, the contexts in which child and adolescent victimization experiences most commonly occur, prevalence rates for victimization, risk factors for and outcomes of victimization, theories relating risk factors and outcomes to victimization, and treatment and prevention of victimization.

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Definitions of Child Sexual Abuse, Adolescent Sexual Assault, and Child-to-Adolescent Revictimization There are no universally used definitions of child or adolescent sexual abuse (CASA). Rather, different definitions can be found in the legal, research, and advocacy communities. Moreover, cultural context is important to consider when definining victimization. Most generally, however, CASA can be conceptualized as unwanted sexual contact under the age of 18. Researchers and clinicians have developed more specific parameters regarding the features that distinguish childhood and adolescent victimizations. Child sexual abuse (CSA) often is operationalized as sexual contact (ranging from kissing/fondling to penetration) occurring when the victim is under the age of 14 that is either (a) against the child’s will; (b) with a family member; or (c) with a perpetrator at least 5 years older (DiLillo et al., 2010; for a summary of definitional criteria, see Rind, Tromovitch, & Bauserman, 1998). Adolescent sexual assault (ASA), in contrast, involves sexual contact occurring between the ages of 14 and 17 either against the adolescent’s will or with a perpetrator 5 or more years older (regardless of consent). If the victim is between the ages of 14 and 17, but the perpetrator is 10 or more years older or a family member, the abuse is classified as CSA. Although researchers have defined sexual revictimization using varied criteria (e.g., Daigle, Fisher, & Cullen, 2008), the most common definition refers to the experience of two or more sexual victimizations by different perpetrators, usually across two or more developmental time periods (typically CSA and ASA; Arata, 2002). Studies often have collapsed ASA into CSA by querying about unwanted sexual experiences that occurred “while growing up” or “before the age of 18.” However, researchers have recently highlighted a need to consider ASA separately from either CSA or adult sexual assault, as the mechanisms and risk factors for each may differ across developmental time periods (Arata, 2002).

Socioemotional Context of Victimization The social contexts in which childhood and adolescent victimization occur can vary considerably. Although not all perpetrators of CSA are family members or relatives, a substantial proportion of sexual abuse occurring during childhood is perpetrated by an older “trusted” individual or caregiver, which has been linked to more severe distress (Browne & Finkelhor, 1986; Ullman, 2007). Among adolescents, however, a large proportion of the victimization experiences involve a similar age perpetrator

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who is familiar to the victim, and thus can be classified as date or acquaintance rape (Wolitsky-Taylor et al., 2008). Coercion in the context of dating relationships can be extremely confusing for adolescents, who may be making novel attempts to develop intimacy with dating partners while attempting to establish and maintain personal boundaries (see Moore & Rosenthal, 2006). Thus, although CSA and ASA both involve lack of consent on the part of a victim, the contexts in which each occurs is often quite different. Despite these differences, the early experience of CSA is associated with increased likelihood of being revictimized during adolescence and beyond (Arata, 2002), perhaps by negatively affecting the development of a healthy sexual self-concept and appropriate personal boundaries.

Prevalence of Childhood and Adolescent Victimization and Revictimization Sexual victimization during childhood or adolescence is an unfortunately prevalent experience in the United States. In fact, studies suggest that 20% to 25% of females and 5% to 15% of males experience sexual abuse as children (Finkelhor, 1994; Finkelhor, Hammer, & Sedlak, 2004). Further, 7% to 18% of adolescent females report forced sexual victimization, whereas 5–14% of adolescent males report forced sexual victimization (Howard & Wang, 2005). In nationally representative samples, 11.8% of adolescent girls reported sexual assault, and 2.1% of the sample reported incapacitated or drug-facilitated assault (McCauley, Ruggiero, Resnick, Conoscenti, & Kilpatrick, 2009), while 2.7% of female adolescents reported sexual assault occurring in the context of dating relationships (Wolitsky-Taylor et al., 2008). Among older adolescent samples, estimates suggest that 15–20% of college women report experiencing a rape or attempted rape during their lives (Brener, McMahon, Warren, & Douglas, 2003). Furthermore, there appears to be a strong relationship between CSA and sexual revictimization during childhood or adolescence (Boney-McCoy & Finkelhor, 1995). This relationship also extends to late adolescence and young adulthood, with CSA victims being at least 2–3 times more likely to be revictimized as adolescents when compared to nonvictims (Arata, 2000; Barnes, Noll, Putnam, & Trickett, 2009; Gagne, Lavoie, & Hebert, 2005).

Risk Factors for Victimization and Revictimization A number of factors have been studied in relation to risk for victimization and revictimization among children and adolescents. There is evidence that family of origin dysfunction is a potential risk factor for

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CSA (Drauker, 1996; Manseau, Fernet, Hebert, Collin-Vezina, & Blais, 2008). More specifically, victims of sexual abuse tend to report less emotional bonding among family members, decreased flexibility in familymember roles and structure during times of stress, and less parent-child involvement when compared to non-victims (Drauker, 1996). Similarly, difficulties that prevent parents from supervising children appropriately, such as being a single parent and parental alcohol and drug problems, have been linked to increased risk for child sexual abuse (Arellano, Kuhn, & Chavez, 1997). Parents of sexually abused children also report greater marital dissatisfaction (Paveza, 1988), poorer parent-child relationships (Boney-McCoy & Finkelhor, 1995), and less perceived emotional support (Pianta & Castaldi, 1989). Parents whose children are sexually abused are also more likely to have their own sexual abuse histories (Finkelhor, 1994). Although these familial variables have been associated with CSA, many studies utilized cross-sectional methodologies to examine caregiver or familial characteristics of identified sexual abuse victims. Thus, with the exception of the parents’ own history of sexual abuse, it is unclear whether many of these factors preceded the sexual abuse or resulted from learning about their child’s sexual abuse. Beyond familial factors, social and environmental characteristics also may contribute to increased risk for abuse or assault. For instance, data from nationally representative samples of children and adolescents reveal that living in more dangerous communities is a risk factor for increased rates of sexual abuse (Boney-McCoy & Finkelhor, 1995), as is low socioeconomic status (Rowland, Zabin, & Emerson, 2000), which is associated with more dangerous conditions and with less supervision and protective resources to buffer against contact with potential perpetrators. Further, poorer children who have little parental or guardian supervision may be perceived by perpetrators as more vulnerable than children whose parents hold them accountable for family activities and provide consistent supervision. Although the responsibility for an assault lies entirely with a perpetrator, there are some individual characteristics that may increase the likelihood of victimization. In terms of demographic characteristics, victims of sexual abuse are more likely to be Black and female (for a review, see Black, Heyman, & Slep, 2001). Child victims of sexual abuse also tend to have more academic problems and physical and intellectual disabilities (Sullivan & Knutson, 2000), as well as more behavior problems at home and school (for review, see Black et al., 2001). Although common in adolescence more generally, engagement in high-risk behaviors has been found to be a robust risk factor for adolescent victimization (Howard, Wang, & Yan, 2007). In particular, greater levels of alcohol and drug

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use may heighten risk for sexual victimization by lowering inhibitions, decreasing the ability to perceive risk, and increasing problems with engaging in active defensive behavior. Furthermore, adolescents who engage in consensual sexual behavior with a greater number of partners and those who have more frequent sexual encounters with persons they do not know well may be at higher risk for victimization when compared to adolescents who do not engage in such behaviors (for a review, see Lalor & McElvaney, 2010). Finally, risky sexual behavior and substance abuse may interact to predict increased risk for victimization. For example, adolescents who abuse substances prior to sex may be at heightened risk for victimization (McCauley et al., 2009; Young, Grey, Abbey, Boyd, & McCabe, 2008). In addition to being implicated in the risk for initial victimization, a number of these risk factors also have been shown to increase risk for subsequent assault. Longitudinal studies of adolescents reveal that alcohol use, particularly heavy episodic drinking, and risky sexual behaviors increase the risk for revictimization (e.g., Testa, Hoffman, Livingston, & Turrisi, 2010). More specifically, adolescents who engage in risky sexual behavior, including intercourse with a greater number of sexual partners, are more likely to experience revictimization (Lalor & McElvaney, 2010), perhaps due to increased exposure to potential perpetrators (Orcutt, Cooper, & Garcia, 2005). Alcohol use, another commonly reported correlate among sexually abused adolescents (Danielson et al., 2009), is an independent risk factor for sexual victimization (e.g., Abbey, Zawacki, Buck, Clinton, & McAuslan, 2004; Testa & Parks, 1996). However, alcohol use may occur simultaneously with sexual risk taking and compound risk for revictimization by reducing perceptions of risk and effective defensive behaviors (Testa & Livingston, 1999).

Theories of Risk Factors for Victimization and Revictimization A number of theories have been proposed to explain risk for sexual victimization and revictimization (Gold, Sinclair, & Balge, 1999; Macy, 2007; Marx, Gold, & Heidt, 2005). One of the most widely cited theoretical models incorporates risk factors occurring at multiple ecological levels (Messman-Moore & Long, 2003). This theory posits that victimlevel variables (e.g., characteristics of the initial abuse and its psychological sequelae) can contribute to risk for victimization by increasing distress and maladaptive coping responses, such as impulsive behavior and substance use. In turn, these problems may increase difficulties in identifying risky situations. Further, microsystem factors involving the context of the

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abuse, such as the perpetrator’s perception of the victim as an easy target, may increase the risk for victimization. In the case of CSA and ASA, older perpetrators may isolate children or adolescents, coerce or force them into abusive experiences, and then threaten them not to disclose the activity. Among adolescents, engagement in behaviors like drinking or risky sex also may increase contact with potential perpetrators and decrease the ability to engage in effective defense behaviors (Messman-Moore & Long, 2003). Exosystem factors, such as low socioeconomic resources and living in a risky neighborhood, may increase the likelihood of experiencing victimization due to exposure to potential perpetrators and limited safety resources. As noted, in single-parent, low-income families, caregivers may have difficulty providing an adequate level of supervision while simultaneously working to feed, clothe, and house the family. These children also may spend more unsupervised time in the community, which might increase exposure to perpetrators (Boney-McCoy & Finkelhor, 1995). Finally, macrosystem factors reflecting cultural and social forces (e.g., rape myth acceptance, victim blaming, patriarchal views) all likely contribute to sexual abuse, assault, and revictimization by increasing the acceptance of abuse and mistreatment of victims.

Outcomes of Child or Adolescent Sexual Abuse Although not all children and adolescents who have been sexually victimized experience negative sequelae, a substantial proportion of victims do experience a wide range of negative outcomes, including physical, psychological, and behavioral problems (Kendall-Tackett, Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993; Noll & Shenk, 2010). In the immediate aftermath of sexual abuse, genital injuries and sexually transmitted diseases are unfortunately common (Anderson, 1995; Boyle, McCann, Miyamoto, & Rogers, 2008; Heger, Ticson, Velasquez, & Bernier, 2002). A recent meta-analysis revealed that CSA is also associated with longer-term physical health problems in the areas of general health, gastrointestinal (GI) health, gynecologic or reproductive health, pain, cardiopulmonary symptoms, and obesity (Irish, Kobayashi, & Delahanty, 2010). Characteristics of the victimization experience itself may impact in the degree of adverse outcomes. For instance, more severe abuse has been associated with greater genital injury (Heger et al., 2002), and children and adolescents reporting intrafamilial abuse tend to have greater emotional and physical injury (Fischer & McDonald, 1998). Further, adolescents victimized in the context of a long-term relationship may sustain more severe physical injury than those who were victimized in the context of a more casual dating relationship (Gagne et al., 2005).

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In addition to physical outcomes, children and adolescents who have been abused often endure a number of psychological difficulties. For example, 37% to 53% of sexually abused children eventually develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (e.g., Kendall-Tackett et al., 1993; McLeer, Deblinger, Atkins, Foa, & Ralphe, 1988; McLeer et al., 1998), and the large majority of sexually abused children referred to treatment have been shown to experience partial PTSD symptoms (McLeer, Deblinger, Henry, & Orvaschel, 1992). A large body of research also details links between sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence and the development of internalizing symptomatology. Specifically, 43% to 67% of children and adolescents meet diagnostic criteria for depression following sexual abuse (e.g., Koverola, Pound, Heger, & Lytle, 1993; Tebbutt, Swanston, Oates, & O’Toole, 1997). Further, the prevalence of anxiety disorders (e.g., phobias, separation anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder) is significantly higher in sexually abused children and adolescents than in nonabused comparisons (12% vs. 3%; Spataro, Mullen, Burgess, Wells, & Moss, 2004). Child and adolescent sexual abuse victims also tend to report self-blame, low self-esteem, and stigmatization related to the abuse (Feiring, Taska, & Lewis, 1996, 1998). Perhaps as a consequence of developing a negative self-concept, abused children and adolescents also report more social isolation than do their nonabused peers (Arellano et al., 1997). In response to significant emotional distress stemming from the abuse, victims also may engage in a number of externalizing behaviors. More specifically, approximately 28% of sexually abused children exhibit highly sexualized behavior (Kendall-Tackett et al., 1993). Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Ford et al., 2000), opposition defiant disorder (ODD) (Ford et al., 2000), and conduct disorder (CD) (Dubowitz, Black, Harrington, & Verschoore, 1993; Lynskey & Fergusson, 1997; Romano, Zoccolillo, & Paquette, 2006) also are commonly diagnosed among sexually abused children. Beyond diagnoses of ADHD, ODD, and CD, studies have shown that sexually abused children and adolescents are significantly more hyperactive, impulsive, and aggressive than are non-maltreated children (e.g., Dubowitz et al., 1993; Ford et al., 2000; Swanston et al., 2003). Further, sexually abused children and adolescents tend to lack skills to self-regulate angry and aggressive tendencies (Ford et al., 2000), which can lead to repercussions in the form of criminal justice involvement. For example, among adolescents entering the juvenile justice system, 25% report a history of sexual abuse (Dembo, Schmeidler, & Childs, 2007).The externalizing problems also can manifest in educational or school-related difficulties for children and adolescents. For instance, sexual abuse has been linked to poorer school adjustment (Caffaro-Rouget, Lang, & Van

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Santem, 1989; Daignault & Hebert, 2009) and greater likelihood of school dropout (Dunlap, Golub, & Johnson, 2003). Lack of coping resources can lead to increased reliance on substance abuse and other tension-reduction behaviors (e.g., sexual risk taking) to regulate negative abuse-related emotions (Arellano et al., 1997; Buckle, Lancaster, Powell, & Higgins, 2005; Caffaro-Rouget et al., 1989; Daignault & Hebert, 2009; for a review, see Danielson et al., 2006). For example, sexually abused adolescents report increased use of alcohol, marijuana, and other illicit substances, including crack cocaine (Freeman, Collier, & Parillo, 2002; Harrison, Fulkerson, & Beebe, 1997). Unfortunately, substance use by the victim or perpetrator has been linked to adolescent sexual assault risk (Seifert, 1999). Sexually abused adolescents also report greater engagement in sexual risk behaviors, including earlier age of first consensual sexual intercourse, higher frequency of sexual encounters with new acquaintances, decreased use of contraception or STD prevention methods, and a greater overall number of sexual partners (for a review, see Senn, Carey, & Vanable, 2008; Steel & Herlitz, 2005). Related to involvement with these high-risk behaviors, sexually abused youths are more likely to run away from home (Freeman et al., 2002) and become involved with prostitution, sex trading, and teenage pregnancy/parenting (Dunlap et al., 2003; Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl, Egolf, & Russo, 1998; Senn et al., 2008; Wilson & Widom, 2010). Sexual revictimization is another unfortunate interpersonal outcome associated with early sexual abuse (Arata, 2002; Krahé, ScheinbergerOlwig, Waizenhöffer, & Kolpin, 1999). Revictimization itself is associated with heightened difficulties across multiple arenas of functioning (Casey & Nurius, 2005; Gagne et al., 2005), and revictimized adolescents and young adults tend to report greater self-blame, more severe trauma symptoms, and heightened substance abuse when compared to those reporting single victimizations (Arata, 2002; Filipas & Ullman, 2006; Follette, Polusny, Bechtle, & Naugle, 1996; Kilpatrick, Acierno, Resnick, Saunders, & Best, 1997). Adolescents and adults reporting revictimization also endure more nonsexual trauma exposure, greater health problems, and longer latency to recover from the most recent sexually assaultive experience (Arata, 1999; Gibson & Leitenberg, 2001).

Theories Explaining the Effects of Sexual Abuse and Revictimization Various theories has emphasized different factors in explaining links between victimization and the development of short- and long-term negative outcomes. For example, developmental psychopathologists have

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posited an ecological transactional model suggesting that early abuse shapes neurodevelopment to result in chronic distress and other negative outcomes (Cicchetti & Valentino, 2006). Trauma theorists have postulated that emotional avoidance contributes to the development and maintenance of difficulties among sexually abused individuals. Perhaps the most prominent theory relating sexual abuse to negative outcomes is Finkelhor and Browne’s (1985) traumagenic dynamics model, which suggests that the impact of childhood trauma can be accounted for by the dynamics of betrayal, traumatic sexualization, stigmatization, and powerlessness, which are said to “alter children’s cognitive and emotional orientation to the world, and create trauma by distorting children’s self-concept, world view, and affective capacities” (Finkelhor & Browne, 1985, p. 531). The dynamic of betrayal may come into play following abuse when victims come to realize that an adult (often a trusted adult or family member) has violated the tacit but fundamental trust that normally exists between children and adults. Older adolescent women who have experienced childhood trauma (sexual, physical, or psychological abuse) that engendered feelings of betrayal have been shown to experience revictimization during adolescence that involves similar feelings of betrayal (Gobin & Freyd, 2009). Traumatic sexualization, which refers to developmentally inappropriate and dysfunctional sexual behavior stemming from sexual abuse, may manifest in a variety of lasting difficulties, including increased vulnerability to subsequent sexual assault (Finkelhor & Browne, 1985). The third process, stigmatization, refers to internalized feelings of shame, guilt, and self-blame that arise from experiencing maltreatment. In the case of sexual abuse, stigmatization may evolve from direct threats and comments from the perpetrator as well as negative reactions by caregivers and family members upon disclosure of the abuse. Studies have found that even nonoffending parents who are typically supportive may exhibit negative or ambivalent responses to disclosure, which may increase the child’s adjustment difficulties and stigmatization following abuse (Elliott & Carnes, 2001). Finally, the dynamic of powerlessness refers to a lack of self-efficacy that emanates from the uncontrollable and repeated physical boundary violations that accompany child and adolescent sexual abuse. Powerlessness engendered by early sexual abuse may undermine victims’ sense of control in later dating relationships, rendering them less effective in asserting their needs during risky interpersonal encounters and increasing risk for additional victimizations. Indeed, among adolescent sexual abuse victims, low sexual assertiveness has been shown to increase risk for date rape (Vogel & Himelein, 1995).

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Prevention and Treatment A variety of prevention and treatment efforts have been developed in response to the prevalence and consequences of sexual abuse noted above. To create minimum standards for prevention programs, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has developed guidelines to aid in the prevention of CSA ranging from the selection of employees who work with children to ways of monitoring behavior and ensuring a safe environment to ways of responding appropriately to allegations of abuse (Saul & Audage, 2007). The CDC also has identified goals for training caregivers and youths to recognize risk factors for sexual abuse and identify potential solutions. Although mass media campaigns have been launched to prevent sexual abuse, evaluation of these efforts suggests that, alone, such methods of prevention are not sufficient to improve the primary prevention of sexual abuse (e.g., Rheingold et al., 2007). School-based educational prevention efforts have been shown to increase knowledge and awareness of sexual abuse, but they tend to have minimal impact on actual rates of sexual abuse. For example, one study that employed teacher training to prevent sexual abuse found that teachers who participated in a six-hour training on sexual abuse had greater knowledge of sexual abuse, behavioral indicators of sexual abuse, and appropriate intervention in suspected abuse cases (Randolph & Gold, 1994). However, the direct impact of school-based trainings on actual sexual abuse prevention is unclear. One evaluation of a psychoeducation group program designed to prevent sexual abuse found that children’s knowledge about sexual abuse and ability to discriminate safe and unsafe scenarios increased significantly with improvements maintained over a one-year follow-up. Another study using a retrospective design to assess college women’s experiences with prevention programs and sexual abuse found that 8% of respondents who had participated in “good touch/bad touch” school-based prevention programs reported experiencing sexual abuse compared to 14% of respondents who did not participate in such a program (Gibson & Leitenberg, 2000). Secondary prevention programs also have been tailored to youths with specific risk characteristics. For instance, due to the increased risk of sexual abuse among children and adolescents with disabilities, clinicians and researchers have proposed a prevention model for work with this population that includes behavioral-skills training at the microsystem level, communication between appropriate agencies at the mesosystem level, federally mandated training for teachers working with developmentally disabled students at the exosystem level, and paradigm shifts at the macrosystem level (Skarbek, Hahn, & Parrish, 2009). Specific prevention efforts have also been suggested

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to reduce the risk of date rape among adolescents in dating relationships. In particular, these programs promote educating potential perpetrators about date rape and teaching active resistance strategies (e.g., verbal resistance, physical resistance, and fleeing) to potential date rape victims (Page, 1997). In addition to school- and agency-based prevention programs, researchers have suggested designing prevention efforts to educate parents about the risk for sexual abuse in order to create safer environments in which children will be less vulnerable to sexual victimization (Wurtele & Kenny, 2010). For instance, among adolescents with a history of sexual victimization, risk reduction through family therapy, a multicomponent treatment that integrates components of existing evidence-based treatments, has been shown to be effective in reducing risk factors for sexual revictimization, including substance use, PTSD, and depression symptoms (Danielson et al., 2010). Further, these treatment gains were maintained at six-month follow-up. In another innovative study, mothers of graduating high school senior girls participated in a parent-based intervention. When compared to controls, girls in the intervention condition evidenced increased mother-daughter communication, decreased first-semester heavy episodic drinking, and had lower rates of alcohol-related sexual victimization in the first year of college (Testa et al., 2010). These family-based prevention approaches are promising; however, more research is necessary to examine whether these results are maintained throughout college. Although prevention efforts are greatly needed, enhancing treatment for children in the aftermath of abusive experiences is also incredibly important in ameliorating negative outcomes associated with sexual abuse and preventing the occurrence of additional victimizations. To this end, metaanalyses reveal that cognitive behavioral treatments delivered either in an individual or a group format effectively reduce sequelae associated with sexual abuse, including PTSD symptoms, internalizing, and such externalizing problems as sexualized behaviors (Trask, Walsh, & DiLillo, in press). Further, to address the issue of possible revictimization among adolescents, multisession, manual-based treatment programs that focus on changing attitudes and behaviors that increase risk for sexual victimization and developing skills to ward off sexual victimization have been shown to be effective (Weisz & Black, 2009).

Summary and Conclusions Child and adolescent sexual abuse are prevalent societal problems that result in a host of intra- and interpersonal negative outcomes, including PTSD, depression, dissociation, low self-esteem, and sexual

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revictimization. Several theories have been hypothesized to account for the risk for and outcomes of sexual abuse and revictimization; however, no single theory appears to fully explain these processes. Recent prevention efforts have demonstrated promise for the reduction of risk for victimization and revictimization among adolescents. More research is needed to evaluate interactions between risk characteristics known to co-occur (e.g., lack of parental supervision and poor family environment, sexual risk taking, and alcohol use) and the contexts in which victimization often occurs in order to further improve prevention efforts.

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Gold, S. R., Sinclair, B. B., & Balge, K. A. (1999). Risk of sexual revictimization: A theoretical model. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 4, 457–470. Harrison, P. A., Fulkerson, J. A., & Beebe, T. J. (1997). Multiple substance use among adolescent physical and sexual abuse victims. Child Abuse and Neglect, 21, 529–539. Heger, A., Ticson, L., Velasquez, O., & Bernier, R. (2002). Children referred for possible sexual abuse: Medical findings in 2,384 children. Child Abuse and Neglect, 26, 645–659. Herrenkohl, E. C., Herrenkohl, R. C., Egolf, B. P., & Russo, M. J. (1998). The relationship between early maltreatment and teenage parenthood. Journal of Adolescence, 21, 291–303. Howard, D. E., & Wang, M. (2005). Psychosocial correlates of U.S. adolescents who report a history of forced sexual intercourse. Journal of Adolescent Health, 36, 372–379. Howard, D. E., Wang, M., & Yan, F. (2007). Prevalence and psychosocial correlates of forced sexual intercourse among U.S. high school adolescents. Adolescence, 42, 629–643. Irish, L., Kobayashi, I., Delahanty, D. L. (2010). Long-term physical health consequences of childhood sexual abuse: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 35, 450–461. Kendall-Tackett, K., Williams, L., & Finkelhor, D. (1993). Impact of sexual abuse on children: A review and synthesis of recent empirical studies. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 164–180. Kilpatrick, D. G., Acierno, R., Resnick, H. S., Saunders, B. E., & Best, C. L. (1997). A 2-year longitudinal analysis of the relationships between violent assault and substance use in women. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 65, 834–847. Koverola, C., Pound, J., Heger, A., & Lytle, C. (1993). Relationship of child sexual abuse to depression. Child Abuse and Neglect, 17, 393–400. Krahé, B., Scheinberger-Olwig, R., Waizenhöfer, E., & Kolpin, S. (1999). Childhood sexual abuse and revictimization in adolescence. Child Abuse and Neglect, 23, 383–394. Lalor, K., & McElvaney, R. (2010). Child sexual abuse, links to later sexual exploitation/high-risk sexual behavior, and prevention/treatment programs. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 11, 159–177. Lee, S., & Tolman, R. M. (2006). Childhood sexual abuse and adult work outcomes. Social Work Research, 30, 83–92. Lynskey, M. T., & Fergusson, D. M. (1997). Factors protecting against the development of adjustment difficulties in young adults exposed to childhood sexual abuse. Child Abuse and Neglect, 21, 1177–1190. Macy, R. J. (2007). A coping theory framework toward preventing sexual revictimization. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 12, 177–192. Manseau, H., Fernet, M., Hebert, M., Collin-Vezina, D., Blais, M. (2008). Risk factors for dating violence among teenage girls under child protective services. International Journal of Social Welfare, 17, 236–242.

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Marx, B. P., Gold, S. D., & Heidt, J. M. (2005). Perceived uncontrollability and unpredictability, self-regulation, and sexual revictimization. Review of General Psychology, 9, 67–90. McCauley, J., Ruggiero, K. J., Resnick, H. S., Conoscenti, L. M., & Kilpatrick, D. G. (2009). Forcible, drug-facilitated, and incapacitated rape in relation to substance abuse problems: Results from a national sample of college women. Addictive Behaviors, 34, 458–462. McLeer, S. V., Deblinger, E., Atkins, M. S., Foa, E. B., & Ralphe, D. (1988). Posttraumatic stress disorder in sexually abused children. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 27, 650–654. McLeer, S. V., Deblinger, E., Henry, D., & Orvaschel, H. (1992). Sexually abused children at high risk for PTSD. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 31, 875–879. McLeer, S. V., Dixon, J. F., Henry, D., Ruggiero, K., Escovitz, K., Niedda, T., et al. (1998). Psychopathology in non-clinically referred sexually abused children. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 37, 1326–1333. Messman-Moore, T. L., & Long, P. J. (2003). The role of childhood sexual abuse sequelae in the sexual revictimization of women: An empirical review and theoretical reformulation. Clinical Psychology Review, 23, 537–571. Moore, S., & Rosenthal, D. (2006). Sexuality in adolescence: Current trends. London: Taylor and Francis. Muram, D., Hostetler, B. R., Jones, C. E., & Speck, P. M. (1995). Adolescent victims of sexual assault. Journal of Adolescent Health, 17, 372–375. Noll, J. G., & Shenk, C. E. (2010). Introduction to the special issue: The physical health consequences of childhood maltreatment—Implications for public health. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 35, 447–449. Orcutt, H. K., Cooper, M. L., & Garcia, M. (2005). Use of sexual intercourse to reduce negative affect as a prospective mediator of sexual revictimization. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 18, 729–739. Page, R. M. (1997). Helping adolescents avoid date rape: The role of secondary education. High School Journal, 80, 75–80. Paveza, G. J. (1988). Risk factors in father-daughter child sexual abuse: A casecontrol study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 3, 290–306. Pianta, R. C., & Castaldi, J. (1989). Stability of internalizing symptoms from kindergarten to first grade and factors related to instability. Development and Psychopathology, 1, 305–316. Randolph, M. K., & Gold, C. A. (1994). Child sexual abuse prevention: Evaluation of a teacher training program. School Psychology Review, 23, 485–495. Rheingold, A. A., Campbell, C., Self-Brown, S., de Arellano, M., Resnick, H., & Kilpatrick, D. G. (2007). Prevention of child sexual abuse: Evaluation of a community media campaign. Child Maltreatment, 12, 352–363. Rind, B., Tromovitch, P., & Bauserman, R. (1998). A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 22–53.

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Romano, E., Zoccolillo, M., & Paquette, D. (2006). Histories of child maltreatment and psychiatric disorder in pregnant adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 45, 329–336. Rowland, D. L., Zabin, L. S., & Emerson, M. (2000). Household risk and child sexual abuse in a low income, urban sample of women. Adolescent and Family Health, 1, 29–39. Saul, J., & Audage, N. C. (2007). Preventing child sexual abuse within youth-serving organizations: Getting started on policies and procedures. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Seifert, S. A. (1999). Substance use and sexual assault. Substance Use and Misuse, 34, 935–945. Senn, T. E., Carey, M. P., & Vanable, P. A. (2008). Childhood and adolescent sexual abuse and subsequent sexual risk behavior: Evidence from controlled studies, methodological critique, and suggestions for research. Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 711–735. Skarbek, D., Hahn, K., & Parrish, P. (2009). Stop sexual abuse in special education: An ecological model of prevention and intervention strategies for sexual abuse in special education. Sexuality and Disability, 27, 155–164. Spataro, J., Mullen, P. E., Burgess, P. M., Wells, D. L., & Moss, S. A. (2004). Impact of child sexual abuse on mental health: Prospective study in males and females. British Journal of Psychiatry, 184, 416–421. Steel, J. L., & Herlitz, C. A. (2005). The association between childhood and adolescent sexual abuse and proxies for sexual risk behavior: A random sample of the general population of Sweden. Child Abuse and Neglect, 29, 1141–1153. Sullivan, P. M., & Knutson, J. F. (2000). Maltreatment and disabilities: A populationbased epidemiological study. Child Abuse and Neglect, 24, 1257–1273. Swanston, H. Y., Plunkett, A. M., O’Toole, B. I., Shrimpton, S., Parkinson, P. N., & Oates, R. K. (2003). Nine years after child sexual abuse. Child Abuse and Neglect, 27, 967–984. Tebbutt, J., Swanston, H., Oates, R. K., & O’Toole, B. I. (1997). Five years after child sexual abuse: Persisting dysfunction and problems of prediction. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 36, 330–339. Testa, M., Hoffman, J. H., Livingston, J. A., & Turrisi, R. (2010). Preventing college women’s sexual victimization through parent based intervention: A randomized controlled trial. Prevention Science, 11, 308–318. Testa, M., & Livingston, J. A. (1999). Qualitative analysis of women’s experiences of sexual aggression: Focus on the role of alcohol. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23, 573–589. Testa, M., & Parks, K. A. (1996). The role of women’s alcohol consumption in sexual victimization. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 1, 217–234. Trask, E., Walsh, K., & DiLillo, D. (in press). Efficacy of treatments for sexually abused children: A meta-analysis. Aggression and Violent Behavior.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Developing Teen Relationships: The Role of Violence Andrea Poet, Catherine R. Swiderski, and Maureen C. McHugh

As parents and members of communities, we try to protect our youths from threats to their safety and to protect their health and well-being. Despite our efforts, their health and safety may be at risk from an unrecognized source, their intimate/romantic partners. Dating violence threatens the health and well-being of adolescents; engaging in dating and sexual relationships places adolescents at risk for becoming victims of violence (Teten, Ball, Valle, Noonan, & Rosenbluth, 2009). Experts have called teen relationship violence a major health crisis, a societal problem, and even a silent epidemic (Weingartner, 2008). Dating violence is not only a serious problem for teens but is also a predictor for intimate partner violence through adulthood. The term “teen relationship violence” (TRV) acknowledges the existence of violence in the relationships of teens, and also suggests that there are some distinct aspects of violence in teen dating relationships. Teen relationship violence is a particular form of intimate partner violence (IPV). This broader term was coined when we realized that relationship violence was not limited to marital or heterosexual couples. IPV has been documented in marital, cohabitating, dating, and gay and lesbian couples (McHugh, Â�Livingston, & Frieze, 2008). In this chapter, we examine the specific Â�findings regarding teen relationship violence, but we also discuss teen relationship violence in the context of what we understand about intimate partner violence.

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What Is Teen Relationship Violence? Although definitions of TRV vary, it typically is used as a broader term to refer to three specific forms of abusive behavior that can occur in the context of a dating relationship (Teten et al., 2009). Teen dating violence may involve physical, sexual, and/or emotional/psychological abuse (Teten et al., 2009). Some also include the intent of the aggressive behavior in the definition (e.g., control or domination) (Werkerle & Wolfe, 1999). According to the Youth Risk Survey of female adolescents who experience dating violence, 57% have been victims of physical violence, 43% of sexual victimization, and up to 65% of psychological abuse (Maas, Fleming, Herrenkohl, & Catalano, 2010). Physical aggression is typically defined as acts intended to harm or kill and may involve such behaviors as hitting, slapping, strangling, and using weapons. Sexual violence entails completed or attempted penetration, unwanted nonpenetrative sexual contact, or verbal sexual harassment and includes incidents in which the victim is unable to consent (e.g., because of age) or unable to refuse (e.g., threatened with physical harm to self or others). Psychological abuse refers to aggressive acts, such as verbal intimidation, derogation and insults, social humiliation, constant surveillance, or threatened acts of violence that may cause emotional trauma. This type of abuse can be more subtle and often involves attempts to control, dominate, or isolate. Although much of the media and the professional literature is focused on instances of physical violence, verbal and emotional abuse may be the key component of teen dating violence. Emotional or psychological abuse has been found to precede and predict physical violence (Cano, Avery-Leaf, Cascardi, & O’Leary, 1998). Much of the harm to the victim, in the form of low self-esteem and depression, may actually be a reaction to the verbal and emotional abuse. Although Molidor (1995) reported low levels of psychological abuse for his high school sample, others have concluded that there are more psychological abuses than physical attacks in adolescent relationships (Jezl, Molidor, & Wright, 1996). Our understanding of teen dating violence now also includes stalking behaviors (Coker, Sanderson, Cantu, Huerta, & Fadden, 2008) and relational aggression (Linder, Crick, & Collins, 2002). Relational aggression refers to actions designed to hurt individuals via their relationships; an example might be deliberately flirting with another to make one’s partner angry. Technology has proven to have a significant impact on teen romantic relationships and the perpetrations of TRV (Ulloa, Castaneda, & Hokoda, 2010). Youths are more connected to technology and thus technology sometimes has a role in relational abuse in teen relationships. Cell phones,

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social-networking websites, and instant messaging are all ways in which teens maintain relationships and even enact abuse (Ulloa et al., 2010). Threatening and/or degrading messages can be sent through text, email, or social-networking sites and may be visible to more than just the dating partner. Stalking or spying may occur through logging onto the partner’s email or social-networking account and by checking calls and texts on a partner’s cell phone. In one survey, 30% of teens indicated that they received up to 30 text messages in an hour from a partner asking what they were doing and whom they were with (Picard, 2007). Texts and cell phones are also used by teens to engage in harassment and name calling. Twenty-five percent of the teens in a survey reported they had experienced this form of abuse. Teens may also feel pressure to engage in sexual behavior over the phone and/or Internet, as did 22% of this sample of teens. For example, one form of sexual behavior that can be used in coercive and abusive ways is sexting, the delivery of sexual material and images through texting.

Prevalence Contrary to what adults, professionals, and the general population may believe, teen dating violence occurs quite frequently. Research studies indicate that teen dating violence occurs in anywhere from 9% to 57% of teen relationships (Herrman, 2009). In one of the first studies to document teen violence, Henton & Cate (1983) reported that 12% of their respondents had experienced relationship abuse. Other early research on dating violence indicated that about 1 in 5 dating couples experiences some form of violence in their relationship (Makepeace, 1981). Similarly, a more recent study of high school students (Silverman, Raj, Mucci, & Hathaway, 2001) found that 1 out of every 5 teens was a victim of some form of relationship violence. Other researchers reported that 46% of high school students experienced physical aggression from a dating partner (Watson, Cascardi, Avery-Leaf, & O’Leary, 2001). It is important to realize that many teens do not report their experience of violence, and others who do discount the seriousness of their situation. One study of 11- to 14-year-old adolescents indicated that about 62% of the teens claimed they knew of someone who had been a victim of verbal abuse during their relationship (Teten et al., 2009). These numbers are frightening. Further, there are some indications that the incidence of dating violence may be increasing with each cohort. The more violence that teens observe, the more violence and abuse appears to be normative to them.

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Gender The most publicized cases of TRV are those involving serious injury or even death. These cases typically involve a male abuser and a female victim. There are documented cases of TRV involving this pattern of unilateral and serious violence perpetrated by the male toward a female victim. However, much of the research on teen relationship violence suggests that physical violence and psychological abuse are also perpetrated by girls and young women against their boyfriends. Some research finds that girls and boys are equally likely to use violence against their partners. Two different meta-analyses, examining the research from many studies, indicated that girls/women are as likely to perpetrate physical violence in their relationships as are boys/men (Archer, 2000). Even in the early studies, respondents indicated that teen dating violence was reciprocal (Henton & Cate, 1983; O’Keefe, Brockopp, & Chew, 1986). Similar results of bidirectional or reciprocal dating violence was reported in more recent research (Renner & Whitney, 2010) using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Other research also confirms that violence in teen relationships is often bidirectional, that is that both partners are engaging in and receiving violence (Gray & Foshee, 1997). Other researchers report that female adolescents perpetrate more physical abuse in dating relationships than do male adolescents (e.g., Foshee, 1996; Wolfe, Scott, Wekerle, & Pittman, 2001). However, some research contradicts these conclusions. In a study of rural youths, Marquart, Nannini, Edwards, Stanley, and Wayman (2007) reported that girls were 3.5 times more likely to report being hit, pushed, or threatened by their partner than were their male counterparts. Other research suggests that girls are more likely to push, slap, or bite their partners, but boys are more likely to punch their girlfriends or threaten them with a gun (Schwartz, Magee, Griffin, & Dupuis, 2004). West and Rose (2000) report that girls in their study reported slapping and pushing their partners, whereas boys were more likely to use sexual aggression. Girls are more likely to experience more severe forms of physical violence, and male-to-female violence results in more injury than female-perpetrated physical aggression (Archer, 2000; Molidar, Tolman, & Kober, 2000). A review of studies of sexual violence indicated that while young men and women were equally likely to pressure partners to engage in sexual activities, female respondents were four times more likely to have experienced rape (Spitzberg, 1999). Similarly, in their study of Latino/a adolescents, Hickman, Jaycox, and Aronoff (2004) found that girls perpetrated more physical and psychological violence,

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whereas boys were more likely to perpetrate sexual violence and to cause more injuries. Further, girls are more likely to be killed by a partner than are boys (U.S. Department of Justice, 1998). Young men and women may use and experience abuse and/or violence differently. Males reported experiencing higher amounts of psychological abuse than did females (Molidor, 1995), including being sworn at, given the silent treating fewer positive and more psychologically abusive behaviors than did their female counterparts. Molidor suggests that young women learn how to implement psychological abuse earlier than males, and that such strategies work as a defense against male entitlement and sexual coercion. Inconsistencies in the research record on who (men or women) uses more violence in intimate relationships has been tied to the methods employed to measure violence and to the respondents who were surveyed (Johnson, 1995; McHugh, Livingston, & Ford, 2005). Elsewhere, McHugh and Frieze (Frieze, 2005; McHugh et al., 2005; McHugh & Frieze, 2006; McHugh et al., 2008) have argued for recognition that women use various forms of violence in their intimate relationships. Refusal to recognize women’s use of violence undermines our understanding of relationship violence and the effectiveness of our interventions. However, we should be careful not to label young men’s and young women’s use of violence as equal, equivalent, or symmetrical. Evidence suggests that men’s violence and women’s violence differ in terms of force, severity, injury, intent, and perception. Johnson (1995), Frieze (2005), and others have argued that there are multiple patterns of relationship violence, including male battering, mutual reciprocal violence, and female-initiated unilateral violence. A similar approach appears to be warranted in our study of TRV. Research is needed to discern multiple forms and patterns of teen dating violence and to assess the consequences of each pattern. We may need to examine the relation of gender to relationship violence using more complex ideas about gender. For example, teens’ conceptualizations of dating violence appear to differ according to gender. Sears, Byers, Whelan, and Saint-Pierre (2006) found that while girls tended to perceive violence as a means of control, boys tended to view violence as the result of being provoked. Girls viewed their violence as less serious than that of boys; they viewed their use of violence more lightly or jokingly. Boys, however, viewed their infliction of harm more seriously and tended to define acts of dating violence according to whether or not it was intended to result in pain or harm. While boys tended to focus on the physical aspects of dating violence, girls’ definitions were broader and included the negative emotional impact of dating

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violence. The research suggests that both male and female teenagers use and experience violence in their relationships, but the forms, patterns, and perceptions of violence are different for young men and women.

Help Seeking Recognizing the signs of teen dating violence is important, particularly as teens are much less likely to report relationship violence than adults. Approximately 1 in 11 incidents of teen dating violence is reported, and 60% of victims and 79% of perpetrators do not seek help (Ashley & Foshee, 2005). There are numerous reasons why teens do not seek help for violent relationships. When teens are asked about unreported dating violence, they cite reasons such as fear of retaliation or escalation of the violence, denial, self-blame, emotional ties to the perpetrator, and feelings of helplessness (Seimer, 2004). Embarrassment, or potential for embarrassment, also plays a role in why teens are reluctant to report abuse. Both male and female teen victims of relationship violence report concealing their abusive relationships due to feelings of embarrassment (Sears et al., 2006). Self-blame may also contribute to teens’ reluctance to report violence. Some common myths among teenagers are that the victim is to blame for the victimization: “Even if I am hit, I am nothing without my partner,” and “If I told people I was abused, they would think it was my fault” (Herrman, 2009). Some relationship violence may also be seen as normative and may even be reinforced by one’s family or culture (O’Keefe, 2005). Even when teens are aware of appropriate resources, they feel that these resources will only let them down. When Gallopin and Leigh (2009) questioned teens as to why they felt that they could not tell their parents about a violent relationship, most teens strongly felt that their parents would not believe them. Research by Sears and colleagues (2006) also indicates that a lack of reporting may be due in part to teens’ gender-role beliefs. Females reported believing that abuse by males will not be taken seriously by adults because it is seen as normal, whereas males reported that abuse by females will not be taken seriously because it is less likely to lead to injury. Ashely and Foshee (2005) found that teens reported being willing to report relationship violence to friends, family members, teachers, and counselors. The authors found there to be a gender difference in which teens were more willing to report. Girls, if they were to confide in someone, reported being more likely to tell friends, siblings, and parents, whereas boys indicated that they would be more likely to go to nonfamily members and professional adults. In the research by Gallopin and Leigh (2009),

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teens felt that police officers were prejudiced and stereotyped these behaviors, making them less willing to take this matter seriously. It is common for teens to seek the advice of their peers when faced with these situations. However, the problem with this is that their peers are inexperienced in this area and often lack the knowledge and maturity to deal with this situation (Ruiz, Exposito, & Bonache, 2010). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) teens express more serious concerns when it comes to help-seeking behaviors. In a study done by Gallopin and Leigh (2009), LGBT participants claimed that dating violence was an everyday occurrence in their lives. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 50% of LGBT teens experience dating violence. In terms of help-seeking, these teens feel even more isolated. One teen stated that police officers often dismissed dating violence cases as soon as they discovered an LGBT teen’s sexual orientation. When asked who they would feel comfortable seeking help with, LGBT teens said that they would not seek a therapist or service provider, but rather a close friend, another survivor, or an LGBT youth organization (Gallopin and Leigh, 2009).

Signs of Distress Since teen victims of relationship violence are especially unlikely to seek help, it is important for parents, teachers, and others who interact with teens to recognize any signs of dating distress. Some generally recognized signs of distress in teens include changes in activities and activity levels, such as interacting with friends and clubs less often and/or becoming socially isolated. Often the teen may discontinue confiding in or disclosing to parents, and they may develop a resistance or oppositional stance toward parents. While this may be difficult to distinguish from adolescent behavior in general, in teens as in adult relationships an abuser may discourage the victim from interacting with friends and family members. Social isolation makes individuals more vulnerable to abuse and more dependent on the abusive partner. Teens in abusive relationships may also display irritability, mood shifts, and depression. Depression is characterized by withdrawal, lack of motivation, irritability, sleep and eating disruptions, and sadness. Repeated bruising, black eyes, or other injuries may signal violence. Teens experiencing physical violence may wear inappropriate clothing to cover bruises, such as wearing long sleeves in hot weather. Teens may avoid contact with parents and friends to avoid detection of injuries. A number of resources online seek to educate parents about the warning signs of teen dating violence. For example, www.4parents.gov urges

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parents to be mindful of a decline in grades, increased emotional outbursts and isolation, and any signs of physical injury. The Parents Guide to Teen Dating Violence, from the Crime and Violence Prevention Center at the California Attorney General’s Office, also encourages parents to be aware of teens withdrawing from friendships or school activities, displaying hostility or shame, being increasingly secretive, or apologizing for their boyfriend or girlfriend’s behavior. Other warning signs that a teen may be involved in an abusive relationship include physical injuries or bruises (although these may not be easily visible) as well as alcohol or drug use, which is often used as a coping mechanism. The Parents Guide also provides warning signs of teens who are abusive, including jealousy or possessiveness, uncontrollable anger or bursts of hostility, blaming others when angry, and criticizing, demeaning, or belittling the teen’s boyfriend or girlfriend. The Parents Guide to Teen Dating Violence is available at http://new.vawnet.org/category/Documents .php?docid=2219&category_id=995.

Outcome/Impact Teen dating violence has a number of serious potential consequences, both short and long term. Teens involved in abusive relationships are at higher risk for physical injuries, ranging from minor to fatal (Banyard & Cross, 2008; Simonelli & Ingram, 1998). Foshee and colleagues (1998) found that 8% of teens sought medical attention for injuries due to a violent incident in the context of a dating relationship. The most serious outcome of teen dating violence is death. According to the Supplementary Homicide Reports, 10% of murdered girls between the ages of 12 and 15 were killed by an intimate partner. The percentage of homicides by partner in girls aged 16 to 19 is even higher (22%). As dating violence can involve other types of abuse (e.g., psychological or sexual), the impact of this abuse takes forms other than the physical. There are a number of mental health consequences for teens involved in violent relationships (Herrman, 2009). These teens are at increased risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, disordered eating, and suicidal behavior (Bossarte, Martinez, & Blustein, 2008; Seimer, 2004; Teten et al., 2009). Victims may also struggle with low self-esteem, feelings of guilt and shame, loss of trust, and social isolation or withdrawal (Bossarte et al., 2008; Herrman, 2009; Teten et al., 2009). Teens involved in abusive dating relationships may also turn to substance use/abuse to help cope with the physical and psychological impact of such abuse (Champion, Foley, Sigmon-Smith, Sutfin, & DuRant, 2008).

Developing Teen Relationships

Dating violence also appears to have an impact on sexual health, particularly for female victims. Female victims are 2.6 times more likely to test positive for sexually transmitted diseases than those without abusive partners (Decker, Silverman, & Raj, 2005). Teens involved in abusive relationships are more likely in general to practice risky sexual behaviors, and these relationships are also more likely to result in unplanned pregnancy (O’Keefe, 2005; Silverman et al., 2001; Ulloa et al., 2010). Abuse in high school dating relationships may establish a pattern of relationship violence that persists for a long time, even a lifetime (Roscoe & Callahan, 1985). Some research has found that involvement in an abusive dating relationship during the teenage years may establish a pattern of future dating and relationship behavior (Herrman, 2009; O’Keefe, 2005; Ulloa et al., 2010). In a sample of college students, dating violence was found to predict future violence in dating relationships (Rich, Gidyca, Warkentin, Loh, & Weiland, 2005). Dating violence during the teen years may even predict marital violence (Perry, 2002). Thus, not only does teen dating violence put teens at risk for numerous and potentially lethal outcomes, teen dating violence may play an important role in the experience and perpetration of future violence in adulthood.

Explanations for Teen Dating Violence As McHugh and colleagues (McHugh & Frieze, 2006; McHugh et al., 2005; McHugh et al., 2008) indicated, our labels for violence typically reflect our theories and may limit our conceptualizations of intimate partner violence( IPV). For example, early recognition of wife abuse resulted in theories that explained serious forms of violence in terms of marital roles and expectations. The realization of violence in cohabiting relationships forced new understandings, as did awareness of gay and lesbian couple violence and dating violence. The increasing recognition of TRV similarly argues for new explanatory approaches. Existing models of relationship violence (see e.g., McHugh & Swiderski, 2010; McHugh et al., 2008) might not explain TRV. Teens differ from adult victims. Typically teens do not share financial or other dyadic responsibilities. Teens do not have the same stresses and frustrations that have been offered as explanations for adult relationship violence. Parents and other adult authorities do not encourage the violent couple to stay together. Understanding or explaining the use of physical, psychological, and/or sexual abuse in teen dating relationships requires us to adopt new approaches and a developmental model. The developmental tasks, maturational levels, relationship skills, and stressors are different for teens than for emerging adults.

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Teen Perceptions of Causes Despite their awareness of dating violence, teens do not perceive these issues as serious or detrimental to themselves or the relationship. Some research with teens indicated that many of them view dating violence as acceptable behavior in a relationship. Although not considered a major issue, teens seem confused and undecided about the causes of dating violence. Some teens feel that violence is an aggressive way to solve an argument. Other causes teens came up with were rushing into a relationship, lack of relationship experience, being confused about the difference between love and lust, and lack of parental guidance and appropriate relationship figures (Gallopin and Leigh, 2009).

Individual Variables Research has attempted to identify cognitions and characteristics of individuals who are likely to perpetrate violence with their partners. Some evidence supports the idea that acceptance of violence is correlated with using violence with a partner (Gray & Foshee, 1997); other studies have not validated a connection between acceptance of violence with perpetration of IPV (Bookwala, Frieze, Smith, & Ryan, 1992). However, externalizing behavioral problems (that is acting out against others) was a salient predictor of teen dating violence for boys (Maas et al., 2010); the authors concluded that aggressive boys were more likely to become involved in high-conflict relationships and subsequently engage in (and experience) reciprocal dating violence. Lack of empathy has been investigated as a characteristic of perpetrators, and some evidence has linked a lack of empathy to TRV (Wolfe, Wekerle, Scott, & Grasley, 2004). Other research has focused on the anger-expression styles of teen partners, demonstrating that this individual approach mediates teen violence in complex ways (Wolfe, Wekerle, Reitzel-Jaffe, & Lefebvre, 1998). Generally, we have not been able to provide a personality profile for perpetrators of IPV (McHugh & Swiderski, 2010), and similarly we cannot identify the teen that will hurt his (or her) dating partner.

Teen Relationships An important element in teen dating violence may be that teens lack experience in intimate relationships. They may lack the skills to communicate their anger, to negotiate conflict, to express their feelings, and to deal with rejection. These are skills that are being developed and practiced in

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early dating situations. Repeated breaking up and making up is frequently observed. During the teen years, individuals attempt to develop serious intimate relationships and the skills to maintain relationships, but the learning process is often a painful one. The nature of dating relationships varies as individuals age; relationships in early adolescence are particularly short term, less well defined, and more fluid than the relationships of young adults (Furman & Hand, 2006). Teens have poor conflict-resolution skills. Inability to resolve conflicts has been identified as an issue in adult relationships that involve violence. Generally, as a culture, we do not provide individuals with extensive conflict-resolution skills. In many contexts we reward individuals for resolving conflict by using verbal intimidation, bullying, and force. Peaceful and nonconfrontational strategies are not always admired, especially for boys and men. Teens in relationships may be influenced by romantic notions of how love is expressed. Love may be associated with acts of devotion, high levels of passion and emotionality, and jealousy and possessiveness; the absence of such behavior is sometimes seen as the absence of love (Johnson et al., 2005). Other authors have similarly suggested that teens’ behavior in relationships is the result of their perceptions about what it is to be “romantic” in a relationship (Ulloa et al., 2010). Jealousy in particular has been associated with relationship violence at multiple developmental stages. Male batterers demonstrate more jealousy than do happily married and nonviolent men (Barnett, Martinez, & Blustein, 1995; Pagelow, 1981). For teens, however, jealousy, possessiveness, and acts of control may be thought to demonstrate devotion and passion. In the early teen years, many girls and boys develop an interest in the other sex. Sometimes girls report changing their appearance and their interests in order to attract the attention of boys, or of a particular boy. Having a boyfriend is one way to achieve status and popularity for girls in some schools. The importance placed on having a boyfriend leaves girls vulnerable to dating violence. Some girls would rather endure physical or psychological violence than not to have a boyfriend. The pressure to demonstrate one’s heterosexuality and one’s ability to attract a boyfriend has been referred to as “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich, 1994). Rich argues that regardless of women’s own sexual desires, girls and women may experience heterosexuality as imposed or managed by society in the form of the messages they receive every day that promote heterosexuality in the form of myths and norms. Some women are encouraged to adopt the goal of making themselves attractive to men. The pressure to have a date, and to maintain a relationship with a boyfriend, encourages young women to put up with unacceptable behavior from men.

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Family Factors Family interactions have been shown to predict relationship quality in adolescents (Conger, Cui, Bryant, & Elder, 2000). Teens who come from families in which IPV occurs are at higher risk for involvement in TRV (Maas et al., 2010; O’Keefe, 1997). Teens may model the violent and abusive behaviors they witnessed at home. Teens who grew up in violent homes may find relationship violence normative or acceptable (O’Keefe, 1997). They may have developed their parents’ anger-expression styles and/or have poor models for conflict resolution. They may be reactant to others’ attempts to control or dominate them. Other research suggests that young people who have experienced neglect, abandonment, or maltreatment are especially at risk for having relationship problems (Maas et al., 2010); bonding with parents is a documented protection against becoming a victim of teen dating violence. The degree of parental involvement and monitoring of children has been identified as a correlate of adolescent behavioral problems and TRV (Straus & Savage, 2005). Sibling violence, including emotional, sexual, and physical types of violence, is linked to later perpetration of violence in dating relationships (Simonelli, Mullis, Elliott, & Pierce, 2002).

Peer Influence Even if an adolescent is not experiencing dating violence personally, most teens know of someone who is experiencing violence in a relationship. However, intervening in another’s relationship may not be seen as acceptable. Most teens feel that it is none of their business what goes on in another person’s relationship and claim that they would not report something if they saw it happen (Gallopin and Leigh, 2009). The context of the violent act also seems to be important to a teen’s perception of dating violence. Some indicate that in certain circumstances, it is okay to use violence, such as in self-defense (Gallopin and Leigh, 2009). A study done by O’Keefe, Brockopp, and Chew (1986) examined teens’ views on dating violence. The researchers found shocking results. Thirty percent of the time, teens felt that violence had no effect on the victim. They felt that it had no effect on the perpetrator only 37% of the time. Students also indicated that teens felt that violence hurt the relationship 33% of the time and improved the relationship 21% of the time. Violence was grounds for termination of a relationship only 12% of the time. From these results, it can be assumed that teens do not feel that violence in a relationship is an adequate reason to end their commitment to each other. Alternatively, psychological, relational, or physical aggression against a boyfriend or girlfriend in junior high or middle school might be comparable

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to other forms of aggression perpetrated and experienced at this age, including bullying, teasing, and gender harassment (Teten et al., 2009).

Community/Culture of Violence Some researchers have suggested that the acceptability of violence within one’s culture or subculture is a predictor and a causal factor in relationship violence. Sanday (1981) examined violence against women across 186 societies and identified cultural characteristics that supported violence against women, including cultural ideologies that support male dominance and gender roles for men and women. Examining subcultures or regions within the United States, Sugarman and Hotaling (1989) found a regional pattern in violence in dating relationships; IPV was especially prevalent in the southern United States. A similar finding was reported by Marquart and her colleagues (2007); dating violence was substantially higher in the southern region. Others have noted a connection between levels of violence in the community and teens’ experience of relationship violence (O’Keefe et al., 1986). One study found that violence in the community was the highest predictor for later dating violence (Malik, Sorenson, & Aneshensel, 1997). This research suggests that effective intervention efforts may involve modifying the acceptability of violence for the entire community rather than intervening at the individual or couple level.

Interventions TRV is increasingly recognized as a serious and prevalent problem, and there are a number of interventions designed to reduce or prevent dating violence. There are two types of interventions: primary and secondary. Primary interventions attempt to prevent teen dating violence from ever occurring, while secondary interventions help to fix the problem once it has already occurred. Although most teens expressed that they do not seek help when involved in a violent relationship, it is important for resources to be available. Most schools do not have any programs or even rules addressing teen dating violence; however, some schools and other programs have taken on an active role in order to prevent this issue.

Primary Interventions Several national organizations have taken on the task of bringing adolescent dating issues to the attention of parents, teachers, and teens. During high school, students are taught about abstinence, drug use, and even fire safety. But most schools do not provide any type of education on dating

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relationships. However, some schools have already set in place curriculum that covers interpersonal relationship skills, warning signs of abuse, and help-seeking behaviors. One of these campaigns is the Choose Respect program. This organization uses public service announcements, websites, interactive teaching methods, bathroom literature, and advertising materials in order to bring out the issues of teen dating (Herrman, 2009). The goal of this program is to promote positive dating relationships among teens (Herrman, 2009). Schools have also taken these issues seriously and created health classes that focus on dating violence, interpersonal skills, and healthy relationships. Two programs, Safe Dates and Healthy Relationships, have been nationally recognized in the school system as being effective for preventing teen violence (Herrman, 2009). Safe Dates involves an interactive, dramatic play put on by the students, a 10-session curriculum, and a poster contest that is aimed at addressing teen dating violence. These activities help improve conflict-management skills and change teens’ perceptions of dating violence (Herrman, 2009). Healthy Relationships consists of similar content that is aimed toward preventing teen dating violence. This program helps increase teens’ selfesteem and teaches them appropriate relationship skills (Herrman, 2009). Take Back the Halls: Ending Violence in Relationships and Schools is a program created at DePaul University for application with poor and minority adolescents in urban areas. Educational programs are likely to become increasingly common as several states legally mandate the inclusion of dating violence in the curriculum. For instance, the state of Rhode Island requires that all high schools implement this material into their curriculum (Weingartner, 2008). This mandate, the Lindsay Ann Burke Act, was created after the tragic death of Lindsay Ann Burke. This young woman was found dead in her exboyfriend’s bathtub after suffering years of violence in her relationship (MSNBC, 2008). Since then, other states, like Texas, have also required high schools to teach these important life skills (Weingartner, 2008). Parents of victims of dating violence are similarly lobbying for legally mandated education in other states.

Secondary Interventions Secondary intervention is directed at helping teens deal with a violent relationship. Although few programs exist in this area, it is the responsibility of the people involved in a teen’s life to recognize and help the teen deal with his or her situation. It is important for parents, teachers, doctors, and school nurses to be able to identify the signs of violence and take an

Developing Teen Relationships

active role in that teen’s life. Teens do not seek help from a person based on a professional title; rather, the relationship they hold with a person is the most important factor in help-seeking behaviors. Therefore, it is important for anyone involved in a teen’s life to be aware of the warning signs and to be willing to reach out and support that individual. Although several professions provide training with domestic violence, this training may not be adequate for teen dating violence. For instance, therapists who work with domestic violence in adults may not even think to look for these signs in young teens. The idea of providing couple’s counseling for young teens is uncommon and seen as irrelevant due to their age and maturity. However, these teens are possibly young enough to modify their behaviors or learn new skills. This is why interventions and prevention programs are so important at this young age. Providing training for proper communication skills, interpersonal skills, and anger management techniques may help prevent future violence in a teen relationship. Studies have shown that intervention programs improve knowledge and skills related to dating violence prevention (Ulloa et al., 2010). Intervention programs also increase the likelihood that these teens will seek help when faced with violence in their relationship (Ulloa et al., 2010). Future research for intervention programs should focus on more long-term studies. One of the issues with current research on teen dating violence is that many studies are short-term and lack follow-up with participants (Ulloa et al., 2010).

Conclusion TRV is prevalent and may have long-term serious consequences for young men and women. Sometimes TRV is even lethal; teenage girls are more likely to sustain serious injury or to be killed than are boys. However, teen relationship violence can be perpetrated by both boys and girls and may often be reciprocal. Parents should be alert to the possibility that their son or daughter who is involved in dating may be the victim or agent of violence. Although both boys/young men and girls/young women perpetrate violence in dating relationships, TRV is not necessarily gender symmetrical or gender neutral. Gender impacts the type of violence perpetrated, the strategy and motive for the violence, the perception of the violence by both actor and recipient, and the short- and long-term impact of the violence. As in the study of adult IPV, we do not have a comprehensive understanding of how gender impacts the expression of violence in teen dating relationships. We need to continue to examine the impact of gender and gender roles on the

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use of violence in relationships, and to develop more complex models of gender and violence. Currently, we have limited understanding of why physical aggression, psychological abuse, and/or sexual violence are prevalent in teen relationships. Many of our theories about (adult) IPV do not seem to apply to teen relationships. We need to develop more developmentally based models of dating violence. For example, we proposed that, in the teen years, the pressure and/or desire to have a boyfriend and the acceptance or even romanticization of violence in relationships contribute to TRV. Further, teens may be especially inexperienced in relationship problem solving and unable to express anger or resolve conflict. Research documents a connection between violence in teen relationships and violence in adult relationships. The patterns of conflict and violence that teens observe in parental and peer relationships appear to influence their own relationship patterns. Moreover, the patterns of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse experienced in teen relationships may be repeated in later adult relationships unless effective interventions are implemented. Recognition of the potential for harm had led to increasing efforts to intervene in TRV. Interventions are based on the recognition that teens are unlikely to seek help and that adults have often been oblivious to the signs that relationship violence is occurring. Current interventions are often school based and focus on the identification of TRV, and on developing healthy relationships and interpersonal and communication skills. Additional research on TRV that advances our understanding of why TRV occurs may result in more effective interventions.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Stalking of Adolescents Thomas M. Evans and Todd Hendrix

Stalking can best be viewed as an attempted, forced, and unwanted relationship. No stalking laws existed until the death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was stalked and eventually murdered by an obsessed fan. California became the first to pass such a law in 1990, and since then all 50 states have followed suit (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1997). Research was scant prior to this period of time but has exploded since laws were passed. Various typologies exist (Mohandie, 2006) but are limited to adults.

What Is Juvenile Stalking? While the developmental period of adolescence is marked by impulsivity, emotional reactivity, shortened time perspective, and risk-taking behaviors (Steinberg, 2005), juvenile stalking is a behavior that is out of the norm for typical postbreakup or rejection behavior. Stalking involves a pattern of behaviors that are frequently exhibited for a period of time and can consume a youth’s thoughts to a degree that most conversations with friends are focused on this topic. Their preoccupation is likely to cause their friends to become concerned. Further, the youth spends an inordinate amount of time planning and preparing his next encounter with the intended target. The juvenile stalker is likely to decrease in participation of other activities and become more socially isolated as he plans his next advance and becomes so singularly focused that there is a drop in grades or failure to meet other obligations.

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The intensity of the anger and duration of the pursuit, harassment, and terrorizing is distinguished from typical adolescence in scope, breadth, and duration. While typical postbreakup behaviors from a jilted partner can include name calling, spreading rumors, or sending hate-filled emails and text messages, these incidents tend to be short-lived, and soon this individual regains his emotional equilibrium and moves on to the next relationship. He or she will seek consolation from friends and after a few days seek to become involved with more social activities. The juvenile stalker, however, will continue to engage in behaviors intended to frighten, humiliate, or terrorize the intended target. These persist for an extended period of time and increase in frequency and intensity, including escalating into violence. They have a need to “even the score,” but there is no defined goal to achieve or timeframe to achieve this objective so that they can ultimately move on. These behaviors will endure even as a new relationship is established.

Research on Juvenile Stalking Currently, there is very limited research on juveniles who engage in stalking behaviors. McCann (1998) was one of the first to examine the behavior of stalking in the adolescent population. Due to the almost complete absence of empirical literature on juvenile stalking, he provided three cases studies to illustrate how these behaviors can be displayed by teenagers. He used a now-outdated typology to categorize these three cases: Erotomanic, Love Obsessional, and Simple Obsessional. This study highlighted that adolescent stalking is a course of behavior that does occur during adolescence and that many psychodynamic factors that are present in adult stalkers were also present in the three youths presented, such as attachment pathology and disturbances in identity. Purcell, Moller, Flower, and Mullen (2009) provided the first empirical study of juvenile stalkers. They identified a group of 299 juvenile stalkers after completing a review of court records from the juvenile and civil court in which a protective order was granted against a juvenile under the age of 18. Interestingly, the majority of the cases came from the civil court, not juvenile court. Six categories emerged from the underlying motivation for stalking: stalking as an extension of bullying, retaliating stalkers, rejected stalkers, disorganized and disturbed stalkers, predatory stalkers, and intimacy-seeking stalkers. Overall, threats were made in 75% of the cases, and 54% of the cases involved both physical and sexual violence. Sixty-four percent of the perpetrators were male, and the victim was previously known to the

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perpetrator in 98% of the cases. From a risk-assessment perspective, the high level of threats made will make assessment difficult, as threats in the absence of any other data are poor predictors of violence. However, the classifications of stalking as an extension of bullying, retaliating stalkers, disorganized and disturbed stalkers, and predatory stalkers do not represent pure stalking behaviors, as their motivation is not to form a relationship with another individual or to torment the individual after the termination of the relationship. These four classifications water down the term stalking and would be better classified as bullying subtypes. Their categories of rejected stalkers and intimacy-seeking stalkers are more reflective of pure stalking behaviors, as the motivations are based solely on a dyadic relationship and are very personal and carry a high degree of emotional valence. These two categories are similar to the typology proposed by Evans and Meloy (in press). These include only behaviors that are fueled by the desire to form an intimate relationship or seek retribution after the termination of the relationship. A significant limitation of using data solely from file review is the inability to delve into the individual psychology of the perpetrators. Thus, we do not know the reasons why those in the rejected group sought to terrorize their former partners. We do not know if those in the intimacy-seeking group have diagnosable mental illness. Questions regarding parental attachments or family-system functioning cannot be answered, nor can questions regarding substance abuse or previous histories of violence. We only know that a large group from this sample engaged in various forms of stalking behavior, the frequency of such behavior, and other descriptive information. We have no insight or understanding of the motivation to engage in this behavior. Without specific case data, we know almost nothing about the psychology of the juvenile stalker. Evans and Meloy (in press) further describe the current state of juvenile stalking, in which they also state that it is largely an unrecognized behavior that has not been viewed as such by the juvenile courts. National juvenile stalking statistics do not exist, and there is no established protocol for how to best evaluate these youths. In an attempt to understand the psychology of the juvenile stalker, Evans and Meloy (in press) provide two separate case studies and offer a preliminary typology. The typology is based not only on the two stalking cases presented but also on the first author’s data from numerous court-ordered psychological evaluations of youths who had engaged in stalking behaviors yet were not officially charged as such. For example, relational violence was charged as assault, while what was actually stalking, which resulted in the youth being arrested at midnight on the victim’s residence, was charged as trespassing.

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The following is a preliminary typology based upon approximately 100 juvenile cases over a 10-year period that could be classified as stalking:

Type I Socially Awkward Desires relations with others. Socially awkward due to poor social skills and/or poor intimacy skills. Lonely; has few interpersonal relationships. Low-level depression possible. Parental relations distant and unfulfilling. Unpopular or feels “irrelevant” or “lost.” Not part of any particular clique; rather is on the fringe and does not fit into any particular group.

Object Relations Has preoccupied attachment style. Has negative view of self and overly positive view of others. Mirroring self-objects needed for idealizing and twinship experience (or dependency needs) not experienced during infancy.

Motivation for Stalking Establishing a relationship the main motivating factor. Limited or no prior relationship with object of pursuit. Likely an acquaintance, coworker, or neighbor. Targeted person more annoyed than frightened.

Stalking Modality Obsessive following; peeping/spying; repeated phone calls, letter writing, emails, or text messaging. Actual face-to-face contact may be limited due to extreme feelings of inadequacy.

Risk for Violence Low. No history of violence or aggression and does not threaten or aggress against targeted individual.

Type II Angry/Disgruntled Perpetrator is relatively popular youth. Unrealistic (or unwarranted) high level of self-regard.

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Has anger issues and is overly sensitive to criticism. Engages in bullying activities. Parental relationships appear good to the casual observer, but closer inspections reveals a narcissistic family pattern, and parents are distant yet overly indulgent.

Object Relations Has a dismissing quality. Overly inflated self-esteem; views others as inferior, yet overly sensitive to criticism and reacts with anger to slight narcissistic insults. Victims viewed as part-objects to be used for own needs until no longer fulfills usefulness.

Motivation for Stalking Anger and revenge fuels this behavior, which is a cover for feelings of humiliation. Had previous relationship with targeted object. Utilized threats, intimidation, or violence to control other person or dictate the terms of the relationship.

Stalking Modality Attempts to enlist others in his campaign of public denigration of ex-partner while concomitantly and covertly trying to “win back” ex-partner. This is done to show her that if she is not with him, then she is “a nobody” and will be very unpopular. Engages in stalking behaviors while also publically demeaning pursuit object. Threatens or attempts to intimidate the other’s new partner. Refuses to accept that other person terminated relationship. Will not take “no” for an answer. Stalking behaviors include threats to self, pursuit object, or object’s new partner.

Risk for Violence Moderate to high. Violence and/or aggression likely present in that relationship, possibly including forced sexual activity. There likely has been at least one incident of violence within the relationship. Violence can be both predatory and affective.

These two classifications of adolescent stalking are similar to the subjects in Purcell and colleagues (2009) rejected and intimacy-seeking classification. Similar to what was found in research of adult stalkers, threats and actual violence were significantly higher in the rejected group.

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Stalking Tactics Purcell and colleagues (2009) found that the juvenile stalker is likely to engage in multiple methods of pursuit behaviors and harassment. These include threatening and unwanted emails, phone calls, and text messages; unwanted approaches; and following. Surveillance of the victim’s home is another tactic that the adolescent stalker will employ in order to keep tabs on the victim. Threats to secondary victims, such as a new boyfriend or a relative, can occur when access to the primary victim is blocked. This multimodal approach is utilized when one form of stalking becomes ineffective in making contact at a particular time; the stalker will improvise and attempt to make contact using an alternate form.

Assessment of the Juvenile Stalker Traditional assessments can provide good information regarding the psychological makeup of the offender but offer no information for risk assessment and management. When conducting a psychological evaluation on a youth who has been charged with stalking, it is imperative to conduct an evaluation that is comprehensive in nature, including a clinical interview with the youth and the youth’s caregivers. Besides evaluating for psychological impairment of the youth, an assessment of the family unit must also be conducted. As discussed earlier, the roots of stalking behaviors can be traced back to faulty attachment patterns. Parental abuse or neglect is a particular area to address. This is an important area because treatment with a juvenile offender should include the family. Psychological testing that provides information regarding cognitive functioning is also important. Many times learning disabilities are present that have not been discovered. The youth may also have an underlying mood disorder or emerging personality disorder. Psychological testing could provide further information in addition to data obtained from the youth and parent interviews. It is also imperative that information be obtained from the victim. There is likely to be a discrepancy between what the youth reports and what the victim reports. The youth accused of stalking has a vested interest in minimizing the behavior. Thus, an interview with the victim provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between the two of them, the form the stalking took, how long it persisted, and what forms it took. Collateral reports, such as police reports and probation reports,

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also must be reviewed, as they are likely to have information that the youth will not provide. As the one empirical study by Purcell and colleagues (2009) illustrated, violence in juvenile stalking cases exceeds 50%. Thus, a history of violent behavior needs to be obtained. This history can be from self-report, parent report, school records, juvenile court records (if there has been previous court involvement), and victim testimony. Once this information is obtained, two instruments that can assist the evaluator in determining risk for future violence are the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (Forth, Kosson, & Hare, 2003) and the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (Borum, Bartel, & Forth, 2003). These instruments, while not stalking-specific, will provide the evaluator with information regarding callousness, a lack of empathy for others, and manipulation of others. It also assists the evaluator by ensuring that all clinically relevant factors associated with youth violence have been addressed in the interview. In addition to conducting a comprehensive psychological evaluation and assessing for general risk for violence, the evaluator who is conducting a psychological evaluation on a youth referred for stalking should have working knowledge of teen dating violence, cyberbullying, and, as mentioned before, attachment pathology. This information, combined with data from the psychological evaluation, will enable the evaluator to assess these concepts in this particular context and thus offer an informed opinion on the nature of the youth’s stalking behavior and the risk for violence, as well as to develop the risk management plan to keep the victim safe and identify treatment needs of the offender.

Teen Dating Violence Teen dating violence, a form of intimate partner violence, is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “ever being hit, slapped, or physically struck on purpose by a boyfriend or girlfriend.” Teen dating violence is considered by the CDC as a significant risk factor to an adolescent’s health and well-being in the United States. The CDC estimates that of the 72% of 8th and 9th graders who reportedly “date,” 25% report verbal, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse from a dating partner each year. About 10% of adolescents nationwide report being physically hurt by a dating partner in the last 12 months, with little differences in the rates for boys and girls or grade level (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009). The prevalence of dating violence among early teens is even higher. In a study of more than 2,000 ethnically diverse sixth-grade students who acknowledged having a recent

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“boyfriend/girlfriend,” 29% reported perpetrating physical aggression against the boyfriend or girlfriend (Miller, Gorman-Smith, Sullivan, Orpinas, & Simon, 2009). Teen dating violence appears to have become an accepted part of the social landscape for early teens. In a national sample of more than 5,000 sixth-grade students, almost 60% of the boys and 45% of the girls reported having begun to “date.” However, all of the respondents, whether involved with dating or not, were asked their perceptions of the acceptability of relational violence. More than half of the respondents reported that a girl hitting her boyfriend was acceptable under certain circumstances, such as being angry or jealous, and more than 1 in 4 sixth graders reported acceptance of boys hitting their girlfriends under similar circumstances (Simon, Miller, Gorman-Smith, Orpinas, & Sullivan, 2010). The etiology of teen dating violence remains as unclear as does the etiology of any violent behavior. However, like most forms of teen violence, some key factors remain consistent. Exposure to peer and family violence is a well-documented risk factor for dating violence perpetration (Spriggs, Halpern, & Martin, 2009). Additionally, research has also shown that witnessing violent crime in childhood and adolescence is a risk factor for ongoing victimization in teen dating violence and intimate partner violence in adulthood (Spriggs et al., 2009). The literature also indicates that teen dating violence remains stable across time and partners, implying that victims of teen dating violence appear to remain in abusive relationships or may involve themselves in a series of abusive relationships (Timmons Fritz, & Smith Slep, 2009). Early-adolescent males who perceived close parental monitoring were reported to have lower levels of perpetration of dating violence, and girls who perceived their parents as being more supportive of nonaggressive solutions toward relationship conflict reported lower levels of teen dating violence. However, when parents were perceived as being supportive of aggressive solutions toward relationship conflicts, and an environment of negative or delinquent peers existed, higher levels of teen dating violence existed. Additionally, when an environment of negative or delinquent peers existed, close parental monitoring was not a protective factor for boys’ likelihood to perpetrate relationship violence (Miller et al., 2009). The influence of a negative peer group was further explored in a study of more than 300,000 adolescent males. This study found that adolescent males involved with close-knit peer groups that were primarily small, dense, and mostly male with higher rates of delinquent behavior reported higher rates of teen dating violence than did adolescent males whose peer groups were more loosely grouped, reported less delinquent

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behavior, and were populated with both males and females (Casey & Beadwell, 2011). The impact of teen dating violence, beyond its potential gateway to adult intimate partner violence, is varied and problematic. Teen dating violence, for both victims and perpetrators, has been positively correlated with lower academic achievement, ongoing sexual activity, suicidality, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical aggression (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009). Teen dating violence victimization was also positively correlated with poorer psychosocial functioning, substance abuse and dependence, and greater Axis I diagnosis (Brown et al., 2009). These psychological symptoms were prevalent at both the time of initial referral to community mental health agencies and also at six-month follow-up. These results indicate that along with the initial trauma, teen dating violence can result in extensive and long-enduring psychological symptoms (Brown et al., 2009). Dating violence, however, is not the only form of sexual aggression that exists in the adolescent environment. In a qualitative study of 72 Australian youths aged 14–15, the vast majority reported that sexual harassment of adolescent girls by adolescent males was a common occurrence. This harassment was focused on verbal and indirect victimization, was almost entirely sexual in nature, and was school based. The authors felt that the term “sexual bullying” appropriately captured the gendered power structure underlying these behaviors (Shute, Owens, & Slee, 2008). Other researchers believe that sexual bullying appears to be the antecedent to more severe forms of relationship violence and provides the conceptual link between bullying and more advanced forms of sexualized violence (Fredland, 2008). However, because the school represents the epicenter of an adolescent’s social life, it does not appear to be a coincidence that the majority of these aggressive behaviors originate and occur in the school setting. Among youths involved with teen dating violence, 35–40% report that physical violence occurred in school buildings or on school grounds (Theriot, 2008).

Cyberbullying Bullying does not remain at school when the school day ends. With the advent of cell phones, the Internet, and online social communities, the opportunities to continue to victimize and bully have continued to expand beyond the school environment and into the relative safety of the adolescent’s home. Recent reports indicate that more than 97% of all youths in the United States are connected to the Internet in some way, and 66%

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of all fourth to ninth graders are able to go online from their bedrooms (Tokunga, 2010). While this almost limitless access to information and networking provides opportunities for learning and connectivity that is unprecedented, it also opens the door to almost as many opportunities for aggression and abuse. The media has presented numerous anecdotal reports of “cyberbullying,” including those leading to suicide or violence. Approximately 20–40% of all youths in the United States report having experienced cyberbullying at least once in their lives (Tokunga, 2010). Contrary to the literature on traditional bullying, both boys and girls appear to be equally victimized in cyberbullying, whereas in traditional bullying boys are overrepresented as both victims and perpetrators (Tokunga, 2010). The term “cyberstalking” has become part of the media’s lexicon but has never been operationally defined. Behaviors associated with cyberstalking include seeking and compiling information online about the victim for the purpose of threatening, harming, or harassing the victim, either online or offline; repeated unsolicited and unwanted emails and instant messaging; electronic sabotage, such as spamming and sending viruses; identity theft; subscribing the victim to unwanted services; purchasing goods and services in the victim’s name; impersonating another online; sending or posting hostile material, misinformation, and false messages; and tricking other Internet users into threatening or harassing the victim (Sheridan & Grant, 2007). In a large sample of more than 4,000 female undergraduates, more than 13% reported having been “stalked,” and of those reporting having been stalked, more than 24% reported receiving unwanted emails from the stalker (Fisher & Wallace, 2000). In a 2002 study completed by Spitzberg and Hoobler (2002), almost one-third of 232 undergraduates polled reported some form of cyberharassment, and sexually harassing messages had been received by 18% of those polled. While still very little is known about cyberstalking, some generalities have emerged. Overall, women were significantly more likely to be stalked. When compared to conventional stalking victims, cyberstalked victims were more likely to have received threats, had the perpetrator threaten suicide, and had personal items taken, and they were less likely to have contacted the police (Sheridan & Grant, 2007).

Attachment Attachment style plays an extremely important role in the assessment of the juvenile stalker, and stalking is best understood as a form of attachment pathology. Attachment theory assumes that all humans are born with

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an innate need to form close emotional bonds with others. This theory posits that if an infant is regularly blocked from forming nurturing bonds with primary caregivers, and that if this blockage continues through childhood, the child has significant difficulty forming positive, reciprocal, and enduring relationships with others that are gratifying and provide a sense of self-worth. The juvenile who engages in stalking behaviors is likely to display one of two maladaptive attachment patterns: dismissing or preoccupied. The adolescent with dismissing attachment has an overly inflated view of himself and a negative view of others (Rosenstein & Horowitz, 1996). This interpersonal style provides cover for individuals who are quite emotionally vulnerable, and who protect themselves against threats to their brittle self-esteem by maintaining a sense of aloofness in interpersonal relationships. Because their early upbringing has led them to have little faith in others who are supposed to care about them, they see others as untrustworthy and are skeptical in their interpersonal relationships. In stalking situations, the adolescent with this attachment style is likely to respond to a narcissistic wound with anger and thoughts of vengeance, as another person whom they had presumed cared for them ultimately betrayed them. Instead of internalizing their distress, they most often act out, including harming others. Persons with a preoccupied attachment style feel very unworthy of another person’s love or affection and view others in an overly idealistic manner. They can only feel good about themselves through their relationships and can be very submissive and fearful that their only source of psychological well-being will abandon them at any time (Rosenstein & Horowitz, 1996). They feel anxious when they are not around their partner. They can become excessively clingy, demanding of the other’s time, and even harbor constant thoughts of infidelity. They are so afraid that their partner will leave them that they can never enjoy the relationship. This has implications for stalking because they can become fixated on the partner who ended the relationship. Because the termination of the relationship has caused a significant amount of psychological distress, the adolescent becomes preoccupied with repairing the relationship, thereby restoring their psychological well-being. This attempt to restore emotional equilibrium may then result in stalking behaviors, such as following and spying. Narcissistic families, domestic violence, parental substance use, neglect, and emotional abuse all serve as major obstacles to developing secure attachment bonds. Since this sets the template for future relationships,

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insecure, dismissing, or fearful attachment styles can make developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships difficult, and thus, upon termination of the relationship or outright rejection when attempting to form a relationship, these youths may respond with deep feeling or humiliation, which is then transferred into rage, followed by revenge-stalking behaviors. Thus, when assessing the juvenile stalker, it is crucial that the early parental or primary caregiver relationships be thoroughly examined, as well as other family-system dysfunction.

Risk Assessment/Management The purpose of completing a comprehensive psychological evaluation on the youth who has engaged in stalking is not only to determine if he has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, but also to determine the risk for violence toward the intended victim and if the stalking is likely to continue. Once the opinion is formulated (typically expressed as low, moderate, or high risk), the next step is to devise a management plan to reduce this behavior. The plan will target the key findings from the assessment and focus on changeable factors, such as family-systems pathology, substance abuse, etc. Another critical area to address if the juvenile stalker has perpetrated any form of physical violence toward the victim is the mode of violence displayed. In other words, did the youth strike the victim immediately after becoming enraged or rejected, or was the violence preplanned and perpetrated after a period time has passed? This is a very important distinction in risk management, as the latter type has been referred to as predatory violence (Meloy, 1988). This type of violence would indicate that the juvenile stalker has planned his violent act much earlier than it occurred. The youth may plan his revenge over a period of time and do so in a very tactical manner that takes the victim by surprise. For example, if the juvenile stalker had been served with a restraining order and had no contact with the victim for an extended period of time, this lulls the victim into a false sense of security. She lets her guard down and believes that the problem is behind her. Unbeknownst to her, the youth who had stalked her had planned his attack well beforehand and then attacks according to plan, which is when she is alone and unable to summon help. As opposed to a juvenile stalker who engages in a reactive form of violence (directly after a threat or perceived slight) where the violence is immediate, the victim does not see this coming. A key component in risk management will involve the school system, since it is quite likely that the stalker and victim will attend the same

Stalking of Adolescents

school. Managing a restraining order may be difficult if the two persons are in the same class or eat lunch at the same time. However, schools are responsible for the safety of the pupils and thus must be made aware of the situation so that they can plan accordingly. The school also serves as an excellent vehicle with which to identify stalking situations and thus make appropriate referrals to mental health professionals and juvenile justice authorities if need be.

Future Directions The scientific study of the adolescent who engages in stalking behaviors is in its infancy. Currently, stalking is going on largely unrecognized by the juvenile justice system. Youths who engage in stalking behaviors are more likely to be charged with unruliness or assault when these situations involve violence. Thus, there is no way to study this population in a systematic fashion. Very little is known about these youths at this time. Questions regarding this population remain unanswered, such as the prevalence of juvenile stalking. Or is it normative for this age group? If it is, when should it become classified as stalking? How long does the youth who engages in stalking persist in this behavior? What is the best way to assess and treat youths accused of stalking? How should schools handle restraining orders? However, the most salient question is if this behavior persists into adulthood. These questions will remain unanswered until youths who stalk others are charged in the juvenile justice system with stalking. This will then provide behavioral science researchers the opportunity to collect data and advance the knowledge of this population.

References Borum, R., Bartel, P., & Forth, A. (2003). Manual for the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (Version 1.1). Tampa: University of South Florida. Brown, A., Cosgrove, E., Killackey, E., Purcell, R., Buckby, J., & Yung, A. R. (2009). The longitudinal association of adolescent dating violence with psychiatric disorders and functioning. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 24, 1964–1979. Casey, E. A., & Beadwell, B. (2009). The structure of male adolescent peer networks and risk for intimate partner violence perpetration: Findings from a national sample. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39, 620–633. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2009). Understanding teen dating violence. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention.

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Erdur-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2006, May). Physical dating violence among high school students—United States, 2003. Retrieved from http: //www.cdc.gov/mmwr/perview/mmwrhtml/mm5519a3.htm. Evans, T. M., & Meloy, R. J. (in press). Identifying and classifying juvenile stalking behavior. Journal of Forensic Sciences. Fisher, C. B., & Wallace, S. A. (2000). Through the looking glass: Reevaluating the ethical and policy implications of research on adolescent risk and psychopathology. Ethics and Behavior, 10, 99–118. Forth, A. E., Kosson, D. S., & Hare, R. D. (2003). Hare psychopathy checklist: Youth version. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Multi-Health Systems. Fredland, N. M. (2008). Sexual bullying: Addressing the gap between bullying and dating violence. Advances in Nursing Science, 31, 95–105. McCann, J. T. (1998). Subtypes of stalking (obsessional following) in adolescents. Journal of Adolescence, 21, 667–675. Meloy, J. R. (1988). The psychopathic mind: Origins, dynamics, and treatment. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Miller, S., Gorman-Smith, D., Sullivan, T., Orpinas, P., & Simon, T. R. (2009). Parent and peer predictors of physical dating violence perpetration in early adolescence: Tests of moderation and gender differences. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 38, 538–550. Mohandie, K. (2006). The RECON typology of stalking: Reliability and validity based upon a large sample of North American stalkers. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 51, 147–155. Purcell, R., Moller, B., Flower, T., & Mullen, P. E. (2009). Stalking among juveniles. British Journal of Psychiatry, 194, 451–455. Rosenstein, D. S., & Horowitz, H. A. (1996). Adolescent attachment and psychopathology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 244–253. Sheridan, L. P., & Grant, T. (2007). Is cyberstalking different? Psychology, Crime and Law, 13, 627–640. Shute, R., Owens, L., & Slee, P. (2008). Everyday victimization of adolescent girls by boys: Sexual harassment, bullying or aggression? Sex Roles, 58, 477–489. Simon, T. R., Miller, S., Gorman-Smith, D., Orpinas, P., & Sullivan, T. (2010). Physical dating violence norms and behavior among sixth-grade students from four U.S. sites. Journal of Early Adolescence, 30, 395–409. Spitzberg, B. H., & Hoobler, G. (2002). Cyberstalking and the technologies of interpersonal terrorism. New Media and Society, 4, 71–92. Spriggs, A. L., Halpern, C. T., & Martin, S. L. (2009). Continuity of adolescent and early adult partner violence victimization: Association with witnessing violent crime in adolescence. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 63, 741–748. Steinberg, L. (2005). Cognitive and affective development in adolescence. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 69–74.

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Theriot, M. T. (2008). Conceptual and methodological considerations for assessment and prevention of adolescent dating violence and stalking at school. Children and Schools, 30, 223–233. Timmons Fritz, P. A., & Smith Slep, A. M. (2009). Stability of physical and psychological adolescent dating aggression across time and partners. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 38, 303–314. Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (1997). Stalking in America: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Denver, CO: Center for Policy Research. Tokunga, R. S. (2010). Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 277–287.

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APPENDIX

Organizations Concerned with Teen V↜iolence and V↜ictimization Michele A. Paludi

The following is a list of resources dealing with teen violence and victimization. This list serves as a good starting point for parents, adolescents, teachers, counselors, and administrators seeking additional information about teen violence. This list is neither complete nor exhaustive. These resources are not to be viewed as substitutes for counseling and/or legal advice.

Internet Safety Sites for Parents www.wiredsafety.org www.cybertipline.com www.missingkids.com

Internet Safety Sites for Adolescents www.safeteens.com www.kidshealth.org www.kidshealth.org/teen/safety

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Organizations Adults and Children Together Against Violence http://actagainstviolence.apa.org/ Advocates for Youth http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/about/ywoclc.htm American Association of University Women www.aauw.org American Psychological Association www.apa.org Antistalking Website www.antistalking.com Anti-Violence Project http://gayteens.about.com Anti-Violence Resource Guide http://www.feminist.com/antiviolence/online.html Break the Cycle http://www.breakthecycle.org Business and Professional Women’s Organization www.bpwusa.org California Coalition Against Sexual Assault http://calcasa.org Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence http://www.colorado.edu/cspv/ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov Child Find of America http://www.childfindofamerica.org Children of the Night http://www.childrenofthenight.org/ Choose Respect www.chooserespect.org Common Sense about Kids and Guns http://www.kidsandguns.org Empower Program www.empowered.org

Organizations Concerned with Teen V↜iolence and Victimization

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission www.eeoc.gov Equal Rights Advocates www.equalrights.org Family Violence Prevention Fund www.endabuse.org Feminist Majority Foundation www.feminist.org Flirting or Hurting? http://www.wgby.org/edu/flirt/fhmain.html Focus Adolescent Services http://www.focusas.com/Violence.html Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network www.glsen.org Girls Inc. http://www.girlsinc.org/index.html GLBT National Youth Talkline http://www.ginh.org/talkline/index.html HOPE http://www.breakthecycle.org/join-us-nat-hope.html KidsHealth http://www.kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/relationships/abuse.html Liz Claiborne: Love Is Not Abuse http://www.loveisnotabuse.com Love Doesn’t Have to Hurt http://www.apa.org/pl/pii/teen Love Is Respect, National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline http://www.loveisrespect.org MADE (Moms and Dads for Education to Stop Teen Dating Abuse) www.loveisnotabuse.com/made/ Men Can Stop Rape www.mencanstoprape.org Mothers Against Teen Violence http://www.matvinc.org Ms. Foundation for Women www.ms.foundation.org

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National Alliance of Gang Investigators’ Associations http://www. nagia.org National Center for Missing and Exploited Children www.missingkids.com National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse http://www.ndaa.org/ncpca_home.html National Center for Victims of Crime http://www.ncyc.org National Center for Violence Prevention www.netam.net National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence www.ncsv.org National Coalition Against Domestic Violence www.ncadv.org National Coalition Against Violent Athletes http://www.ncava.org/ National Domestic Violence Hotline http://www.ndvh.org National Hopeline Network http://www.hopeline.com National Organization for Men Against Sexism www.nomas.org National Organization for Women www.now.org National Runaway Hotline http://www.nrscrisisline.org National Sexual Violence Resource Center www.nsvrc.org National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline http://www.loveisrespect.org National Women’s Law Center www.nwic.org National Youth Violence Prevention Resources Center www.safeyouth.org

Organizations Concerned with Teen V↜iolence and Victimization

Office of Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice www.ojp.usdoj.gov/vawo Polly Klaas Foundation http://www.pollyklaas.org Prevent Cyberbullying and Internet Harassment www.cyberbully411.com Preventing Violence in our Schools www.extension.umn.edu Promote Truth www.promotetruth.org Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network www.rainn.org Security on Campus www.securityoncampus.org Stalking Resource Center www.ncvc.org/src/Main.aspx Striving to Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere http://www.safeyouth.gov/Pages/Home.aspx Students Against Violence Everywhere www.nationalsave.org Teen Dating Violence http://www.coolnurse.com/teen_dating_violence.html Teen Relationships http://www.teenrelationships.org Teens Against Gang Violence http://www.manta.com/c/mmft8gm/teens-against-gang-violence That’s Not Cool http://www.thatsnotcool.com Trust Betrayed www.wvdhhr.org U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights www.ed.gov Womenslaw http://www.womenslaw.org

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About the Editor and Contributors

The Editor Michele A. Paludi,╇ PhD, is the series editor for Women’s Psychology and for Women and Careers in Management for Praeger. She is the author/ editor of 38 college textbooks and of more than 170 scholarly articles and conference presentations on sexual harassment, campus violence, psychology of women, gender, and discrimination. Her book Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus (SUNY Press, 1990) received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States. Dr. Paludi served as chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Alcohol and Other Drug Problems in Higher Education. She was one of six scholars in the United States to be selected for this subpanel. She also was a consultant to and a member of former New York State governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Dr. Paludi serves as an expert witness for court proceedings and administrative hearings on sexual harassment. She has had extensive experience in conducting training programs and investigations of sexual harassment and other Equal Employment Opportunity issues for businesses and educational institutions. In addition, Dr. Paludi has held faculty positions at Franklin & Marshall College, Kent State University, Hunter College, Union College, and Union Graduate College, where she directs the human resource management certificate program. She is on the faculty in the School of Management. She was recently named “Woman of the Year” by the Business and Professional Women in Schenectady, New York. She is currently the Elihu Root Peace Fund Professor in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College.

About the Editor and Contributors

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The Contributors Stuart C. Aitken╇is Professor and Chair of Geography at San Diego State University and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Young People and Space (ISYS). His research interests include film and media, critical social theory, qualitative methods, children, families, and communities. Stuart’s recent and forthcoming books include Young People: Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations (Routledge, 2011), Qualitative Geographies (Sage, 2010), The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (Ashgate, 2009), Global Childhoods (Routledge, 2008), Philosophies, People, Places and Practices (Sage, 2004), Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity (Routledge, 2001), Family Fantasies and Community Space (Rutgers University Press, 1998), Place, Space, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), and Putting Children in Their Place (Association of American Geographers, 1994). He has published more than 150 articles in academic journals, including the Annals of the AAG, Geographical Review, Antipode, Transactions of the IBG, CaGIS, Society and Space, The Journal of Geography, and Environment and Planning A, as well as in various edited book collections and encyclopedias. Aitken is past coeditor of The Professional Geographer and is current North American editor of Children’s Geographies. He has worked for the United Nations on issues of children’s rights, migration, and dislocation. Donald E. Colley III╇is a second-year PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Geography at San Diego State University and is currently in residence at the University of California–Santa Barbara. His dissertation research is broadly focused on violence, health, masculinity, and youths. Colley received an MA in geography from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, and a BA in geography from Concord University in Athens, West Virginia. Previous research has explored the dimensions of belonging and exclusion in the context of sports and fitness. He has also presented on the sociospatial aspects of fraternity hazing, the importance of considering geography in fat studies research, and the resolution of violence in the writings of Robert Frost. David DiLillo╇ received a BA from Rhodes College and a PhD in clinical psychology from Oklahoma State University. He is currently an associate professor and director of clinical training at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. His primary research interests lie in the area of family violence, including child maltreatment and marital and relationship violence. Recent projects have focused on the long-term adjustment of adults who have experienced various forms of childhood trauma and maltreatment

About the Editor and Contributors

(e.g., sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, and neglect). His work has explored several aspects of this issue, including the interpersonal functioning of adult survivors in both couple and parent-child relationships. His research has been funded by NIMH and NICHD. His most recent project is a longitudinal study of sexual revictimization. Rukudzo Amanda Dzwairo╇ is a transfer undergraduate student in psychology at the University of South Africa. She is a coauthor of published research conducted during her studies at the University of Evansville. This research won a Psi Chi award at the Midwestern Psychological Association Conference in 2009. She studies social psychological factors that shape perceptions of juvenile offenders and victims within the justice and legal system. Thomas M. Evans,╇PhD, is a clinical and forensic psychologist. For 12 years he served as the clinical director of the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Diagnostic Clinic. He is currently in independent practice and devotes his time to forensic assessment of juveniles and adults. His research interests include stalking by juveniles, stalking in the workplace, and threat assessment. Katlyn M. Sorenson Farnum,╇ BS, is a doctoral student in the joint social psychology and law program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research focuses primarily on understanding the causes and effects of discrimination and stigma within the legal system. She also studies juror perceptions of offenders and their victims. She is an Othmer Fellow and works closely with the Weibling Project on the psycholegal study and treatment of discrimination. Ann Flynn,╇NTBSc (Hons), is a primary school teacher and was an education officer with the Cool School antibullying program for nine years. She has extensive experience in working with students, parents, and teachers. She was involved in the development of the program, training of teachers and parents, and research associated with the program. She is coauthor of Cool School publications and research papers. Joanna L. Goodwin╇ is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler. Her undergraduate degree is in psychology. She worked as a case manager for children at a community mental health and mental retardation facility for 2 and a half years. She also worked as a case manager in a residential treatment center for 2 and a half years. Goodwin is currently a foster care

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and adoption case manager for a nonprofit organization. She has been a member of the Air National Guard for 18 years, 14 of which have been in Texas. As an enlisted member for 15 years, she maintained aircraft, and she has been deployed to the Middle East, serving in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. She received her commission as an officer and is now a captain, serving as the executive officer in charge of the administrative personnel for the 136th Maintenance Group, Texas Air National Guard. Katie E. Griffin╇ received her master’s degree in forensic psychology at City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her research interests include microaggressions and mental health, as well as hate crimes and associated legislation. Todd Hendrix,╇ PC, PhD, currently serves as the director of the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Diagnostic Clinic in Ohio and is also an adjunct professor at Cleveland State University. Britney Hilbun╇ is a graduate student in the general clinical psychology program at the University of Texas at Tyler (UTT). She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from UTT as well. She has worked as a research assistant in the psychology department for several years and has done volunteer work with the local crisis center for women and children who have been victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse. Deborah James,╇ PhD, BS (Hons), is a research psychologist with the Meath Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. She has extensive research experience in mental health settings from childhood to old age. Her research interests include bullying, relational aggression, and epidemiology of mental health problems. She has been involved with the Cool School antibullying program for more than 13 years. Her roles included the development of the program, training of teachers, and evaluation of the program. She is author of journal articles and coauthor of a number of Cool School publications. She is currently training as an integrative psychotherapist. Eric G. Jamison II╇ is currently a third-year doctoral student at the University of Maryland, School of Public Health, and also holds a Master of Science degree in applied chemistry from Delaware State University. His current research interests include intervention and health promotion as it relates to underserved populations, using a community-based participatory research approach. He is particularly interested in adolescent violence, aggression, gang violence, and the associated risk and resilience factors.

About the Editor and Contributors

Ashley Kravitz╇is originally from Buffalo, New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business management from St. John Fisher College and graduated from Union Graduate College in June 2011 with a master’s in business administration. Ashley currently works for the New York State Office of Mental Health in Albany as a budget analyst. She enjoys running, reading, and collecting beach glass. Jeanette Krenek╇ has spent most of her life living overseas in various countries. She graduated from Le Tourneau University in Longview, Texas, with a BS in psychology in 2007. Krenek then provided intensive case management services to individuals with chronic mental illness for Community Healthcore from 2007 to 2010. She is currently a full-time graduate student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Texas at Tyler. Maria Lawlor,╇ MD, MRCPsych, is director of the Cool School antibullying program and consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist with Meath Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. She has extensive experience in working with young people with psychiatric/psychological difficulties. She is founder of the Stay Safe program, which is a schoolbased program aimed at empowering children to recognize and resist abuse/victimization. This program has been implemented nationally within Ireland and in the United States. She is also involved in research projects examining bullying, epidemiology of mental health, child sexual abuse prevention, and Asperger’s syndrome. She is author of books and journal articles. Paula K. Lundberg-Love╇is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler (UTT) and the Ben R. Fisch Endowed Professor in Humanitarian Affairs for 2001–2004. Her undergraduate degree is in chemistry, and she worked as a chemist at a pharmaceutical company for five years prior to earning her doctorate in physiological psychology, with an emphasis in psychopharmacology. After a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in nutrition and behavior in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, she assumed her academic position at UTT, where she teaches classes in psychopharmacology, behavioral neuroscience, physiological psychology, sexual victimization, and family violence. Subsequent to her academic appointment, Lundberg-Love pursued postgraduate training and is a licensed professional counselor. She is a member of Tyler Counseling and Assessment Center, where she provides therapeutic services for victims of sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and domestic violence. She has

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conducted a long-term research study on women who were victims of childhood incestuous abuse, constructed a therapeutic program for their recovery, and documented its effectiveness upon their recovery. She is the author of nearly 100 publications and presentations and is coeditor of Violence and Sexual Abuse at Home: Current Issues in Spousal Battering and Child Maltreatment, as well as Intimate Violence Against Women: When Spouses, Partners, or Lovers Attack. As a result of her training in psychopharmacology and child maltreatment, her expertise has been sought as a consultant on various death penalty appellate cases in the state of Texas. Carol MacKinnon-Lewis╇ is a professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies, University of South Florida. She received her PhD in child development from the University of Georgia. For 25 years, her research focus has been on the identification of family processes as they contribute to children’s social emotional competence and how variations in youths’ experiences within their families influence their relationships in other contexts, with a particular interest in their aggressive behavior with peers. More recently, her research has included the use of technology as a vehicle for the dissemination and implementation of preventive interventions and practices to the field. Funded by NSF, U.S. Department of Education, NIMH, NICHD, and the William T. Grant Foundation, MacKinnon-Lewis’s work has been published in a number of professional journals, including Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Development and Psychopathology, Journal of Family Psychology, and Social Development. Robert F. Marcus,╇ PhD, is an associate professor of human development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since joining the faculty in the Department of Human Development in 1973, Marcus has balanced his academic duties with his clinical work in the community. Marcus holds a PhD in human development and family studies from Pennsylvania State University. He has published or presented more than 100 papers, and for the past 20 years, he has focused his work entirely on violence in adolescence and emerging adulthood, the causes of dating violence, and personality and situational correlates of aggression and violence. Currently, Marcus is a licensed and practicing psychologist at Sheppard Pratt of Howard County, in Columbia, Maryland. Jennifer L. Martin,╇ PhD, has worked in public education for 15 years, 13 of those as the department head of English at an alternative high school for at-risk students in the Detroit metropolitan area. She is also a special lecturer at Oakland University, where she teaches in the Education Specialist

About the Editor and Contributors

Degree Program and in the women and gender studies department. As an educational leader, Martin has been an advocate for at-risk students, and she has received several district, state, and national awards and recognitions for her advocacy, mentorship, and research. She has served as a mentor to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, as well as to new teachers in a variety of areas, such as writing and publishing, career and leadership development, and advocacy. Martin is the editor of the two-volume Women as Leaders in Education (Praeger, in press). She has conducted research and published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on bullying and harassment, peer sexual harassment, educational equity, mentoring, issues of social justice, service learning, and teaching at-risk students. Martin is often an invited speaker at universities and nonprofit organizations on the aforementioned topics. As action vice president of Michigan NOW, she engages in volunteer Title IX education and legal advocacy work. Through this work she has been asked to comment on proposed Michigan legislation on National Public Radio. Maureen C. McHugh,╇ PhD, is a professor of psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in gender and in diversity. She has been teaching courses in the psychology of women and psychology of human sexuality since 1975. She has published journal articles and chapters in the areas of methods, violence against women, and gender differences, including chapters in many texts and handbooks. In 2005, she collaborated with Irene Frieze to edit two special issues on gender and intimate partner violence in Psychology of Women Quarterly and in Sex Roles. McHugh was awarded the Christine Ladd Franklin Award, for her contributions to feminist psychology, and the Florence Denmark Distinguished Mentoring Award, for feminist mentoring, from the Association for Women in Psychology. Niamh Murphy,╇ NDC BA (Hons), is a group therapist with the Meath Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. She has worked with the program for eight years. In addition to working with the development and evaluation team, she has devised and implemented school-based interventions for dealing with victims and bullies. She has extensive experience in working with young people with emotional and behavioral difficulties. She is coauthor of a number of Cool School publications. Kevin L. Nadal,╇ PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology and mental health counseling at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City

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University of New York. He earned his doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University. He has published several works focusing on Filipino American, ethnic minority, and LGBTQ issues in the fields of psychology and education. He is a fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is the author of the books Filipino American Psychology: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice and Filipino American Psychology: A Collection of Personal Narratives. Lindsay Marie Pantlin╇ is a master’s student at the University of Texas at Tyler (UTT) in the general clinical psychology program. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UTT. During her undergraduate program she was a member of Psi Chi and Alpha Chi. She also collaborated on research projects with two professors at UTT. She is a volunteer at the East Texas Crisis Center and acts as an advocate for victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault who go to hospitals in Tyler. Lindsay is an early intervention specialist with the Early Childhood Intervention program at the Andrews Center in Tyler. She works with children who have developmental delays or atypical development. Andrea Poet╇is a graduate student in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is currently involved with research on gender and aggression, including intimate partner violence and the sexual derogation of women. Allison L. Skinner,╇ MA, is an adjunct faculty member of the psychology department at the University of Southern Indiana and lab manager of Margaret Stevenson’s Psychology and the Law Laboratory at the University of Evansville. Her research focuses on the impact of prejudice, stereotypes, and social biases in the legal system. Margaret C. Stevenson,╇PhD, is assistant professor of psychology at the University of Evansville. She received her doctorate in social psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2008. Her dissertation was awarded the 2008 American Psychological Association (APA) Division 37 Dissertation Award; APA Division 37’s Section on Child Maltreatment honorary mention; and the 2008 APA Division 41, American Psychology and Law Society (AP-LS) First Place dissertation award, and she is currently published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. She was also the 2010 recipient of the APA Division 37’s Early Career Award in Child Maltreatment. Stevenson studies various issues at the intersection of children, psychology, and the law. Specifically, she examines social psychological factors that shape

About the Editor and Contributors

perceptions of child offenders and victims. Stevenson also serves on the editorial board for two professional journals and was appointed as a committee member of APA Division 41’s (AP-LS) Dissertation Awards Committee. Catherine R. Swiderski╇is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). Her dissertation research focuses on the experience of psychological abuse as a form of intimate partner violence experienced by men. Swiderski is a contributor to an ongoing viole-nce prevention program involving the integration of scholarship on violence against women into the psychology curriculum. She published a chapter on intimate partner violence and presented a poster at the American Psychological Association National Summit on Interpersonal Violence and Abuse (Dallas, 2010). Currently, Swiderski conducts crisis intervention counseling at a domestic violence shelter, and she counsels students at the Counseling Center at IUP. Her previous experience includes counseling clients with issues of trauma and violence at a community mental health center and Â� volunteering with a sexual assault prevention program and at a residential treatment facility for abused adolescent girls. Christine M. Wienke Totura,╇ PhD, is a senior policy researcher with the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. Totura’s work focuses on examining the implications of behavioral health and educational policies and practices for communities, youths, and families both in Arizona and nationwide. Totura is specifically involved in research on the assessment of adolescent aggression and social development, as well as systemic factors impacting implementation of public health programming in schools and communities. She has published and presented extensively in these areas and has obtained numerous federal and local grants and contracts. Totura earned her Bachelor of Science degree in psychology and criminal justice from Loyola University in Chicago and her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in clinical psychology from the University of South Florida. Additionally, Totura is a licensed clinical psychologist in Arizona. Kate Walsh╇ received a BA from Boston University and is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is currently a predoctoral clinical intern at the Medical University of South Carolina. Her research interests lie primarily in uncovering risk factors for adolescent and adult sexual revictimization. Recent projects, including her NIMH-funded dissertation study, have focused on laboratory examinations of emotion regulation and established risk factors (e.g., sexual risk taking, post-traumatic stress disorder) for sexual revictimization.

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Index

Abdul-Kabir, S., 117 acquaintance rape, 205 adolescent employment and sexual harassment, 166–168 adolescent girls: cognitive maturity of, 181–184; mental health of, 168. See also sexual harassment of adolescent girls adolescent sexual assault (ASA), 204 adolescents: metal health impact of sexual harassment, 168–170; workplace sexual harassment, 156–157 aggression: peer aggression, 112; physical aggression, 111, 222; prevalence of types by gender, 110–111; relational aggression, 42, 108, 222; verbal aggression, 111. See also microaggressions aggressive girls, 48–49 Aitken, S. C., 91 Allen, M., 156 alternative dispute methods, 177 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 40, 155 American Association of University Women (AAUW) study, 161, 168, 183 anger as source of power, 50 Anger Coping program, 117 anti-bullying program elements, 118 Antonishak, J., 62 Aronoff, J., 224 Arriaga, X. B., 228 Ashbaker, B., 156 Ashley, O. S., 226 attachment bond obstacles, 253

attachment psychology, 249 attachment theory, 252–253 attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 209 Austin, B., 11 aversive racial theory, 61–62, 68 bad reputation, 46 Barickman, R., 169, 172, 174, 179 Barnes, A., 133 Baron, R. M., 71 Barron, C., 48, 49 Basow, S. A., 40–41, 43, 46–47, 53 Bauman, K. E., 228 Bearinger, L. H., 11, 12 behavior change intervention program, 119 behavioral response of LGBT people, 8 Berson, L., 166 Berson, M., 166 betrayal feelings, 211 black juvenile sex offenders, 57 black women: physical strength, 69; stereotypes of sexual activity and dominance, 68 Blueprints Bullying Prevention Program, 107 Bogart, K., 163 books on mean girls, 42 Bottoms, B. L., 57, 63, 69, 70 Brain, P., 131 BrainPower program, 117 Brockopp, K., 232

276 Index Brown, C., 182–183 Brown, L. M., 42, 43, 50, 53 Browne, A., 211 Brumberg, J. J., 40, 41, 45, 47, 48 Bucceri, J. M., 5, 6 bulimia, 199 Bulimic Investigatory Test, 199 bullies: classifications of, 106; ethnic identification, 111; female, 42; gender differences of, 110, 113; hypotheses of, 4; motivations, 4; parents of, 114; prevalence of, 180; profiles of, 110, 112–113; research on, 118; response to, 96; social behavior of, 108–109; stereotypes of, 42; teacher response to, 128; zero-tolerance policies impact, 117 bullying: acknowledgement of, 15; as microassaults, 8; as microinsults, 8; as microinvalidations, 8; by girls, 39; from peers, 11; gender differences of, 110–111; geography of, 95; group discussion about, 15; long-term impact of, 112; microaggressions leading to, 16; programs to combat, 127; psychological consequences of, 16; vs. sexual harassment in schools, 179–184; vs. stalking, 245; vs. teacher discipline, 129–130 bullying, steps to take regarding: about, 140–146; denial, dealing with, 144–146; intervention, 141; interviews, 141; relational aggression management, 146–149; restorative justice approach, 142; what not to do, 142–144 bullying and victimization: as normative behavior, 131–132; by race and ethnicity, 111; genetic precursors of, 113; school climate and, 114–115 bullying in middle school: about, 105–106; bullying roles, 108–110; consequences for bullies, victims, and bully/victims, 111–113; cultural differences in expressions of, 110–111; definition of, 107; environmental impacts, 114–115; future research directions, 118–119; prevention and

intervention, 115–118; risk factors for bullying and victimization, 113; statistics of, 106–107; types of, 107–108 Bullying Prevention Program, 117 bullying roles: about, 108; bully/victims, 109–110; defenders, 110; henchmen/ contributors, 110; peer group-observers, 110; victims, 109 bullying sociogram: implementation steps, 138–140; preventative steps, 137–138; procedural steps, 138; reactive steps, 138; sociogram use, 138–140 bully/victims: behavior problems, 109–110; characteristics of, 113; dynamic of, 41, 92; future of, 111; normative problems, 131 Butler, J., 99 Byers, E. S., 225, 226 Cao, Y. H., 52 Capodilupo, C. M., 5, 6 Carter, Jimmy, 59 Cate, R., 223 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 24, 212, 249 Chesler, P., 41–42 Chew, E., 232 child abuse, 193 child or adolescent sexual abuse (CASA): described, 204; physical health impact of, 208; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, 209 child sexual abuse and adolescent sexual assault and revictimization: about, 203; definitions of, 204; outcomes of child or adolescent sexual abuse, 208–210; prevalence of childhood and adolescent victimization and revictimization, 205; prevention and treatment, 212–213; risk factors for victimization and revictimization, 205–207; socioemotional context of victimization, 204–205; theories explaining the effects of sexual abuse and revictimization, 210–211; theories of risk factors for victimization and revictimization, 207–208; conclusions, 213–214

Index child sexual abuse (CSA): and sexual victimization, 205; described, 204 children, education process for, 88 Choose Respect program, 234 chronic groups, trajectory of violence for, 26 Civil Rights Act Title VII, 158–159 class observation, 136–137 Clement, Tyler, 3 cognitive maturity of adolescent girls, 181–184 Collins, R↜., 95 Columbine High School, 105 compulsory hetero sexuality, 231 conceptual model for managing bullying: about, 134–135; bullying sociogram, 137–140; class observation, 136–137; confidential questionnaires, 135–136 conduct disorder (CD), 209 Connolly, J., 11, 12 Cormier, S., 43 Coronado v. State of Texas, 73 Corpus, M. J. H., 6, 7 Courtois, C. A, 194 Craig, W., 11, 12 Cresswell, T., 98 culture of fear, 84 cyberabuse, 222–223 cyberbullying, 3, 108 cyberstalking, 252 cyberstalking vs. sexual harassment, 166–168 Cyr, M., 198 Daly, M., 33 date rape, 205 dating skills, 230–231 dating violence, 221; metal health impact of, 228; sexual health impacts of, 229; teens’ views on, 232 DeBlase, G., 50 Dedman, B., 102n4 defenders, 110 DeGennaro, J. T., 62 developmental criminology, 30, 31 Dewey, L., 165 direct bullying, 107

277 discrimination, 183 dismissing attachment, 253 Dixon, Marcus, 58–59 Dohrn, B., 49 Donnella, A. G., 63 Dovidio, J. F., 63 Drobac, J., 157 DSM-IV-TR, 198 Duffy, J., 169 Dupper, D. R., 89–90 dynamic of powerlessness, 211 Dzwairo, R. A., 65, 70 early desisters, trajectory of violence for, 26 eating disorders, 40 Education Act of 1972 Title IX, 158–159 Edwards, R. W., 224, 233 Elkind, D., 181, 182 Elliot, William, 58–59 Ellsworth, P. C., 61, 62, 63 embarrassment, 226 emerging adulthood: and romantic involvement, 24, 31; defined, 24; described, 31; personality evolving during, 30–31; prevalence rates of violence, 23 emerging adulthood theory, 23, 30 Émile (Rousseau), 87 environmental impacts: family context, 114; school climate, 114–115 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 157, 159, 166–168, 176, 177–179 Erikson, E., 38 erotomanic behavior, 244 Ertesvag, S., 180 Espelage, D., 180 Espeland, P., 164, 168 Esqueda, C. W., 65 Etherington, K., 197 Evans, T. M., 245 evolutionary prospect theory, 30 evolutionary theory, 23, 32, 33 exclusionary bullying, 99 exclusionary violence, 98, 99 exosystem factors, 208 explicit discrimination, 5

278 Index family of origin dysfunction, 205–206 Faragher v. Boca Raton, 170 female adolescents, physical abuse by and of, 224 female aggression, 42 female friendships, 42–43 female sexuality, 46 females: policing of other females, 49; self-sensorship of, 38–39. See also black women; girls feminine norms of sexual behavior, 46 feminine sexist stereotypes, 42 feminism, 182–183 Ferron, J., 166 Filipas, H. H., 198 Fine, M., 45, 47 Fineran, S., 156, 168, 169, 171 Finkelhor, D., 211 Flower, T., 244, 247–248, 249 forced-rape case, 69 Ford, A., 229 Foshee, V. A., 226, 228 Foucauldian perspective, 93 Foucault, M., 50 Freed, L. H., 11 Freedner, N., 11 Friend to Friend program, 117 Frieze, I. H., 225, 229 Gaertner, S. L., 63 Gallopin, C., 226, 227 Galloway, D., 133 gender conformity, 11 gender microaggression towards LGBT people, 8 genetic precursors of bullying and victimization, 113 Gilligan, C., 39–40, 42, 43 Girl Scouts, 155 Girl Scouts of America study, 165, 181 girls: adolescent girls, 168, 181–184; aggressive girls, 48–49; bullying by, 39; incarceration of, 49; mean girls, 42; self-esteem of, 50–51; suicide by, 37; suicide risk of, 40; violence physical assault by, 37. See also sexual harassment of adolescent girls

girls and women: anger as source of power for, 50; sexual desire of, 45–46 Giroux, H. A., 52 Glassner, B., 84 grievance procedures, 176–177 Grossman, M., 117 Gruber, J., 156, 168, 169, 171 Gullan, R. L., 117 Gunn, Sakia, 13 Haegerich, T. M., 70 Hall, G. Stanley, 88 Hamit, S., 15 Haney, C., 73 Hanmer, T. J., 42 Harmon, T., 46, 47 Harris, A., 41 Harris, Eric, 105 Harrison, L. A., 65 Haw, R. M., 62 Healthy Relationships program, 234 Heaton, E., 156 Helms, R. W., 228 Henton, J., 223 Hickman, L. J., 224 Hill, C., 163 Hispanic juvenile sex offenders and victims, 73 Holder, A. M. B., 5, 6 Holt, M., 180 homicides: among urban males, 26; at schools vs. homes, 85; bully/victims cycle and, 85; by intimate partners of girls, 228; decline in, 33; in urban America, 33; statistics, 24 Homma, Y., 11, 12 hostile attribution bias, 115 hostile environment sexual harassment, 158–159 Hotaling, G. T., 233 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 88 Hunter, Tyra, 13 identity politics, 100 Iglesias, E., 43 In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 39 incarceration of girls, 49

Index incest: age and risk of, 197–198; developmental effects of, 197–198; dissociation and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 198; obesity and eating disorders, 199; psychological effects, 199–200 inclusionary bullying, 99 inclusionary violence, 97 Incredible Years program, 116 indirect bullying, 107–108 in-group biases, 63–64 inner-city school violence, 91 internalized sexism, 42 interracial relationships, 64–65 Interventions: primary interventions, 233–234; secondary interventions, 234–235; conclusions, 235–236 intimacy-seeking stalkers, 245 intimate partner violence (IPV), 85, 221 Irving, L. M., 199 Is Your Daughter Safe at Work (PBS program), 166 Issa, M. A., 15 Jackson, H., 68 Jawad, A. F., 117 Jaycox, L. H., 224 Johnson, B., 198 Johnson, M. P↜., 225 juries: race salience in, 61–62; racial bias by, 60–61 juvenile sex offenders: of racial minority groups, 73; perception of, 57; recidivism, 58; registration support and, 71; registration support and race of, 71 juvenile stalking: about, 243–244; assessment of juvenile stalkers, 248–249; attachment, 252–254; cyberbullying, 251–252; future study, 255; physical violence by, 254; prevalence of violence in, 249; research on, 244–247; risk assessment and management, 254–255; socially awkward stalking types, 246; socially popular stalking types, 246–247; stalking tactics, 248; studies on, 245; teen dating violence, 249–251

279 Kalodner, C. R., 40 Kenkel, M., 198 Kenny, D. A., 71 Klebold, Dylan, 105 Koch, G. G., 228 Kowalski, R., 49, 92 Lacombe, D., 48, 49 Larkin, J., 169 late desisters, trajectory of violence for, 26 Laub, J., 31 Leaper, C., 182–183 Leary, M. R., 92 LeFebvre, H., 93, 101 Leff, S. S., 117 Leigh, L., 226, 227 Lera, M. J., 132 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adolescents, 9–10 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) children, 4 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people: behavioral response of, 8; cognitive response of, 8; emotional response of, 8; help seeking behavior, 227; microaggression towards, 6; microinsults, 6; murders of, 13; physical and mental health problems, 14; rights of, 6; stereotypical image of, 17 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) teens: microaggressions from peers, 11; microaggressions within schools/educational systems, 10; microaggressions within the family, 12; of color, 12–13; protective factors, 12 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youths: depression in, 14; suicide attempts by, 14 Levy, A., 175, 179 Lewis-Charp, H., 52 Linder, G. F., 228 Lindsay Ann Burke Act, 234 Livingston, N. A., 229 love and romantic notions, 231 love obsessional behavior, 244 Loveless, Tom, 87 Lowery, Joseph, 58

280 Index Lund, I., 180 Lynch, M., 73 Lyons, N. P., 42 macrosystem factors, 208 Males, Mike, 101n1 Marchant, R., 91 marital commitment, 32 Marquart, B. S., 224, 233 Martin, J., 183 mass schoolyard shooting, 91 Massey, D., 94 Mather, Cotton, 87 McCann, J. T., 244 McCluskey-Fawcett, K., 199 McDuff, P., 198 McHugh, M. C., 229 mean girls, 42 media image of femininity, 37 media messages, damage from, 41 media’s influence on teen violence and victimization: about, 37–39; alienation and body image, 39–41; alienation through social space, 41–44; anger and the “bad” girl, 48–50; hope of education, 50–53; sexuality, desire, and the bad reputation, 44–48; conclusion, 53–54 Meissner, C. A., 62 Meloy, R. J., 245 mental health: bullying impact on, 15; dating violence impact on, 228; gender microaggression, 8; impact responses on, 169; Internet and video games use, 119; of adolescent girls, 168; of LBGT teens, 9, 13–14; of LBGT youths, 17; sexual harassment and, 168, 189; sexual harassment of adolescents impact on, 168–170; teacher social support and, 128; violent relationship impacts, 228 Meyer-Adams, N., 89–90 microaggressions: about, 3–4; affect on emotional and physical health, 8; based on intersectional identities, 12–13; described, 4; from student and teacher interactions, 10; impact of,€4; impacts of, on LGBT adolescents’

mental health,€13–14; leading to bullying, 16; on marginalized groups,€7; preventing or dealing with, 15; racial microaggression taxonomy, 5–6, 7; recommendations for addressing teen bullying and microaggressions, 14–18; review of microaggression literature, 5–9; sexual orientation, 7, 9–10; systemic change to decrease, 16; teen bullying as, 9; towards LGBT people, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12; victims of, 5 microassaults, 6, 8 microinsults, 6, 8 microinvalidations, 6, 8 Miller, D. A., 199 Mitchel, T. L., 62 Modern Racism Scale, 63 Molidor, C. E., 222, 225 Moller, B., 244, 247–248, 249 Morrow, K., 200 Mortimer, J., 168 mother-child sexual abuse, 196–197 Mullen, P. E., 244, 247–248, 249 Munro, M. A., 117 murder, 228 murder rate, 101n1 Murnen, S., 169 Nadal, K. L., 5, 6, 7, 8, 15 Najdowski, C. J., 57, 69, 70 Nannini, D. K., 224, 233 National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 165 National Incident Base Report System (NIBRS), 195 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 23 National Youth Survey, 23, 24, 25 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), 51 Noguera, P. A., 93, 94 Nuttall, R., 68 O’Brien. M., 196 Office of Civil Rights (OCR), 171–172 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 195 O’Keeffe, N. K., 232

Index Olweus, D., 107, 117 opposition defiant disorder (ODD), 209 Ortega, R., 132 out-group biases, 63–64, 67 Owen, Robert, 86–87 Paludi, C., 170, 176, 179, 183 Paludi, M., 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176, 179, 183 parental education on sexual abuse, 213 parental monitoring: involvement and, 232; of teen dating, 250 parent-child relationship, 206 Parents Guide to Teen Dating Violence (CVPC), 228 Parkinson, M., 156 Paskewich, B. S., 117 passive victims, 109 peer aggression, 112 peer harassment impacts, 38 peer mediation, 117 Pepler, D., 11, 12 Perron, A., 198 Pfeifer, J. E., 62 Phillips, S., 92 Phinney, G., 163 physical aggression, 111, 222 physical bullying, 107 physical health impact: of child or adolescent sexual abuse (CASA), 208; psychological difficulties of, 209 Pimental, P. S., 57, 69, 70 Pittsburgh Youth Study, 25 playground violence, 85 playgrounds, 89 police officers, 227 Polly Klass Foundation, 165 post-traumatic stress, 169 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): child or adolescent sexual abuse (CASA) and, 209; dissociation and, 198; violent relationship impacts, 228 power, 113 Power, T. J., 117 Precious (movie), 193 prejudice in history, 5 preoccupied attachment style, 253

281 prevalence rates: age related, for serious violent offenders (SVOs), 25; decline of, in serious violence, 23; of emerging adulthood, 23; of violence by age, 27; of violence by age and type, 28 prevention and intervention: about, 115–116; lessons learned, 118; what works and what doesn’t, 116–117 primary schools, 132 profiling, 102n4 protective factors for decreased violence probability, 29 psychcopathology, risk of, 197 psychological abuse, 222, 225 psychological maltreatment, 129 Psychopathic Checklist: Youth Version, 249 Purcell, R., 244, 247–248, 249 Push (Sapphire), 193 quid pro quo sexual harassment, 158–159 race impact on perceptions of adolescent sex offenders: about, 57–60; conclusions and directions for future research, 72–74; effects of defendant and victim race, 60–61; effects of juvenile defendant and victim race, 62–64; effects of juvenile defendant and victim race on registration support for forced rape, 68–69; effects of juvenile defendant and victim race on registration support for statutory rape, 65–68; perceptions of interracial domestic violence, 64–65; social psychological theory explaining effects of race, 61–62 race of juvenile defendant and victim on impact of registration support for forced rape, 68–72; discussion of preliminary findings, 71–72; method, 69–70; preliminary results, 70–71 race salience in juries, 61–62 racial bias by juries, 60–61 racial microaggression taxonomy, 5–6, 7 rape: acquaintance rape, 205; date rape, 205; forced-rape case, 69; registration support for forced rape, 68–69;

282 Index registration support for statutory rape, 65–68; reporting of, 224; reports of, 205; stranger rape cases, 64 reactive victims, 109 registered sex offenders, suicide risk by, 58–60 registration support: gender and victim race, 67; juvenile sex offenders’ race and, 71; victim race and, 72 Reis, E., 11, 12 rejected stalkers, 245 relational aggression, 42, 108, 222 relational bullying, 108 Reppucci, N. D., 62 Resnick, M. D., 11, 12 restorative justice, 134, 148 restraining orders, 254–255 retaliation fear, 226 retributive goals of punishment, 66 retributive justice, 134 Rich, A., 231 Rigby, K., 133 Riis, Jacob, 88 risk: assessment and management, 254–255; of incest, 197–198; of psychcopathology, 197; perception vs. reality, 85. See also suicide risk risk factors: bullying and victimization, 113; increased violence probability, 29; victimization and revictimization, 205– 207; victimization and revictimization theories, 207–208 risky sexual behavior, 207, 210 Rivera, D. P., 6, 7 Roland, E., 133, 180 romantic involvement and emerging adulthood, 24 Roots of Empathy program, 116 Roscoe, B., 161 Rose, S., 224 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 87 Rubin, L. R., 40–41, 43, 46–47, 53 Saewyc, E. M., 11, 12 Safe Dates program, 234 Sagrestano, L., 177 Saint-Pierre, M., 225, 226 Salerno, J. M., 57, 69, 70

Saltzburg, S., 12 Sampson, R., 31 Sanday, P↜., 233 Sandler, B., 171, 180 Sapphire (formerly Ramona Lofton), 193 Schaeffer, Rebecca, 243 school interventions, 118 school systems, physical and psychological safety of LGBT in, 17–18 school violence, structural nature of, 93 school-based educational prevention of sexual abuse, 212 schools: bullying vs. sexual harassment in, 179–184; incidence of sexual harassment in, 156; single-sex, 51–52; standardization focus, 52 schools and workplaces responsibilities on sexual harassment: aggression tolerance, 117; characteristics of investigators, 175–176; confidentiality, 178; educational programs, 174–175; impartiality, 178; investigator gender, 176; investigatory procedures, 173; mediation, 176–177; Office of Civil Rights, 179; promptness, 177; reactive measures, 175–176; responsibilities of schools and workplaces regarding, 170–177; retaliation, 178–179; sexual harassment complaints, 179; sexual harassment policy, 171–173 schoolyard bullying, 96 schoolyard segregation, 99 schoolyard violence: about, 83–86; as a relational event, 94–97; as cultural, 92; as implicit, 90–92; as structural, 93–94; complex schoolyard geographies of violent events, 97–100; groupings of, 90; rethinking spaces of violence, 89–90; schoolyards as moral spaces, 86–89; conclusions, 100–101 schoolyards as moral spaces, 101 Scott, E. S., 62 Sears, H. A., 225, 226 Second Step Violence program, 116–117 secondary schools discrimination training, 183 Sekely, A., 65, 70 self-blame, 226

Index self-esteem of girls, 50–51 serious violent offenders (SVOs) age related prevalence rates, 25 Seventeen (magazine), 162 sex offender registration policies, 57 sexual abuse: parental education of, 213; race and gender of victims, 206; school-based educational prevention of, 212 sexual abuse of teens by family members: about, 193; effects of, 197–199; incest, defined, 194; incest, statistics regarding, 194–195; sibling incest, 195–197; conclusion, 200 sexual agency, 44, 46 sexual assault: ages most susceptible to, 47–48; in dating relationships, 205 sexual bullying, 251 sexual desire of girls and women, 45–46 sexual harassment, 45; and adolescent employment, 166–168; behavioral examples of, 159; by gender, 161; by race, 160–161; complaints, 157; in schools, 161–162; incidence of, in schools, 156; investigation of, 177; legal definition of, 157–159; metal health impact to adolescents, 168–170; post-traumatic stress and, 169; vs. cyberstalking, 166–168 sexual harassment of adolescent girls: by peers and teachers, 159–163; by teachers, 163–164; epidemic proportions, 155–157; legal definition of, 157–159; on Internet, 164–166; peer sexual harassment, 160–162; reasonable care in preventing and dealing with, 170–174 sexual harassment of adolescents, metal health impact of, 168–170 sexual harassment vs. bullying in schools, 179–184 sexual orientation, 109 sexual orientation microaggressions: LGBT adolescents, 9–10; taxonomy of, 7 sexual victimization, 205, 210 sexual violence, 222 Sheffield, C., 169 Shepard, Matthew, 13

283 Sibley, D., 97 sibling incest: definition of, 195; in context, 195–197 sibling violence, 232 silence and speaking out implications, 42 Silva, E., 163 similarity-leniency bias, 62 Simmons, S., 163 simple obsessional behavior, 244 single-sex schools, 51–52 Skay, C. L., 11, 12 Skolnik, A., 8 Small, M., 85 Smith, A. C., 65, 70 Smith, J. K., 63 Smith, L., 92 Smith, P. K., 131 Smolak, L., 169 social control theory, 31 social manipulation, 41 social stature, 113 social-information processing theory, 115 socioeconomic status (SES), 74n2, 206 sociograms, 137 Sommers, S. R., 61, 62, 63 Sorenson, K. M., 65, 70 Soukamneuth, S., 52 stalking: juvenile stalking, 243–255; motivation for, 244; vs. bullying, 245 stalking behaviors, 244, 248 stalking typology, 246 Stanley, L. R., 224, 233 Starzynski, L. L., 198 Stein, N., 162, 163, 169, 170, 171, 180, 181 Stein, S., 163 stereotypes: of black women, 68; of bullies, 42; of feminine sexists, 42; of LGBT people, 17; of self-sacrificing females, 38 Stern, S. R., 39 Stevenson, M. C., 57, 63, 65, 69, 70 stigmatization, 211 Stockdale, M., 177 Stonehill, H., 171, 180 stranger rape cases, 64 Strauss, S., 164, 168 Striepe, M. I., 46, 47

284 Index Structured Assessment of Violence Risk on Youth, 249 substance abuse, 206–207 subtle discrimination, 5 Sue, D. W., 5, 6 Sugarman, D. B., 233 suicidal thoughts, 112 suicide risk: body image and, 37, 40; by€LGBT youths, 14; by registered sex offenders, 58–60; of adolescent incest survivors, 198; of girls, 40; of registered sex offenders, 59; peer aggression and, 112 suicides: by girls, 37; by LGBT youths, 18; from bullying, 112; from cyberbulling, 252; from teen bullying, 3–4, 15; sexual harassment and, 169 Supplementary Homicide Reports, 228 Take Back the Halls program, 234 teachers: intervention of bullying, 133; sexual harassment of adolescent girls by, 163–164 teachers and teen bullying: about, 127; bullying eradication, 131–133; managing bullying conceptual model, 134–140; managing bullying in schools, 133–134; schools, levels of bullying in, 127–128; steps to take regarding bullying, 140–146; students bullying teachers, 130–131; teacher attitudes toward bullying, 128–129; teachers bullying students, 129–130; teachers managing bullying, 131; telling about bullying, 133; conclusions, 149 technological approaches for therapeutic purposes, 119 teen bullying: as microaggression, 9; suicide from, 3–4 teen dating, parental monitoring of, 250 teen dating violence, 223; etiology of, 250; explanations for, 229; impact of, 251 teen relationship violence (TRV): about, 221; cases of, 224; community/culture of violence, 233; definition of, 222; described, 222–223; explanations

for teen dating violence, 229; family factors, 232; gender, 224–226; gender impacts of, 235; help seeking behavior, 226–227; individual variables, 230; interventions, 233–235; lack of empathy to, 230; outcome/impact, 228–229; peer influence, 232–233; prevalence, 223; teen perceptions of causes, 230; teen relationships, 230–231; warning signs, 227–228 Tetrick, K., 85 “The Net Effect: Girls and New Media,” 155 Thomas, M., 99, 100 Thomson, S., 89, 93 Timmerman, G., 156, 169 Title IX, 51, 158–159, 171, 179 Tolman, D. L., 46, 47 Tomaszewski, E., 163 Torino, G. C., 5, 6 Townsend, S. M., 198 traumatic sexualization, 211 Tuan, Y. F↜., 98 turning points, 30 Tyner, J., 85, 88, 97 Ueno, K., 11 Ullman, S. E., 198 universal education goals, 87–88 U.S. Department of Education, 156, 164, 181 utilitarian goals to protect society, 66 Vaca, R., Jr., 57, 69, 70 van Roosmalen, E., 45 verbal aggression, 111 verbal and emotional abuse, 222 verbal bullying, 107 victimization: genetic precursors of, 113; long-term consequences, 112; risk factors for, 113, 205–207; sexual victimization, 112, 205; theories, 207–208. See also bullying and victimization; child sexual abuse and adolescent sexual assault and revictimization; media’s influence on teen violence and victimization

Index victims: behavior problems, 109; race effect of, 74n1; registration support and race of, 72; social economic status (SES) of defendant and, 74n2 violence: exclusionary violence, 98, 99; interracial domestic violence perceptions, 64–65; levels of, 90; metal health impact of, 228; prevalence rates, 23, 27, 28; protective factors, 29; sexual violence, 222; sibling violence, 232; teen dating violence, 223, 250, 251; trajectory of, for chronic groups, 26; trajectory of, for early desisters, 26; use of by gender, 225. See also media’s influence on teen violence and victimization; schoolyard violence; teen relationship violence (TRV) violence in emerging adulthood: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), 26–29; prevalence rates reduction of, 23; sources of violence in the late teens and early 20s, 29–30; theoretical explanations for risk and protective influences on violence, 30–33; violence in the late teens to mid-20s, 24–26; conclusion, 33 violent behavior: developmental course of, 24–25; trajectory for, 25–26

285 Walkerdine, V., 88 Walsh, M., 169 Wareham, S., 169 Wave I of Add Health, 28 Wave III of Add Health, 26, 29 Wayman, J. C., 224, 233 West, C., 224 Whelan, J. J., 225, 226 White, J., 49 whole school approach, 127, 129 Wiley, T. R. A., 57, 69, 70 Williams, T., 11, 12 Willis, C. E., 69, 72 Wilson, Genarlow, 57–58, 64 Wilson, M., 33 Wilson v. State of Georgia, 65 Winfrey, Oprah, 58 Wishnietsky, D., 164 Wong, Y., 8 workplace sexual harassment, 156–157 Worling, J. R╃., 196 Wright, J., 198 Yang, Y. W., 11 Young, E., 156 Younger, B., 40 Youth Risk Survey, 222 zero-tolerance policies, 92, 94, 96, 117

The Psychology of Teen V↜iolence and V↜ictimization

The Psychology of Teen V↜iolence and V↜渀屮ictimization Volume 2: Prevention Strategies for Families and Schools Michele A. Paludi, Editor Foreword by Lisa Krenkel

AN IMPRINT OF ABC-CLIO, LLC Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England

Copyright 2011 by Michele A. Paludi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The psychology of teen violence and victimization / Michele A. Paludi, editor ; foreword by Lisa Krenkel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-39375-4 (hardback: acid-free paper) – ISBN 978-0-313-39376-1 (ebk) 1. Children and violence. 2. Violence in children. 3. Youth–Crimes against. I. Paludi, Michele Antoinette. HQ784. V55P79 2011 303.60835–dc23â•…2011033276 ISBN: 978-0-313-39375-4 EISBN: 978-0-313-39376-1 15 14 13 12 11╇ 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

There can be no better measure of our governance than the way we treat our children, and no greater failing on our part than to allow them to be subjected to violence, abuse, or exploitation. —Jessica Lange It is my hope that these volumes of The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization will help parents, educators, activists, and legislators continue to advocate for and protect the rights of children and adolescents. —Michele A. Paludi

Contents

Foreword by Lisa Krenkel

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction by Michele A. Paludi

xiii

Part I. Impact of Teen Violence on Adolescents, Family, and Peers Chapter One:

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents James Crosby

3

Chapter Two:

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence Beth M. Housekamp, Marjorie Graham-Howard, Bethany Ashby, and Alice Fok-Trela

17

Chapter Three:

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games Craig A. Anderson and Sara Prot

41

Chapter Four:

The Role of Victimization Experiences in Adolescent Girls and Young Women’s Aggression in Dating Relationships Katie M. Edwards, Christina M. Dardis, and Christine A. Gidycz

71

Part II. Educational Responses to Teen Violence Chapter Five:

Educating Teens to Discriminate Abusive from Nonabusive Situations Imelda N. Bratton, Christopher P. Roseman, and William E. Schweinle

89

viii Contents

Chapter Six:

Young People’s Representations of Bullying Causes Robert L. Thornberg

Chapter Seven:

Desensitization to Media Violence Kostas A. Fanti and Marios N. Avraamides

Chapter Eight:

What We Do Matters: Making Shelter When Teachers Abuse Teens Billie Wright Dziech

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Part III. Community Responses to Teen Violence Chapter Nine:

Chapter Ten:

Community Interventions: Providing Support for€Adolescent Victims of Violence Roseanne L. Flores Adolescents and Firearms Deanna L. Wilkinson, Ashley Hicks, and Shelly Bloom

Chapter Eleven: Delinquency and Violent Behavior in Girls: Prominent Risks and Promising Interventions Ann Booker Loper, Emily B. Nichols, and Caitlin M. Novero

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Chapter Twelve: Broadening the Frame of Violence Prevention through the Promotion of Youth Community Engagement 221 Jessica J. Collura, Brian D. Christens, and Shepherd€Zeldin Chapter Thirteen: Abusive Adolescent Boys in Adulthood William E. Schweinle

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Index

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Foreword Lisa Krenkel

The solution of adult problems tomorrow depends in large measure upon the way our children grow up today. There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing that, when we save children, we save ourselves. Margaret Mead

The subject of teen violence in today’s society is both volatile and controversial. Teenagers are the victims of violence, and the perpetrators are increasingly not only adults but also teens’ own peers. As an attorney, I have seen the end result of this disturbing trend: a juvenile justice system that is overburdened, underfunded, outdated, and ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught of cases involving teenagers. Teenage victims are not often afforded the same resources as adult victims of physical abuse and sexual violence, and even when they are, the resources are designed to assist adult victims and are not tailored to the unique psychology of teens, who are often marginalized in our society. Ultimately this results in a resistance to treatment and assistance that can have life-threatening or lifelong consequences. The statistics are staggering, and the solution is evasive. The violence is increasingly more violent in degree, and the age of the offender is younger and younger. Technology has quickly outpaced society’s ability to codify many crimes such as sexting and child pornography. Sexual violence in schools and on school buses, bullying, and Internet crimes of harassment, humiliation, and intimidation are increasingly unmonitored, with devastating results. Is the answer merely to treat these juvenile offenders as adults and absorb them into the adult criminal justice system? Should the adult laws of criminal intent and capacity be applied to teen offenders? Will adult concepts of punishment serve the same purpose when applied to

x Foreword

teenagers? Can we help the teen victims in the same way that we try to help adult victims of violent crime? In these two volumes, Dr. Paludi and her colleagues seek to examine the roots and causes of teen violence by exploring society’s changing attitudes toward sex, gender, and violence and teenagers’ precarious status within this paradigm. Dr. Paludi has dedicated her life to helping women and children. She is an educator, author, and expert witness and a psychological theoretician. In these volumes, she challenges us all to explore the difficult issues that affect children, specifically teenagers, in a time of technological advancement that is marked by social inequality and the marginalization of teenagers, who can neither defend nor empower themselves. As a litigator, I see the aftermath of the violence, its end result. Dr. Paludi and contributing authors explore the etiology of this violence as it manifests itself in an effort to change the pattern of violence and victimization that has besieged our nation’s youths.

Acknowledgments

I have had the honor of knowing and working with individuals and organizations who have advocated for adolescents’ rights, especially with respect to violence and victimization. I would like to acknowledge their work and the impact they have had in protecting our children and teens: The American Association of University Women Business and Professional Women’s Club of Schenectady, New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment Florence L. Denmark Susan Klein Lisa Krenkel Donna Linder and Child Find of America Paula K. Lundberg-Love Jennifer L. Martin Kevin L. Nadal Bernice Sandler Nan Stein Susan Strauss Brittany Tarabour United States Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse in Higher Education Women’s Studies Program, Northeastern University

I also appreciate the caring and support of my sisters Rosalie Paludi and Lucille Paludi during the writing and editing of these volumes.

xii Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Debbie Carvalko and her colleagues at Praeger for knowing how much writing and editing books means to me. As Toni Morrison is quoted as saying, “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Debbie knows this about me!

Introduction Michele A. Paludi

Adolescents and Hate Crimes Hate crimes are the scariest thing in the world because these people really believe what they’re doing is right. Cher

During the writing of The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization, the following incidents received national attention: March 2010: Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince committed suicide following bullying, verbal harassment, and physical abuse from peers at school. May 2010: Cactus Grill Restaurant in Leawood, Kansas, was sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for sexually harassing an 18-year-old woman, including unwanted touching, sexual advances, and requests for sex. July 2010: Cory Miller, a 16-year-old teen from Havana, Illinois, was attacked by bullies for the third time in two years. Cory was born with cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair. The bullies had taunted and threatened him, violently kicked and beat him, spit on him, and broke his wheelchair and glasses. They left him lying in dirt. August 2010: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that Arkansas, Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri were the five states with the highest percentages of girls being raped. September 2010: Marco Gonzalez, a 15-year-old boy in Georgia, was abducted by individuals who stole his family car with him inside of it. October 2010: Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after learning that his roommate and classmate had used a webcam to secretly broadcast Tyler’s sexual relationship with another man.

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October 2010: Four teenagers in Staten Island, New York, were arrested for bullying a Muslim classmate, Kristian, for more than a year, which included spitting in his face, punching him in the groin, and calling him a terrorist. October 2010: Yale University fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon paraded through the university campus shouting sexually offensive slogans against women, including “No Means Yes; Yes Means Anal.”

Much violence against adolescents and committed by adolescents is a result of hate crimes (McConnell & Swain, 2000; Steinberg, Brooks, & Remtulla, 2003), as illustrated by the incidents listed above. A hate crime is a crime that in whole or in part is motivated by the offender’s bias toward the victim’s status. Hate crimes are intended to hurt and intimidate individuals because they are perceived to be different with respect to their sex, religion, race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or disability (Paludi, Ellens, & Paludi, 2010). While hate crimes are assaults against an individual, they are also assaults against everyone who shares the victim’s status (e.g., Muslims, individuals with disabilities, African Americans, lesbians, gay males, females). Legislation lists specific crimes that are identifiable as a hate crime, including murder; manslaughter; robbery; aggravated assault; burglary; motor vehicle theft; arson; forced and nonforced sex offenses; intimidation; destruction, damage, or vandalism of property; and other crimes involving injury to any person or property. When the behavior does not fall into one of the listed criminal categories identified above, hate offenses are referred to as bias-motivated incidents. These incidents may include cases of verbal slurs and may be precursors to more serious hate crimes (Paludi et al., 2010). Thus, violence against adolescents (as well as adults) exists along a continuum, from incivility and microaggressions to hate crimes, including assault and murder (Paludi, 2010; see also chapters 1 and 5, volume 1, and chapter 10, volume 2, of this book set).

A Closer Look at Gender-Based Hate Crimes Gender-based hate crimes are the most prevalent type of hate crimes committed and experienced by teens. Gendered violence, or gender-based violence, has been defined as follows: “any act that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (United Nations, 1995). This definition includes rape, stalking, intimate partner violence, and child sexual abuse. The terminology “gendered violence” is used, as highlighted

Introduction

by Russo and Pirlott (2006, p. 181), “because such violence is shaped by gender roles and status in society. . . . A complex mix of gender-related cultural values, beliefs, norms, and social institutions implicitly and even explicitly have supported intimate partner violence and provided little recourse for its victims.” Hate crimes against lesbians, gay men, and transgender individuals is gendered. Unlike other forms of hate crimes, however, gender-based hate crimes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youths are viewed as the most socially acceptable type of violence by adolescents (see chapter 1, volume 1, of this book set). Boys and men commit most of the violent crimes against gay males and lesbians (National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 2009). The majority of murders of transgender individuals are perpetrated by nontransgender men; most victims are transgender women. Such violence has its roots in gender nonconformity (Schilt & Westbrook, 2009). The violence is fueled by anger as well as fear about gender nonconformity and feeling deceived by the individual’s gender presentation (Schilt & Westbrook, 2009). Adolescent girls are exposed to more violence than are adolescent boys (Flores, 2006; see also chapter 11, volume 2, of this book set). The National Survey on Drug Use and Health of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2010) reported that from their sample of 33,091 girls aged 12 to 17, 18.6% got in a serious fight at school or work, 14.1% participated in a group-against-group fight, and 5.7% were violent toward others with an intent to hurt them. With respect to adolescent boys, this research found that 25.4% got into a serious fight at school or work, 17% participated in a group-against-group fight, and 9.3% attacked another person with the intent to harm that person. Girls (and women) are most likely to be murdered by a romantic partner or ex-partner (Lundberg-Love & Wilkerson, 2006; McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008; Tan & Gregor, 2006). Ten percent of teen girls report that they have experienced physical violence in their own relationships, including hitting, shoving, throwing of objects, grabbing, and other physical force used with the intention to injure, harm, or kill another individual (McHugh et al., 2008; Ulloa, Castaneda, & Hokoda, 2010; see also chapter 2, volume 1, and chapter 4, volume 2, of this book set). A comparison of intimate partner violence rates in adolescents and adults indicates that teen girls are at a higher risk of intimate partner abuse (Silverman, Raj, Mucci, & Hathaway, 2001; see also chapter 11, volume 1, of this book set). In addition, girls and women are more likely than males to experience stalking and sexual assault (see chapter 12, volume 1, of this book set). In fact, adolescent girls aged 16 to 19 are almost four times more likely

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than the general population to be victims of rape, with the majority of these girls experiencing date rape, not stranger rape (Gerber & Cherneski, 2006; Maxwell, Robinson, & Post, 2003). Approximately 71% of school-aged females report being bullied (Chisolm, 2010; Martin, 2010; Paludi, 2010; see also chapter 6, volume 1, and chapter 6, volume 2, of this book set). Eighty percent of adolescents have been sexually harassed by a peer, including name calling, graffiti written about them in school bathrooms, offensive drawings disseminated about them, unwanted touching, cyberbullying, sexual rumors, and pressure for sex (see chapter 8, volume 1, and chapter 8, volume 2, of this book set). As another example of gendered violence, approximately 30% of adolescent girls are victims of child sexual abuse (Lundberg-Love & Marmion, 2006; see also chapters 9 and 10, volume 1, of this book set).

Placing Gendered Violence into an Adolescent Developmental Context: Power Issues American boys must be protected from a culture of violence that exploits their worst tendencies by reinforcing and amplifying the atavistic values of the masculine mystique. Our country was not created so that future generations could maximize profit at any cost. It was created with humanistic, egalitarian, altruistic goals. We must put our enormous resources and talents to the task of creating a children’s culture that is consistent with these goals. Myriam Miedzian

In the life cycle, adolescence is a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood (Newman & Newman, 2008). According to theories of adolescent development, one of the most important developmental tasks of adolescence is establishing an identity (Erikson, 1963). During adolescence, individuals begin to integrate the opinions of influential others (e.g., parents, teachers, music idols, actors) into their own likes and dislikes. The eventual outcome is people who have a clear sense of their values and beliefs, occupational goals, and relationship expectations. This normative developmental task can be disrupted by individuals manipulating the adolescents (Kroger, 2000). Adolescents are establishing intimacy and self-esteem during this stage as well (Chisholm, 2010). During adolescence, girls and boys want to be seen as popular with their peer group (Hartup & Stevens, 1999). The functions of a peer group for teens include social support, emotional intimacy, fun, and understanding. Adolescents are more likely to behave in ways that are gender-role stereotypic when with their peer group than when alone (Doyle & Paludi, 1998). Because of the importance placed on

Introduction

the peer group, behavior that is gender-role stereotypic is intensified during adolescence in order for teens to fit in with their peers. Among boys, the pressure to be tough is intensified during adolescence; teen boys are likely to engage in fights with their peers. They do so in order to gain status and popularity among other teens in their peer group (American Association of University Women, 2001). Teen boys are likely to participate in a crowd, that is, a large group of boys recognized by a few characteristics, such as involvement in athletics (Way & Pahl, 1999). In addition, Paludi, Martin, and Paludi (2007) and Giladi (2005) noted that boys act out of extreme competitiveness or fear that they will lose their position of power. Since they don’t want to be viewed as less masculine or weak by their male peers, they engage in sexual victimization of girls. Thus, girls are the objects of the game to impress other boys. De-individuation is common among adolescent boys; they discontinue self-evaluation and instead adopt group norms and attitudes. Deindividuation causes group members to behave more aggressively than they would as individuals (Paludi, 2010). In addition, Doyle and Paludi (1998) and DeSouza (2004) noted that the male-as-aggressor theme is so central to many adolescent boys’ selfconcept that it spills over to their relationships with girls. The California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (2002) reported that among 1,600 juvenile sexual assault offenders, 23.5% perceived sex as a way to feel power and control, 9.4% perceived sex as a way to dissipate anger, and 8.4% perceived sex as a way to punish girls. In addition, both abusers and victims attribute the responsibility for violent dating behavior to victims; for example, the girl provoked the violence because of her personality, the girl had a need for affection, or the girl was influenced by her peer group (Lavoie, Hebert, Tremblay, Vitaro, & McDuff, 2002). Equally disconcerting is research by Jackson, Cram, and Seymour (2000) indicating that 77% of girls and 67% of boys in high school endorse sexual coercion, including unwanted genital contact and sexual intercourse.

Hate Crimes, Violence, and Stereotypic Beliefs During adolescence, teens rely on stereotypes about individuals and, in the case of hate crimes, act on these stereotypes (Morrison, Morrison, Pope, & Zumbo, 1999; Otis & Loeffler, 2006). Stereotypes refer to individuals’ cognitions that typically do not correspond with reality (Fiske & Lee, 2008). Stereotypes occur when individuals are classified by others as having something in common because they are members of a particular

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group or category or are perceived to be a member of this group (e.g., gay men, Latinos, disabled, female). Social science research has identified that stereotypes have the following characteristics (Fiske, 1993): Groups that are targeted for stereotypes are easily identified and relatively powerless. This misperception is difficult to modify even though individuals who hold stereotypes have interacted with individuals of the group who disconfirm the stereotypes. â•… There is little agreement between the composite picture of the group and the actual characteristics of that group. This is the product of a bias in individuals’ information-processing mechanisms.

Race/color stereotyping is a psychological process that describes individuals’ structured set of beliefs about the personal attributes of individuals because of their actual or perceived race or because it is believed that this individual has a particular racial background (Feinberg, 2000). Gender stereotyping is a psychological process describing individuals’ structured set of beliefs about the personal attributes of men and women (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008). Sexual orientation stereotyping is a psychological process describing individuals’ structured set of beliefs about personal attributes of others because of their perceived or acknowledged sexual orientation (Herek & Garnets, 2007). Psychologists have identified an emotional component to stereotypic cognitions: prejudice as well as a behavioral component to individuals’ cognitions involving discrimination, harassment, and violence, including hate crimes (Fiske, 1993). Individuals’ statements and nonverbal gestures toward women and men and individuals’ race/color and sexual orientation provide insight into their structured set of beliefs about individuals of different sexes, races, and sexual orientations (Reskin, 2000). Negative attitudes and feelings about individuals’ sex, race, and sexual orientation develop as a consequence of cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural processes (Paludi et al., 2010). The cognitive aspect refers to placing individuals in categories that activate gender stereotypes, race stereotypes, and sexual orientation stereotypes. The motivational aspect refers to the need for individual power, control, and status. The sociocultural aspect refers to viewing as normal negative attitudes and behavior toward individuals because of their sex, race, or sexual orientation (Fiske & Lee, 2008). Characteristics such as English fluency, skin color, and accents are salient features that individuals use to categorize a person. Consequently, individuals activate stereotypical traits about these characteristics (Wigboldus,

Introduction

Dijksterhuis, & vanKnippenberg, 2003). Stereotypes are not labels but instead are assumptions about personality traits and behaviors that people in the labeled categories are thought to possess (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008). Stereotypes have negative effects; the categorization process causes people to emphasize differences between groups and similarities within groups. Thus, for example, Latinos are seen as radically different from White individuals (Fiske & Lee, 2008).

Out-Group Homogeneity Bias Related to stereotyping is the out-group homogeneity bias (Judd, Park, Yzerbyt, Gordijn, & Muller, 2005; Mulvey, Hitt, & Killen, 2010). This is a process by which individuals view groups in which they are not a part (e.g., a sexual orientation or race different from their own) as more homogeneous than their own group (e.g., their own sexual orientation or race). Thus, stereotypes concerning members of out-groups are stronger than those of in-group members. According to Judd (cited in DeAngelis, 2001, p. 3), “people are more willing to ignore individuating information about members of out-groups, lumping them all into a single disliked category.” In actuality, focusing on differences among protected categories ignores ingroup variability. The overemphasis on differences provides confirmation of the stereotype that religions are opposite and that one’s own beliefs are normative while others are a deviation from the norm (Judd et al., 2005). Adolescents hold stereotypes about victims, for example, victims of sexual assault (Maxwell et al., 2003). Adolescents typically blame the victim for the assault, including the style of dress and walking in certain neighborhoods. Kershner (1996) noted that most students aged 14 to 19 stated that forced sexual intercourse is acceptable under certain circumstances. Marciniak (1998) found that gender role attitudes, attitudes, and cognitive development are important factors in sexual aggression and in accepting rape myths. The continuation of stereotyping in adolescence is explained by the role that stereotyping plays in perpetuating group identity, group norms, and exclusion (Killen, Sinno, & Margie, 2007).

Gendered Violence in the Media We must also be careful to avoid ingesting toxins in the form of violent TV programs, video games, movies, magazines, and books. When we watch that kind of violence, we water our own negative seeds, or tendencies, and eventually we will think and act out of those seeds. Thich Nhat Hanh

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Violence against adolescents has been explained by adhering to stereotypes about unequal power relations and patriarchal values. As Russo and Pirlott (2006, p. 181) summarized with respect to gender-based violence, “gender roles and expectations, male entitlement, sexual objectification, and discrepancies in power and status have legitimized, rendered invisible, sexualized, and helped to perpetuate violence against women.” In addition, factors embedded in the adolescent culture that influence as well as support violence include alcohol and drug use, religious influences, devaluation of subordinated groups, the sexualization of violence, and video games (Maxwell et al., 2003; see also chapter 3, volume 2, of this book set). A major catalyst for the incidence of hate crimes, including gender-based hate crimes and other forms of violence in the United States, is the frequency with which violence is portrayed in media, especially media consumed by adolescents (see chapter 3, volume 1, of this book set). The Parents Television Council (2003) noted that in 2002 compared to 1998, violence on television was 41% more frequent during the 8:00 p.m. time slot and 134% more frequent during the 9:00 p.m. time slot. Kaufman (2004) noted that in January 2004, three continuous hours of violent television programs were aired on one station on Thursday evenings: Cold Case, CSI, and Without a Trace. Kaufman (2004, p. 2) cited research from the National Cable Television Association’s National Television Violence Study indicating that “across the three years of this study, a steady 60% of TV programs contain violence . . . [and] much of the violence is glamorized, sanitized, and trivialized” (p. 2). Beresin (2010) reported that television programs offer 812 violent acts per hour, with children’s cartoons displaying approximately 20 violent acts hourly. Violence in music videos has been observed in between 56% and 76% of the videos and include hitting, shootings, stabbings, punching, and kicking (Baxter, De Reimer, Landini, Leslie, & Singletary, 1985; Sherman & Dominick, 1986; Greeson & Williams, 1986). The most violent music videos are rap, followed by rock. These videos also included alcohol use and smoking as part of the violence. Beresin (2010) noted that by the time children are 18 years old, they will have watched 28 hours of television per week, viewed 200,000 acts of violence in the television programs, and seen more than 16,000 murders in these shows. Seventy-five percent of children and teens watch music videos, with 60% of them indicating that they view these videos pretty much or a lot (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007; van den Bulck & Beullens, 2005). Klein and colleagues (1993) and the Council on Communications

Introduction

and Media (2009) reported that teens aged 14 to 16 years old listen to music an average of 40 hours per week. In violence portrayed in the media, girls and women are often portrayed as weak, objectified, submissive, and vulnerable (LaTouche, 2007). Pipher (1994) concluded that adolescent girls suffer psychologically from negative body image, lowered self-esteem, and achievement conflicts, all as a consequence of the culture’s messages about young women’s bodies needing to be protected, made more beautiful, and preserved. These messages are part of rock music videos, song lyrics, and television programs. In contrast, the media portrays boys and men as aggressive and powerful. Violence is thus used to reinforce gender norms. Exposure to violence in media increases aggressive thoughts and a permanent hostility toward girls and women (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Anderson, Carnagey, & Eubanks, 2003). Bretthauer, Zimmerman, and Banning (2007) noted that a review of “The Hot 100” list generated by Billboard Chart Research Services indicated that violence, especially violence against women, was prominent in music lyrics. They identified six themes in their review: men and power, sexual violence, objectification of women, sex as a main priority for men, women defined in terms of their relationships with men, and women not valuing themselves. Armstrong (2001) found that gangsta rap music is identified with violent and misogynist lyric portrayals, including corporal punishment for women, hitting women with shoes, physically attacking women who refuse sex, rape, and murder. According to Armstrong (2001, p. 8), “the hegemonic dimension of gangsta rap music’s narratives is immediate evidence of a rape culture. . . . In fact, gangsta rap music is a ‘celebration’ of rape culture and its most powerful contemporary voice.” Furthermore, exposure to violence in rock music videos has been linked to increased beliefs in stereotypes about sexuality, attractiveness, and violence. Adolescent boys who have been exposed to rock music videos have stated that they would engage in violence against women; boys who were not exposed to music videos did not endorse this view (Kaestle, Halpern, & Brown, 2007; Johnson, Adams, Ashburn, & Reed, 1995). Research by Malamuth and Check (1981) noted that when men who had never raped were exposed to depictions of sexual assault, they reported a heightened sexual arousal from the scenes and an increase in their rape fantasies. Thus, research suggests that most men find violence a stimulant to heighten or arouse their sexual feelings. Men find sexuality related at some level to an expression of aggression, and in turn aggression heightens their sexual fantasies or actual sexual behaviors (Doyle & Paludi, 1998).

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Impact of Violence on Adolescents The impact of violence has significant effects on adolescents. For example, teens (and children) who are exposed to violence on television will be provided with violent heroes to imitate and taught that violence is the way to resolve conflict with individuals, especially with dating partners (Beresin, 2010; Ward, 2002). Most of these adolescents have televisions in their own rooms, so they watch programs without parental supervision and editing (Beresin, 2010). Adolescents also use headphones, so their parents are not able to hear the lyrics to the music to which their teens are listening. Bretthauer, Zimmerman, and Banning (2007) noted that music lyrics send relationship messages to listeners, who are predominantly adolescents. St. Lawrence and Joyner (1991) reported that adolescents’ preference for heavy metal music is a significant marker for substance abuse, suicide risk, alienation, and risk-taking behaviors during adolescence (e.g., failure to use contraceptives, failure to use a seatbelt). Furthermore, according to Kaufman (2004, p. 3), “the hero of TV shows never gets in trouble for his/her violent actions. The hero is always ‘justified’ in one way or another when committing violent acts. . . . Television will never show a main character lose an arm, leg or get killed on screen. In reality, with as much gunplay that appears on TV, main characters should also get shot. . . . The hero can really be as violent as he/she wants.” Comstock and Paik (1991) identified four dimensions related to the way that violence is portrayed on television and that may heighten the likelihood of the influence of television: efficacy, normativeness, pertinence, and susceptibility. For example: Violence is justified. The perpetrator is similar to the viewer. Violence is portrayed as real events, not events simulated for a television drama. Violent acts leave the viewer in a state of unresolved excitement.

Research suggests a positive correlation between television violence and aggressive behavior (see chapter 7, volume 2, of this book set). Eron and Huesmann (1986) reported that there is a sensitive period between 8 and 12 years of age during which children are particularly susceptible to the impact of violence portrayed in the media. In addition, boys are more likely than girls to identify with a violent character and to subsequently model aggressive behavior.

Introduction

With respect to the impact of real-life violence on adolescents, including rape, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, and bullying, several reports have documented the high cost of various forms of violence within three major perspectives: (1) psychological health, (2) physiological, and (3) education/work (e.g., Barron & Hebl, 2010; Contrada et al., 2000; Dansky & Kilpatrick, 1997; Katz, Joiner, & Kwon, 2002). Responses by adolescents to violence include headaches, sleep disturbances, disordered eating, gastrointestinal disorders, nausea, crying spells, scars, bruising, broken bones, absenteeism from school, decreased morale, decreased school satisfaction, performance decrements, damage to interpersonal relationships at school, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a consequence of violence. Symptoms of PTSD include anxiety, physiological arousal, irritability, avoidance/denial, intrusion, repetitive nightmares, impaired concentration and memory, and acting-out behaviors. Immediately after the violent episode, individuals experience a sense of disbelief, shock, and psychological and physical numbing. A few days after the incident, individuals experience three different types of consequences: 1. Reexperiencing consequences (e.g., dreaming, flashbacks). 2. Withdrawal consequences (e.g., social withdrawal, absenteeism). 3. Other consequences (e.g., irritability, sleep disturbances, anger, exaggerated startle responses) (Avina & O’Donohue, 2002; see also chapters 1 and 2, volume 2, of this book set).

In addition, adolescents think about violence to themselves through self-injury (e.g., cutting) as well as suicide (see chapter 3, volume 1, of this book set). Furthermore, adolescents who have not had anyone intervene on their behalf to stop the violence learn to keep silent about future abuse because they believe that no one will ever help them (Paludi, 2010).

Present Volumes Violence against adolescents has been recognized as a major public health and human rights issue that requires a coordinated response from parents, teachers, counselors, and providers (e.g., health care, mental health, rape crisis centers) in the teen’s community (chapter 7, volume 1, and chapters 5, 9, and 12, volume 2). I wanted to edit these two volumes to highlight the following for parents, educators, guidance counselors, and adolescents themselves: 1. Implications of adolescence as a life stage for individuals learning to be violent and to accept violence.

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2. Understanding the relationship among violence, powerlessness, and lack of access to resources with respect to adolescent victims of violence. 3. Types of violence common to adolescence (e.g., bullying, harassment, intimate partner violence, gang violence, rape). 4. Understanding the link between violence during adolescence and gender roles and gender-related life circumstances. 5. Strategies for prevention for parents, teachers, counselors, and case workers.

This two-volume set on the psychology of teen violence and victimization features scholarly research about individual, institutional, and societal influences on violence against adolescents and perpetrated by adolescents. Contributors discuss the impact of race on perceptions of teen sex offenders (chapter 4, volume 1); the role of adolescent victimization in women’s aggression in their relationships, violent behavior in girls, schoolyard violence, bullying, teen relationship violence, adolescent stalking, educating teens to discriminate abusive from nonabusive situations (chapter 5, volume 2); adolescents, firearms, and violent video games (chapter 3, volume 2); and teen violence prevention (chapter 13, volume 2). We take a multicultural approach to teen violence. In addition, I offer readers resources on teen violence, including organizations concerned with teen violence and victimization. My goal is that these chapters and resources stimulate additional research agendas on teen violence and victimization that make Tyler, Phoebe, Cory, Marco, Kristian, and other victims of violence central, not marginal and visible, not invisible to our research and advocacy. Marion Wright Edelman’s sentiment is expressed throughout these volumes: “If we don’t stand up for children, then we don’t stand for much.”

References American Association of University Women. (2001). Hostile hallways: The annual survey on sexual harassment in America’s schools. Washington, DC: Author. Anderson, C., & Bushman, B. (2002). The effects of media violence on society. Science, 295, 2377–2379. Anderson, C., Carnagey, N., & Eubanks, J. (2003). Exposure to violent media: The effects of songs with violent lyrics in aggressive thoughts and feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 960–971. Armstrong, E. (2001). Gangsta misogyny: A content analysis of the portrayals of violence against women in rap music, 1987–1993. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 8, 96–126. Avina, C., & O’Donohue, W. (2002). Sexual harassment and PTSD: Is sexual harassment diagnosable trauma? Journal of Traumatic Stress, 15, 69–75.

Introduction

Barron, L., & Hebl, M. (2010). Sexual orientation: A protected and unprotected class. In M. Paludi, C. Paludi, & E. DeSouza (Eds.), Praeger handbook on understanding and preventing workplace discrimination: Vol. 1. Legal, management and social science perspectives (pp. 251–273). Westport, CT: Praeger. Baxter, L., De Riemer, C., Landini, A., Leslie, L., & Singletary, M. (1985). A content analysis of music videos. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 29, 333–340. Beresin, E. (2010). The impact of media violence on children and adolescents: Opportunities for clinical interventions. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Retrieved on November 8, 2010, from http://www.aacap.org /cs/root/developmentor/the_impact_of _media_violence_on_children_and_ adolescents_opportunities_for_clinical_interventions. Bretthauer, B., Zimmerman, T., & Banning, J. (2007). A feminist analysis of popular music. Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 18, 29–51. California Coalition Against Sexual Assault. (2002). Research on rape and violence. Retrieved on November 11, 2010, from http://www.calcasa.org/stat/CAL CASA_Stat_2008.pdf. Chisholm, J. (2010). Perils in cyberspace: Current trends in cyberbullying. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families: Vol. 1. Incidence and psychological dimensions (pp. 59–88). Westport, CT: Praeger. Comstock, G., & Paik, H. (1991). Television and the American child. San Diego, CA: Academic. Contrada, R., Ashmore, R., Gary, M., Coups, E., Egeth, J., Sewell, A., Ewell, K., Goyal, T., & Chasse, V. (2000). Ethnicity-related sources of stress and their effects on well-being. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 136–139. Council on Communications and Media. (2009). Impact of music, music lyrics, and music videos on children and youth. Pediatrics, 124, 1488–1494. Dansky, B., & Kilpatrick, D. (1997). Effects of sexual harassment. In W. O’Donohue (Ed.), Sexual harassment: Theory, research and practice. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. DeAngelis, T. (2001). Understanding and preventing hate crimes. Monitor on Psychology, 32, 1–7. DeSouza, E. (2004, July). Intercultural and intracultural comparisons of bullying and sexual harassment in secondary schools. Paper presented at the Association for Gender Equity Leadership in Education, Washington, DC. Doyle, J., & Paludi, M. (1998). Sex and gender: The human experience. New York: McGraw-Hill. Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Eron, L. D., & Huesmann, L. R. (1986). The role of television in the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior. In D. Olweus, J. Block, & M. RadkeYarrow (Eds.), The development of antisocial and prosocial behavior: Research, theories and issues (pp. 285–314). New York: Academic Press. Feinberg, M. (2000). Racism: Why we dislike, stereotype and hate other groups and what to do about it. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Fiske, S. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist, 48, 621–628.

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Fiske, S., & Lee, T. (2008). Stereotypes and prejudice create workplace discrimination. In A. Brief (Ed.), Diversity at work. New York: Cambridge University Press. Flores, R. (2006). Adolescent girls speak about violence in their community. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 47–55). Boston: Blackwell. Gerber, G., & Cherneski, L. (2006). Sexual aggression toward women: Reducing the prevalence. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 35–46). Boston: Blackwell. Giladi, A. (2005, August). Sexual harassment or play? Perceptions and observations of young children’s experiences in kindergarten and early schooling in Israel. Paper presented at the Conference of the International Coalition Against Sexual Harassment, Philadelphia, PA. Greeson, L. E., & Williams, R. A. (1986, December). Social implications of music videos for youth: An analysis of the content and effects of MTV. Youth and Society, 18(2), 177–189. Hartup, W., & Stevens, N. (1999). Friendships and adaptation across the life span: Current directions. Psychological Science, 8, 76–79. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2007). Parents, children and media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Herek, G., & Garnets, L. (2007). Sexual orientation and mental health. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 3, 53–75. Jackson, S., Cram, F., & Seymour, F. (2000). Violence and sexual coercion in high school students’ dating relationships. Journal of Family Violence, 1, 23–36. Johnson, J., Adams, M., Ashburn, L., & Reed, W. (1995). Differential gender effects of exposure to rap music on African American adolescents’ acceptance of teen dating violence. Sex Roles, 33, 597–605. Judd, C., Park, B., Yzerbyt, V., Gordijn, E., & Muller, D. (2005). Attributions of intergroup bias and outgroup homogeneity to ingroup and outgroup others. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 677–704. Kaestle, C. E., Halpern, C. T., & Brown, J. (2007). Music videos, pro-wrestling, and acceptance of date rape among middle school males and females: An exploratory analysis. Journal of Adolescent Health, 40, 185–187. Katz, J., Joiner, T., & Kwon, P. (2002). Membership on a devalued social group and emotional well-being: Developing a model of personal self-esteem, collective self-esteem and group socialization. Sex Roles, 47, 419–431 Kaufman, R. (2004). Filling their minds with death: TV violence and children. Retrieved on November 8, 2010, from http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/healtheducation /violencechildren/violencechildren.html. Kershner, R. (1996). Adolescent attitudes about rape. Adolescence, 31, 29–33. Killen, M., Sinno, S., & Margie, N. (2007). Children’s experiences and judgments about group exclusion and inclusion. In R. Kail (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (pp. 173–218). New York: Elsevier. Kite, M., Deaux, K., & Haines, E. (2008). Gender stereotypes. In F. Denmark & M. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (2nd ed.). Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Klein, J., Brown, J., Childres, K., Oliveri, J., Porter, C., & Dykers, C. (1993). Adolescents’ risky behavior and mass media use. Pediatrics, 92, 24–31. Kroger, J. (2000). Identity development: Adolescence through adulthood. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. LaTouche, K. (2007). Gender representation in BET’s 106 & Park and Sucker Free on MTV: A content analysis. Thesis submitted to the College of Communication for the degree of master of science. Lavoie, F., Hebert, M., Tremblay, R., Vitaro, L., & McDuff, D. (2002). History of family dysfunction and perpetration of dating violence by adolescent boys: A longitudinal study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 30, 375–383. Lundberg-Love, P., & Marmion, S. (2006). Intimate partner violence against women: When spouses, partners or lovers attack. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lundberg-Love, P., & Wilkerson, D. (2006). Battered women. In P. LundbergLove & S. Marmion (Eds.), Intimate violence against women (pp. 31–45). Westport, CT: Praeger. Malamuth, N., & Check, J. (1981). The effects of mass media exposure on acceptance of violence against women: A field experiment. Journal of Research in Personality, 15, 436–446. Marciniak, L. (1998). Adolescent attitudes toward victim precipitation of rape. Violence and Victims, 13, 287–300. Martin, L. (2010). Bullying and peer sexual harassment: A prevention guide for students, parents and teachers. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families: Vol. 1. Incidence and psychological dimensions (pp. 89–109). Westport, CT: Praeger. Maxwell, C., Robinson, A., & Post, L. (2003). The nature and predictors of sexual victimization and offending among adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 32, 465–477. McConnell, S., & Swain, J. (2000, August). Victim-offender mediation with adolescents who commit hate crimes. Paper presented at the 108th Annual Conference of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC. McHugh, M., Livingston, N., & Frieze, I. (2008). Intimate partner violence: Perspectives on research and intervention. In F. L. Denmark & M. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (pp. 555–589). Westport, CT: Praeger. Morrison, M., Morrison, T., Pope, G., & Zumbo, B. (1999). An investigation of measures of modern and old-fashioned sexism. Social Indicators Research, 48, 39–50. Mulvey, K., Hitti, A. & Killen, M. (2010). The development of stereotyping and exclusion. Cognitive Science, 1, 597–606. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. (2009). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer domestic violence in the United States in 2008. Retrieved on November 9, 2011, from http://www.avp.org/documents/2008NCAVPLGBTQ DVReportFINAL.pdf. Newman, B., & Newman, P. (2008). Development through life: A psychosocial approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

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Otis, M., & Loeffler, D. (2006). Changing youths’ attitudes toward difference: A community-based model that works. Social Work with Groups, 28, 41–64. Paludi, M. (2010, October). The continuum of campus violence: Applying “Broken Windows Theory” to prevent and deal with campus violence. U.S. Department of Education National Meeting on Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention in Higher Education, National Harbor, MD. Paludi, M., Ellens, H., & Paludi, C. (2010). Religious discrimination. In M. Paludi, C. Paludi, & E. DeSouza (Eds.), Praeger handbook on understanding and preventing workplace discrimination: Vol. 1. Legal, management and social science perspectives (pp. 157–182). Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., Martin, J., & Paludi, C. (2007). Sexual harassment: The hidden gender equity problem. In S. Klein (Ed.), Handbook for achieving gender equity through education (2nd ed., pp. 215–229). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Parents Television Council. (2003). TV bloodbath: Violence on prime time broadcast TV. Retrieved on November 11, 2010, from http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/reports/stateindustryviolence/main.asp. Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York: Ballantine. Reskin, B. (2000). The proximate causes of employment discrimination. Contemporary Sociology, 29, 319–328. Russo, N. F., & Pirlott, A. (2006). Gender-based violence: Concepts, methods, and findings. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 178–205). Boston: Blackwell. Schilt, K., & Westbrook, L. (2009). Doing gender, doing heteronormativity: Gender normals, transgender people, and the social maintenance of heterosexuality. Gender and Society 23(4), 440–464. Sherman, B., & Dominick, J. (1986). Violence and sex in music videos: TV and rock ’n’ roll. Journal of Communication, 36, 79–93. Silverman, J. G., Raj, A., Mucci, L. A., & Hathaway, J. E. (2001). Dating violence against adolescent girls and associated substance use, unhealthy weight control, sexual risk behavior, pregnancy, and suicidality. Journal of the American Medical Association, 286, 372–379. St. Lawrence, J. S., & Joyner, D. J. (1991). The effects of sexually violent rock music on males’ acceptance of violence against women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 15, 49–63. Steinberg, A., Brooks, J., & Remtulla, T. (2003). Youth hate crimes: Identification, prevention and intervention. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 878–989. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2010). Factors affecting violent behavior in teen girls. Retrieved on November 14, 2010, from http://www.teendrugabuse.org/mental-health/factors-affection-violentbehavior-in-teen-girls/. Tan, J., & Gregor, K. (2006). Violence against pregnant women in northwestern Ontario. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 320–338). Boston: Blackwell.

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Ulloa, E., Castaneda, D., & Hokoda, A. (2010). Teen relationship violence. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families: Vol. 1. Incidence and psychological dimensions (pp. 111–135). Westport, CT: Praeger. United Nations. (1995). Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 4–5 September, 1995. New York: United Nations. van den Bulck, J., & Beullens, K. (2005). Television and music video exposure and adolescent alcohol use while going out. Alcohol, 40, 249–253. Ward, R. (2002). Fan violence: Social problem or moral panic? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7, 453–475. Way, N., & Pahl, K. (1999). Friendship patterns among urban adolescent boys: A qualitative account. In M. Kopala & L. Suziki (Eds.), Using qualitative methods in psychology (pp. 145–161). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wigboldus, D., Dijksterhuis, A., & vanKnippenberg, A. (2003). When stereotypes get in the way: Stereotypes obstruct stereotype-inconsistent trait inferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 470–484.

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PART I

Impact of Teen V↜iolence on Adolescents, Family, and Peers

CHAPTER ONE

Peer V↜ictimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents James Crosby

Introduction In recent years, peer victimization (PV) has become an increasing societal concern. Youths,1 parents, teachers, community members, and the media have all increased dialogue on this topic, and myriad opinions have developed on its potential consequences and the appropriate methods of intervention. Of particular concern to many are the perceived outcomes of being bullied, including internalizing distress, suicidal ideation or behavior, and even school shootings. A recent cover of People magazine posed a chilling question regarding the suicide of a 15-year-old victim of bullying: “Bullied to Death?” (see Smolowe, Herbst, Weisensee, Rakowsky, & Mascia, 2010). This widely read popular media outlet mulled over concerns with which professionals and researchers grapple on a regular basis (e.g., the relation between PV and distress, as well as the criminalization of bullying due to its perceived negative outcomes). Corresponding to growing concerns from adults and youths, the extant literature on PV is expanding at an unprecedented rate. Of particular interest are findings (e.g., Smith, Schneider, Smith, & Ananiadou, 2004) that seem to indicate somewhat less than satisfactory results from many schoolwide antibullying interventions. These data, coupled with the continuing

The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization

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empirical associations of PV and negative outcomes (e.g., internalized distress; see Davidson & Demaray, 2007), indicate a significant need for ongoing research and development in understanding the impact of bullying on victims, as well as for improved methods for reducing its incidence and consequences. The focus of this chapter is to examine PV as a traumatic experience. Some adults (and youths) see PV as a normative experience. Further, these persons may be less likely to intervene if they perceive the behaviors of bullies as normative or relatively harmless. While the literature supports the hypothesis that PV can be traumatic for some youths, the data are even more compelling in light of the need for improvement in interventions and outcomes for individual victims.

A Brief Review of Peer Victimization Although an increase in popular media coverage seems recent, PV has received attention in the professional literature for nearly four decades. As is noted in most PV literature reviews, much of the early interest and works were stimulated by Dan Olweus. In his book Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys, Olweus (1978) reviewed the developmental history of bullying terminology as it relates to PV, citing the work of ethologist Konrad Lorenz on mobbing in animal packs and military populations. (The term “mobbing,” based on the term “mob . . . [defined as] a group of individuals joined in some kind of activity” [Olweus, 1978, p. 2], remains in usage in some circles when discussing bullying behaviors, although more so in the United Kingdom and other areas of Europe than in North America.) During the 1970s, Olweus extended these ideas of group-mobbing to research on individuals who were exposed to systematic aggression over time, initiating the first systematic study of PV. The results of this study were ultimately published in a Swedish text (Olweus, 1973; later published in English as Olweus, 1978). At that time (1973), there was scarcely any published research on this topic. Further, no clear definition of PV had been established in the (limited) extant literature. If PV research, assessment, and intervention were to advance, an operational definition was imperative.

Defining Peer Victimization A victim of bullying is defined as someone who is subjected to intentionally negative acts by a more powerful individual repeatedly over time. Each of the components in the aforementioned definition are based on

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents

Olweus’s (1978) definition and are pervasively used in studies of PV across disciplines and locales. Further, PV may manifest in different forms, including physical (e.g., hitting, kicking), verbal (e.g., threats, name calling), relational (e.g., social exclusion), and cyberbullying (i.e., manifestations of verbal or relational PV via electronic means, such as text messaging or Web-based social networks). Further, Arsenault, Bowes, and Shakoor (2010) succinctly reviewed three groups who may be involved in bullying. First, bullies are the perpetrators of the negative acts, who may have a behavioral profile similar to children with general conduct problems. Second, victims are those in receipt of the negative acts. Finally, bullyvictims represent a small group of individuals who could be classified as both bully and victim. Additionally, it should be noted that bullying and PV are not synonymous terms.2 Specifically, “bullying” refers to perpetrators’ actions. “Peer victimization” (PV) refers to the experiences of victims of bullying and is the focus of this chapter.

Trauma in Children As noted by Weaver (2000), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was originally an explanation for a range of symptoms associated with a catastrophic or traumatic event. PTSD (APA, 2000) is an anxiety disorder composed of symptoms in three main categories: (a) reexperiencing a traumatic event, (b) increased physiological arousal, and (c) avoidance of stimuli that are associated with the trauma or stressor. An important factor that distinguishes PTSD from other anxiety disorders is its association with a traumatic stressor. As noted by Fairbank, Putnam, and Harris (2007), attempting to estimate the prevalence of PTSD in children is an arduous task. For example, child maltreatment data are often not collected due to mandatory reporting laws. In one large-scale survey of youth violence (Finkelhor, Ormrod, Turner, & Hamby, 2005), experiences of violence were pervasive. Specifically, more than half of the respondents had experienced some type of violent assault (not including bullying experiences) during the previous year. More than 20% of the sample had experienced physical bullying in the previous year. Further, more than 20% had experienced teasing or emotional bullying during the same period. Although not all such experiences will lead to the presentation of post-traumatic stress symptomatology, early identification and intervention are clearly critical. There are myriad long-term sequelae associated with early life PTSD, including a greater risk for traumatic reactions to stressors later in life and continuing internalizing problems

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(see Norris & Sloan, 2007, for an excellent review of the epidemiology of trauma and PTSD). Importantly, Norris and Sloan noted that violence is the single greatest cause of PTSD and that no other objective would aid in reducing the prevalence of PTSD as much as curbing violence. Regarding exposure to a traumatic event, the American Psychiatric Association (2000) states that “the person [must have] experienced, witnessed, or [have been] confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others” (DSM-IV-TR; Criterion A1, p. 467). Further, the individual’s response to the traumatic event must have involved “intense fear, helplessness, or horror” (p. 467). Additionally, some child-specific notes are listed in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, including trauma-themed repetitive play, frightening dreams that do not necessarily have recognizable content, and trauma-specific reenactment. One of the most pressing topics related to potential revisions of the PTSD diagnostic criteria in the pending DSM-V is related to the A1 criterion: describing and defining the features of the traumatic event. While multiple concerns have been raised about Criterion A1, some may be succinctly summarized as follows: The stressor should be thought of as subjectively perceived or experienced. That is, some individuals with PTSD may not have directly experienced the stressor. Rather, the mere threat of the stressor may result in PTSD symptomatology. If such a diagnostic adjustment were made, those persons who feel that there is a genuine threat to their life or to their physical integrity qualify (at least partially) for a diagnosis of PTSD. Further, as discussed below, researchers and practitioners should examine the expected nature of the traumatic event or stressor. That is, should these events or stressors be only life threatening or physical in nature?

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Plausible Relationship? PV has been repeatedly related to internalizing distress (e.g., anxiety, social withdrawal, depression, etc.) in a variety of populations (e.g., see Crick & Bigbee, 1996; Davidson & Demaray, 2007; Grills & Ollendick, 2002; Hawker & Boulton, 2000). Additionally, Arsenault, Bowes, and Shakoor (2010) aptly weighed in on the issue of bullying and, broadly, mental health problems in youths with an excellent review of the literature. Among many other compelling findings, Arsenault and colleagues reported that both family factors (e.g., parental domestic violence) and individual characteristics (e.g., withdrawal behaviors, history of internalizing problems) can predict which children will become targets of bullying.

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents

Further, considering evidence that victimization can be quite stable over time, the authors discussed literature (e.g., Barker et al., 2008) indicating that children who are chronically victimized are most at risk for developing detrimental outcomes and are more likely (than their nonvictimized peers) to display both internalized (e.g., anxiety) and externalized distress (e.g., aggression). Additionally, the experience of peer victimization seems to neurologically impact the effectiveness that youths can cope with stress (Vaillancourt et al., 2008). While there are numerous studies supporting the hypothesis that PV and internalizing symptomatology are related, is it plausible that PV experiences could ultimately lead to PTSD? Given the long-term impact of early trauma experiences in individuals with PTSD, this is an essential question. If a behavior is considered a normal or developmentally appropriate experience for youths, then serious consideration and intervention are less likely. Further, if the different types of bullying (i.e., physical, verbal, relational) are perceived to be differentially severe, then the probability of intervention could differ across type. First, the literature on PV and PTSD must be addressed. Interestingly, one of the earliest studies of the relation between PV and post-traumatic stress symptomatology was focused on adult samples and workplace bullying. Mikkelsen and Einarsen (2002) found that the majority of their sample of workplace bullying victims reported post-traumatic stress symptomatology. (Although a more detailed examination of workplace bullying is precluded here, it should be noted that this is an intriguing and fast-developing area of the literature.) In one of the earliest studies on youth-age PV and PTSD, Mynard, Joseph, and Alexander (2000) found a positive relationship between PTSD symptomatology and PV experiences in high school students in the United Kingdom. Further, Weaver (2000) examined a case in which an adolescent female was reported to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD, apparently as the result of PV experiences in school. Storch and Esposito (2003) succinctly reviewed the PV/internalizing distress literature to date and reported that PV is associated with a number of outcomes, including acute anxiety, hypervigilance, helplessness, and powerlessness. Further, they directly examined the relationship between self-reported PV and the symptoms of PTSD in an urban sample of 205 fifth and sixth graders. Their results indicated significant positive relationships between PTSD symptomatology and both overt (i.e., physical victimization, as assessed by the authors) and relational victimization (i.e., r 5 .37 and .33, respectively). In a similar study of the relationship between PV and PTSD symptomatology, Crosby, Oehler, and Capaccioli (2010) examined the self-reports of

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fifth- through eighth-grade students in rural schools. The examination of these variables in a rural locale, in part, addressed some concerns expressed by Storch and Esposito (2003) that participants in their urban sample may have been exposed to other traumatic events that could have also influenced the results of their study. Additionally, participants in the rural sample were asked about verbal victimization and PTSD symptomatology via items that were specifically oriented to PV experiences. The results of Crosby and colleagues supported those of Storch and Esposito and others, indicating a positive relationship between PTSD symptomatology and PV. Specifically, the data in an examination of the relationship between PV and PTSD symptomatology revealed significant positive correlations between physical (r 5 .62), verbal (r 5 .65), and relational victimization (r 5 .63). Additionally, female participants reported higher levels of PTSD symptomatology and relational victimization than did male participants. No other significant differences were found between genders on victimization type. Weaver (2000) intriguingly queried readers as to whether or not posttraumatic stress disorder can be diagnosed in adolescence without a catastrophic stressor. (As discussed below, this is a critical question when considering a diagnosis of PTSD for a victim of bullying.) Weaver reported a pattern of symptomatology in his case study, which closely matches a PTSD symptom presentation, and observed that some researchers and diagnosticians may not consider peer victimization to be life threatening. Therefore, he elaborated, some may consider an adjustment disorder to be a more appropriate diagnosis, due to a potentially prevailing assumption (even in some professional circles) that peer victimization is a relatively common experience and is not considered catastrophic, per se. In essence, Weaver presented the PV-PTSD question to professionals and researchers and called for further examination of the diagnostic criteria and additional research. Fortunately, researchers have made progress in this area of the literature. Arguably, PV has been associated with a much broader and more severe range of sequelae than adjustment disorders alone. As previously mentioned, many of these studies indicate a variety of internalizing problems, including anxiety. As PTSD is categorized as an anxiety disorder (APA, 2000), it is plausible that such an outcome (i.e., PTSD) could result from repeated exposure to physical violence (for example) from peers. After all, it is certainly reasonable to question a conceptualization of youth-based chronic abuse (i.e., peer victimization) as being within the range of normal experiences. Further, there are certainly data to support a hypothesis that all types of PV (including verbal and relational victimization) are associated with

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents

post-traumatic stress symptomatology (e.g., see Crosby et al., 2010, and Storch & Esposito, 2003). Based on the previous discussion of including the notion of threats of trauma to the definition of traumatic stressor, some types of verbal victimization (e.g., being threatened with physical harm) seem to be a reasonable fit, conceptually. Relational victimization, however, may be more problematic. Although the literature seems to indicate that relational victimization can also result in traumatic stress, adults often perceive this type as less harmful than its more direct counterparts (e.g., physical aggression). Further, if the diagnostic criterion (i.e., A1) is constructed to require only real or threatened physical experiences (thereby implicitly excluding other types of [indirect] experiences), then relational victimization would be out of the realm of possibility for conceptualization as a traumatic stressor. Clearly, this is an undesirable scenario. The data support a relation between all types of victimization, not only those that include real or threatened physical victimization experiences. In sum, the extant literature seems to indicate that PV experiences and post-traumatic stress symptomatology are related. Topographically, the behaviors experienced by victims (e.g., repeated physical violence, etc.) are quite similar to the experiences of other youths who would perhaps be more readily considered for a PTSD diagnosis (e.g., chronic physical abuse by a parent). Although, the literature on PV and PTSD is still somewhat limited in quantity, the relationship between these two variables is quite plausible and well supported by the data that are available. More research, including data on how victims attempt to cope with their PV experiences, is certainly warranted.

Trauma and Ecology These aforementioned findings (e.g., Crosby et al., 2010; Storch & Esposito, 2003; Weaver, 2000) are striking, and their implications must be examined in the context of student ecology and adult (i.e., teacher, parent, etc.) perceptions of PV and their likelihood to intervene. As discussed by Bauman and Del Rio (2006), most bullying occurs in schools, and teachers and other school personnel are often in the best position to intervene. It is imperative that teachers and other school personnel be committed to effective bullying intervention and that they understand the topography and potential severity of all types of bullying (i.e., physical, verbal, relational, cyberbullying, etc.). Specifically, what are adults’ views on PV and how do these views relate to the likelihood that they will intervene? If, in fact, adults do perceive the types of victimization as differentially severe

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and are differentially likely to intervene on the types, then some youths may be more likely to suffer negative outcomes.

Adult Perceptions of Peer Victimization Although somewhat limited (both in number and methodology), the extant literature on teachers’ perceptions of the severity of the different types of bullying seems to support a disparity. That is, teachers may be more likely to perceive some forms of bullying as more severe (or harmful) than others and to intervene based on their perceptions of severity (e.g., see Bauman & Del Rio, 2006, with a preservice teacher sample). Other than perceptions of severity, perceptions of ambiguity (i.e., not being able to accurately recognize or define certain bullying behaviors) are also problematic. Relational bullying, for example, is much more difficult to observe, and there is some evidence to indicate that youths are less likely to report this type of victimization to adults (Birkinshaw & Eslea, 1998, as cited in Bauman & Del Rio). Furthermore, some teachers may view bullying as a normal experience and are less likely to intervene based on these beliefs (Kochenderfer-Ladd & Pelletier, 2008). Additionally, some studies have indicated that teachers and students disagree about what constitutes bullying. In a large-scale study of perceptual differences (on bullying and peer victimization) between students and staff in one district, Bradshaw, Sawyer, and O’Brennan (2007) found that staff members across elementary and secondary levels significantly underestimated the number of students who are victimized on a frequent basis. Interestingly, some evidence indicates that teachers may not intervene as often as they think they do (Newman & Murray, 2005) and that youths perceive staff assistance as either unhelpful or even harmful (Rigby & Bagshaw, 2003).

How Might Social Support Relate to the Experience of Peer Victimization? Alarmingly, there is some evidence to suggest that adults may be present when PV is occurring. For example, Crosby and colleagues (2010) found that 35% of the victims in their sample reported that adults were present at least “sometimes” when they were being victimized. Further, of the total sample, 66% reported that they had watched someone being victimized in the past two months, and 21% reported that they had been a bystander to victimization in the past week. This finding is quite unfortunate and indicates some problems with the viability of social support as a protective factor (for this sample).

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents

Clearly, the usage of social support for victims must be examined more closely in future research. Davidson and Demaray (2007) defined social support “as knowledge that a person is cared for, is esteemed, and belongs to a large network of concerned people” (p. 384). Most parents, teachers, and other professionals would agree that social support should be a protective factor for victims of bullying. Davidson and Demaray, for example, found that social support from teachers and peers did moderate the relationship between PV and internalized distress. However, Hunter and Boyle (2004) found that children who are bullied persistently use social support less than those who experience victimization over shorter time periods. It is also possible that the importance that victims place on social support may play a key role in coping strategy usage (Davidson & Demaray, 2007). That is, some victims who place a higher importance (or value) on social support may experience more significant distress than those who value social support less. This is indeed an intriguing hypothesis. Consider school systems and campuses that encourage seeking social support as the sole method of reducing victimization (e.g., “Just tell the teacher.”). In settings such as those examined by Crosby and colleagues (2010), students reported that adults are sometimes present when they are victimized. In light of the common suggestion to seek social support for victimization, one wonders how victims may process the presence of these (passive or active) adult onlookers. That is, some victims of bullying may (understandably) view social support as a nonviable option when there are so many onlookers—particularly when adults are present. Others may perceive social support as quite important yet use it progressively less as they find it ineffective. Such dissonance between perceptions of importance and actual viability could be quite distressing. While this has not been sufficiently explored, it is plausible that continued unsuccessful attempts at eliciting social support from adults (who are occasional unwitting onlookers or may not perceive the victimization as severe enough to warrant intervention) may actually result in even higher levels of distress.

Conclusions and Implications for Intervention The extant literature reviewed in this chapter lends support to the hypothesis that PV experiences can lead to PTSD. Of primary importance, however, is the validation of all types of PV as genuine threats to the mental health of some youths and a potential traumatic experience. As has been discussed, some parents and teachers perceive the various types of PV as differentially harmful. Specifically, physical victimization is the easiest to observe (or to view evidence of) and is perceived

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by adults as the most harmful. Verbal victimization, although direct, may present difficulties in gathering irrefutable evidence of its occurrence unless it is directly observed. Relational (or social) victimization is even more difficult to observe, as it involves more complex social structures and covert behaviors. Verbal and relational victimization often fall behind in perceptions of harmfulness and may be less likely to be viewed as legitimate victimization. The topography of each of these types must be included in psychoeducational programming for both adults and youths. Further, each of the types of victimization can result in internalizing (and externalizing) distress. Therefore, parents, educators, and community members must be not only educated about the typology of PV but also informed that negative psychological sequelae are associated with all types. These sequelae may not occur for all students, especially for those that possess effective support networks and active coping strategies. However, for those who do not possess such protective factors and skills, the sequelae may range from milder internalizing distress to post-traumatic distress or even suicidality. Psychoeducation seems to be an excellent (and certainly underused) component of systemic intervention and dissemination of information. Although the development of adaptive problem-solving skills seems to be quite important, it seems even more important that adults recognize that youths must also have absolute access to adult social support. The notion that intervention should focus predominantly on the development of problem-solving skills in the victim misses one key component of the definition of bullying: a power differential. In some cases, although not all, the power imbalance may be so great that problem solving (i.e., acting independently to reduce the victimization) could be nearly impossible. In these cases, social support may be the final option for victims. Norris and Sloan (2007) noted that although humans play a role in causing violence, they can also play a significant role in preventing violence. If victims perceive adults as unhelpful (e.g., being passively present when victimization occurs [see Crosby et al., 2010]), then it is little wonder that significant amounts of traumatic stress may occur. Surely, prevention efforts and vigilance from adults (i.e., those responsible for the safety and well-being of youths) should be a primary focus for reducing PV in schools and communities. Adults must be educated and empowered to intervene on behalf of victims of bullying. First, however, seeking (at least adult) social support must be a viable option for all students. The clear establishment of a support network is, perhaps, one of the best ways to address this

Peer Victimization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children and Adolescents

need for the viability of social support in a system. In some systems, this may be as simple as the appointment of a school counselor and/or a small group of teachers who could be approached as needed by youths who are being victimized. Individuals in these networks could mobilize supports for the student(s), including notifying parents (if necessary) and intervening as appropriate. Although the point seems apparent, psychoeducational approaches should clearly employ a view that victims should not be required to assume sole responsibility for their own safety.

Notes 1.╇Throughout this chapter, the term “youths” refers to children and adolescents. 2.╇This differentiation is not applied widely in the literature. I distinguish these terms in this fashion to clarify particular perspectives.

References American Psychiatric Association (APA). (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (Rev. 4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. Arsenault, L., Bowes, L., & Shakoor, S. (2010). Bullying victimization in youths and mental health problems: “Much ado about nothing”? Psychological Medicine, 40, 717–729. Barker, E. D., Bolvin, M., Brendgen, M., Fontaine, N., Arsenault, L., Vitaro, F., Bissonnette, C., Tremblay, R. E. (2008). The predictive validity and early predictors of peer victimization trajectories in preschool. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65, 1185–1192. Bauman, S., & Del Rio, A. (2006). Preservice teachers’ responses to bullying scenarios: Comparing physical, verbal, and relational bullying. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 219–231. Birkinshaw, S., & Eslea, M. (1998, September). Teachers’ attitudes and actions toward boy v girl and girl v boy bullying. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society, Lancaster University, Lancaster, England. Bradshaw, C. P., Sawyer, A. L., & O’Brennan, L. M. (2007). Bullying and peer victimization at school: Perceptual differences between students and school staff. School Psychology Review, 36, 361–382. Crick, N. R., & Bigbee, M. A. (1996). Relational aggression, gender, and social psychological adjustment. Child Development, 66, 710–722. Crosby, J. W., Oehler, J., & Capaccioli, K. (2010). The relationship between peer victimization and post-traumatic stress symptomatology in a rural sample. Psychology in the Schools, 47, 297–310.

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Davidson, L. M., & Demaray, M. K. (2007). Social support as a moderator between victimization and internalizing-externalizing distress from bullying. School Psychology Review, 36, 383–405. Fairbank, J. A., Putnam, F. W., Harris, W. H. (2007). The prevalence and impact of child traumatic stress. In M. J. Friedman, T. M. Keane, & P. A. Resick (Eds.), Handbook of PTSD: Science and practice (pp. 229–251). New York: Guilford. Finkelhor, D., Ormrod, R., Turner, H., & Hamby, S. L. (2005). The victimization of children and youth: A comprehensive, national survey. Child Maltreatment, 10, 5–25. Grills, A. E., & Ollendick, T. H. (2002). Peer victimization, global self-worth, and anxiety in middle school children. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 31, 59–68. Hawker, D., & Boulton, M. J. (2000). Twenty years’ research on peer victimization and psychosocial maladjustment: A meta-analytic review of cross-sectional studies. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 41, 441–455. Hunter, S., & Boyle, J. (2004). Coping and appraisal in victims of school bullying. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 83–107. Kochenderfer-Ladd, B., & Pelletier, M. E. (2008). Teachers’ views and beliefs about bullying: Influences on classroom management strategies and students’ coping with peer victimization. Journal of School Psychology, 46, 431–453. Mikkelsen, E., & Einarsen, S. (2002). Basic assumptions and symptoms of posttraumatic stress among victims of bullying at work. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 11, 87–111. Mynard, H., Joseph, S., & Alexander, J. (2000). Peer-victimization and posttraumatic stress in adolescents. Personality and Individual Differences, 29, 815–821. Newman, R. S., & Murray, B. J. (2005). How students and teachers view the seriousness of peer harassment: When is it appropriate to seek help? Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 347–365. Norris, F. H., Sloan, L. B. (2007). The epidemiology of trauma and PTSD. In M. J. Friedman, T. M. Keane, & P. A. Resick (Eds.), Handbook of PTSD: Science and practice (pp. 78–98). New York: Guilford. Olweus, D. (1973). Hackkycklingar och oversittare. Forskning om skolmobbning. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Olweus, D. (1978). Aggression in the schools: Bullies and whipping boys. Washington, DC: Hemisphere Publishing. Rigby, K., & Bagshaw, D. (2003). Prospects of adolescent students collaborating with teachers in addressing issues of bullying and conflict in schools. Educational Psychology, 23, 535–546. Smith, J. D., Schneider, B. H., Smith, P. K., & Ananiadou, K. (2004). The effectiveness of whole school antibullying programs: A synthesis of evaluation research. School Psychology Review, 33, 547–560. Smolowe, J., Herbst, D., Weisensee, E., Rakowsky, J., & Mascia, K. (2010). Bullied to death? People, 73, 66–70.

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Storch, E. A., & Esposito, L. E. (2003). Peer victimization and posttraumatic stress among children. Child Study Journal, 33, 91–98. Swearer, S. M., Grills, A. E., Haye, K. M., & Cary, T. (2004). Internalizing problems in students involved in bullying and victimization: Implications for intervention. In D. L. Espelage & S. M. Swearer (Eds.), Bullying in American schools: A social-ecological perspective on prevention and intervention (pp. 63–83). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Vaillancourt, T., Duku, E., Decatanzaro, D., Macmillan, H., Muir, C., & Schmidt, L. A. (2008). Variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity among bullied and non-bullied children. Aggressive Behavior, 34, 294–305. Weaver, A. (2000). Can post-traumatic stress disorder be diagnosed in adolescence without a catastrophic stressor? A case report. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 5, 77–83.

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CHAPTER TWO

Treatment of Adolescent V↜ictims of V↜iolence Beth M. Housekamp, Marjorie GrahamHoward, Bethany Ashby, and Alice Fok-Trela

Adolescents worldwide are exposed to a number of traumatic events, including sexual abuse, physical abuse, partner abuse, school violence, war, and witnessing violence in their place of residence or community. The numbers of potential adolescent victims of violence are staggering. For example, in 2005 over 3.6 million children and adolescents were referred for child welfare services in the United States, and 899,000 of these child abuse and neglect cases were substantiated (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, 2007). The National Center for Victims of Crime (2010) reports the following recent statistics: In 2007, teens ages 12 to 19 experienced nearly 1.6 million violent crimes; this figure includes 179,056 robberies and 57,511 sexual assaults and rapes; during this same one-year period, 47% of youths ages 14 to 17 had experienced a physical assault, 16% had been sexually victimized, 17% had experienced abuse or neglect, 13% had been exposed to online sexual solicitations, 32% had reported being bullied at school and 173,600 teens were victims of serious violent crimes at school. In the United States, adolescents who do not come from the majority culture have even greater risk of being a victim of violence. For example, from 1993 through 2003, Black youths ages 17 or younger were 5 times as likely as White youths to be homicide victims. American

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Indian and Alaskan Native teens and young adults suffer the highest violent victimization of any age category in any racial group. Victims ages 18 to 24 make up almost one-third of all American Indian and Alaskan Native violent crime victims and have a violent victimization rate of 1 in 4. In addition, 18% of hate and bias incidents against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (LGBTQ) victims reported to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs recently were against victims ages 18 and younger, and from 1995 to 2008, 23 teens were murdered as a result of their gender identity or expression (National Center for Victims of Crime, 2010). Socially marginalized adolescents have often experienced multiple forms of psychological trauma, as they suffer sustained exposure to an invalidating social environment, such as poverty, community violence, or other deprivation, as well abuse or neglect within their own interpersonal situation. As Briere and Lanktree (2008) note in their summary of the research literature on multiple impacts of trauma, “social and economic deprivation, as well as racism, sexism, homophobia, and homelessness, not only produce their own negative effects on children and adults they also increase the likelihood of trauma exposure and may intensify the effects of such victimization” (p. 2). Adolescents from homes and communities with less social stature are also more likely to be a victim of violence such as child abuse, sexual and physical assault, gang or community violence, drive-by shootings, robbery, sexual exploitation through prostitution, trauma associated with refugee status, witnessing domestic violence, and loss associated with the murder of a family member or friend (Briere & Lanktree, 2008). Although estimates of the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among youths who have experienced traumatic events vary, most studies have found prevalence rates around 15% (Cuffe et al., 1998; Stewart et al., 2004). As noted above, Briere and Lanktree recognize that when someone has experienced trauma within a setting where additional traumas are present (such as lower SES environments, residential treatment facilities, or juvenile justice settings), the psychological results are often multiple and severe, a phenomenon they identify as complex post-traumatic disturbance: Complex trauma can be defined as a combination of early and late-onset, multiple, and sometimes highly invasive traumatic events, usually of an ongoing, interpersonal nature. In most cases, such trauma includes exposure to repetitive childhood sexual, physical, and/or psychological abuse, often (although not always) in the context of concomitant emotional neglect and harmful social environments. (Briere & Lanktree, 2008)

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

Children and adolescents with complex PTSD also frequently have other comorbid symptoms, including anxiety, dissociation, depression, and externalizing disorders. In addition, adolescents who experience complex post-traumatic symptoms often self-mutilate or are violent toward others, abuse substances, have eating disorders, exhibit susceptibility to revictimization, and suffer traumatic bereavement due to the loss of significant others through violent circumstances (Briere & Lanktree, 2008; Carrion, Weems, Ray, & Reiss, 2002). In addition, those treating adolescent victims of violence note that adolescents may not meet full PTSD criteria but may still suffer from the same degree of functional impairment as those who have full-blown symptoms (Carrion et al., 2002). Given the multiple traumas that adolescent victims of violence may experience and the complex symptomatology that may arise from exposure to violence within different settings, particularly socially Â�marginalizing settings, it is critical to be aware of the impact of both the adolescent’s home environment as well as the settings in which treatment may occur. In addition, assessment of the adolescent victim of violence must occur within a developmental framework that recognizes societal impacts as well as the need for appropriate test selection. Finally, treatment of PTSD and other complex traumatic disturbances arising from exposure to violence must recognize the individual circumstances of the type(s) of violence the adolescent has experienced. In providing an overview of assessment and treatment of adolescent victims of violence, this chapter focuses on each of these broad areas.

Types of Treatment Settings for Adolescent Victims of Violence Mental health professionals work with adolescent victims of violence in a variety of settings, including schools, psychiatric treatment facilities, residential facilities, medical hospitals, the juvenile justice system, as well as traditional outpatient clinics and private practice settings. Each of these settings require an awareness of the systemic structure and impacts, the various legal and ethical obligations within the different settings, and alternative treatment options present depending on the setting where one is working with the adolescent.

Providing Treatment within School Settings One common setting where counselors work with adolescent victims of violence is public or private schools. With increased concern about children and adolescents experiencing bullying or violence at school,

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schools have introduced both systemic, curriculum-based approaches to treating violence and individual counselors and others to provide support for individual victims of bullying and violence. Generally, programs may be either curriculum based or peer led. They may focus on social skills or on restorative justice (i.e., forgiveness). Programs may focus specifically on the participants involved, or they may involve the entire school. The development of systemic interventions began with Dan Olweus, who was the first to suggest the integration of common elements; his work culminated into what has now become the standard in antibullying programs. The goal of such programs is to teach students social skills that will allow them to create healthy relationships (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2009b). These programs focus not only on the perpetrators and the victims, but also on the students who are bystanders. By doing so, they strive to change the social dynamics in the peer groups and the roles played by adults in shaping the students’ school experiences.

Adolescent Victims in Short- or Long-Term Psychiatric Hospital Settings Adolescents are occasionally treated in short- or long-term hospital settings or in residential facilities that specialize in the treatment of substance abuse, severe acting out behaviors, or family-related issues. The trend for hospital stays, consistent with the norm for all developmental groups, is for short periods of initial stabilization and follow-up through partial day treatment programs or outpatient services provided on site at the hospital. During an initial 3- to 5-day hospitalization, the most severe presenting symptoms and crisis issues can be addressed. This may include psychotic symptoms, depression and suicidal ideation, conduct disorder and impulsive acting-out behaviors, homicidal risk, self-injurious behaviors, and substance abuse. Treatment focuses on reducing immediate risk of harm to self and others and on rapidly stabilizing symptoms with medication and therapy. Once the teen is no longer an imminent risk, she can be released home with follow-up care. Family and group therapy are provided both while the adolescent is in the hospital and upon her release.

Medical Centers and Hospitals A medical setting is often the first place traumatized adolescents, particularly those who have been assaulted, go to seek treatment. They present in emergency departments or at their primary care providers’ office for treatment of physical injuries, testing for sexually transmitted infections, and documentation of abuse. In addition, because many adolescents have

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

good relationships with their primary care providers and these visits are confidential, the initial disclosure of abuse and trauma is often made to their physician. Often, primary care providers have known these adolescents and their families for years. They are invested in their patients’ physical and emotional well-being, and many recommend that their patients seek mental health services. When patients are referred by their primary care providers, it is important for mental health professionals to include these physicians in their treatment and disposition planning, as physicians will continue to interact with adolescents and their families long after therapy is terminated.

Residential Treatment Settings Some adolescents (including adolescent victims of violence) present with psychological needs that cannot be adequately addressed in either an outpatient or inpatient setting. Eating disorders, substance abuse, self-injurious behaviors, and severe conduct disorder may all require an out-of-home placement in a residential treatment facility. Teens who have been removed from the home by a social services agency due to family neglect and abuse issues may also reside in group homes, foster homes, and long-term residential placement settings. While some of these adolescents are newly removed from the home, many were initially placed as young children and are essentially being raised in residential environments. When working with adolescent victims who are in such residential settings, it is critical to work closely with the treatment team, the agencies, case manager, and others who are interacting with the adolescent on a regular basis. Often those members of the team who are responsible for assisting the adolescent in managing his or her daily life are those who are most aware of the adolescent’s struggles in coping and also are often on the receiving end of the adolescent’s anger, fear, anxiety, and other emotional and behavioral symptoms.

The Juvenile Justice System Adolescent victims of abuse who then go on to commit crimes and become involved with the juvenile justice system are another group in need of treatment. While awaiting trial or the disposition of their criminal case, these adolescents may be housed in a secure juvenile detention center. If the juvenile is facing serious charges, he or she may remain in a custody setting for weeks or even months before the criminal case is heard. Additionally, if the court deems that the youth represents a risk for

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future criminal acts, the minor may be ordered to a boot camp, placement, or secure facility. Many states have provisions that allow teens who are of a certain age and have committed certain categories of violent crimes to be transferred to the adult criminal court system. When this happens, the youth may be sentenced to adult prison or a juvenile correctional facility. Adolescents in the juvenile justice system have various treatment needs that may include amelioration of mental health symptoms, treatment for their own trauma history, substance abuse treatment, and sex offender treatment. When providing treatment to an adolescent victim of violence who is also incarcerated because he or she is an offender, it is important to be aware of unique legal and ethical issues. Specifically, teens that have been ordered to treatment by the court do not have the same confidentiality rights that exist in an ordinary outpatient setting. Treatment that is court ordered may require the practitioner to provide regular feedback and clinical information to the court documenting the teen’s progress and adjustment. Even for youths who are not mandated into treatment, the probation department or supervisory agency may require information from the mental health professional as part of the probationary plan. To complicate this further, since adolescents in the juvenile justice system are not yet adults, parental rights for information and consent are still required in many jurisdictions. It will therefore behoove the practitioner providing treatment services in the juvenile justice system to familiarize herself with the specifics of the legal and ethical issues and reporting requirements for her specific jurisdiction.

Assessment of Adolescent Victims of Violence The appropriate assessment of the adolescent is the necessary first step or precursor to any treatment that is subsequently offered, regardless of setting, type of trauma experienced, or specific psychological or behavioral impact. The adolescent’s symptom presentation depends on multiple factors, including age and developmental level at the time of the trauma, the nature and duration of the trauma, and social support following the traumatic event (Steiner, Carrion, Plattner, & Koopman, 2003). Research has demonstrated that severity of exposure to trauma correlates with severity of PTSD symptoms—the more extreme the trauma (such as being exposed to potentially deadly gunfire or other life-threatening violence), the longer the exposure to the traumatic situation (such as long-term abuse in the home), the age of the adolescent at the time of the severe trauma, and the more discrete types of severe trauma the adolescent experiences, the

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

more likely he or she is to develop either PTSD or complex post-traumatic disturbance. Complex trauma is also more likely to develop if an infant or child is exposed to danger that is unpredictable, as the child must devote resources that are normally dedicated to growth and development to survival (Houskamp, Scott, Neumann, & McDonald, 2010; Briere & Lanktree, 2008). In addition, treatment is also impacted by where the adolescent is residing. If the adolescent is living in a setting that is unsafe, on the streets for instance, assessing the impact on the adolescent and finding a safe residence for him or her is a prerequisite of effective treatment. Assessment, as conceptualized as an aide in treatment, can be broadly defined to include not only traditional psychology testing and specialized tests but also clinical interviewing, behavioral observations, and thirdparty interviews. The goal of assessment is to obtain, as quickly as possible, the necessary information that can guide and inform treatment. To this end, the assessment is conducted at the beginning of the treatment phase and is viewed as a part of the overall therapeutic process with the teen in need. The treating clinician can obtain this information in one or two sessions at the beginning of treatment and use the assessment as a way to begin establishing rapport, therapeutic alliance, and connection with the client. However, assessment is also an ongoing, dynamic piece of the treatment planning process and should be threaded through the entire process of therapy. Depending on the specific treatment goals and needs of the client, the assessment should start with a thorough clinical interview. The focus of the assessment is to receive information regarding the teen’s chief psychological symptoms or problems. However, other information, including the child’s developmental history, family and social history, educational history, substance abuse history, criminal history, and prior mental health history, may also be necessary. The assessment should include a full evaluation of the trauma exposure history (Briere & Lanktree, 2008), including any history of exposure to child abuse, emotional neglect, assaults by peers, community violence, witnessing violence, traumatic loss, exposure to accidents and disasters, and serious medical illness or injury. This information can be obtained through either open-ended questioning or a structured interview protocol. Use of standardized psychological testing may assist in the assessment process. For adolescents, it may be useful to obtain a brief measure of current cognitive functioning to rule out any developmental or cognitive limitations that may be a barrier to treatment. The Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) is a useful screening measure for intelligence, and if needed, the clinician can then administered either the WASI-IV or WISC-IV

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if more information is required. Personality inventories and symptoms checklists may also be helpful. The Child Behavioral Checklist (Achenbach, 1991) has a self-report, parent and teacher form. The MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992), PAI-A (Morey, 2008), and MACI (Millon, 1993) can all be filled out by the adolescent to provide information about current psychological functioning and symptoms. If more specific information is needed about a certain cluster of symptoms, the CDI, BDI, or BAI can also be chosen. Specific trauma-specific measures are also available, and many were developed for specific age groups within the adolescent population. These may include the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, Trauma Symptom Inventory, Detailed Assessment of Posttraumatic Stress, and UCLA PTSD Index for DSV-IV (Briere & Lanktee, 2008). The advantage of these measures is to gather data on the specific trauma history of the adolescent and use this data as a framework for specific treatment intervention. The practitioner can obtain this information from either self-report or report by the caregiver, though many researchers suggest that obtaining information from both may provide the most comprehensive assessment (Briere & Lanktree, 2008). Finally, for teens that have been exposed to a specific trauma unique to that population, the treating mental health professional may use traumaspecific inventories that were initially developed as research measures but have been proven to have clinical utility. For example, when working with adolescents who have been exposed to community or gang violence, mental health professionals may use the Community Violence Exposure Survey (Saltzman, Pynoos, Layne, Steinberg, & Aisenberg, 2001), which is a 25-item self-report inventory adapted from the more widely used Survey of Exposure to Community Violence.

Treating Adolescent Victims of Childhood Physical and Sexual Abuse and Assault Maltreatment of children is a relatively common occurrence in the United States, particularly maltreatment and abuse by family members. For example, according to national statistics recently compiled, a report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds. Ninety percent of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way and 68% are abused by family members. We also know that child abuse occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions, and at all levels of education. And the impact of child abuse for adolescents and adults is staggering. For example, 31% of women in prison in the United States were abused as children; over 60% of people in drug rehabilitation centers report being abused or neglected as a child; and approximately 80% of 21-year-olds

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

that were abused as children were found to meet criteria for at least one psychological disorder. Abused children are also 25% more likely to experience teen pregnancy, and abused teens are three times less likely to practice safe sex, putting them at greater risk for STDs (Childhelp, 2010). A wide range of significant immediate and longer-term psychological symptoms have been found to be associated with physical, sexual, or psychological abuse by a family member, close relative, or other trusted person. In particular, experiences of being abused as a child predispose one for difficulties such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and externalizing behaviors. In addition to these well-known traumatic responses, those who have a history of having been abused in childhood may also struggle with impaired self-disturbance. Impaired self-capacities comprise at least three separate but related types of disturbance: problems in one’s ability to access and maintain a stable sense of identity or self (identity disturbance), an inability to regulate and/or tolerate negative emotional states (affect dysregulation), and difficulties in forming and sustaining meaningful relationships with others (relational disturbance). Briere and Rickards (2007) in a study assessing self-disturbance found that impaired self-capacities appear particularly associated with adverse interpersonal events (i.e., those within families or among adults close to the child). In addition, impairment in these areas was found primarily in those who had a history of being maltreated or abused as a child, in particular emotional abuse, emotional nonsupport, and sexual abuse when one was young.

Adolescent Victims of Physical and Sexual Assault Perpetrators of assaults on adolescents may include same-age peers or adults, including adults in positions of authority and trust, such as teachers, coaches, religious leaders, neighbors, and other adults who come into contact with adolescents regularly and may abuse this power. At times, the adolescent may be both the perpetrator and victim of violence, as occurs in situations involving gang or community violence. Additionally, an earlier history of child sexual or physical abuse may make the youth more vulnerable to later assaults. Sexual assaults on adolescents are prevalent, with some authors noting that adolescents have the highest rates of rape and other sexual assaults of any age group (American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Adolescence, 2001). Teens may be victims of sexual assault, molestation, rape, acquaintance or date rape, and statutory rape. The incidence of date rape in the adolescent population is high. A study conducted by Jackson, Cram,

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and Seymour (2000) found that 77% of female and 67% of male high school students endured some form of sexual coercion occurring in dating relationships. Statutory rape, which includes sex between a youth below the legal age to give consent and an older adolescent or adult, is also common. One study that analyzed crime report data found that 25% of sex crimes committed against minors involved statutory rape (TroupLeasure & Snyder, 2005). With the spread of the Internet and teens having increasing exposure to social networks and chat groups, victimization by adults who meet and interact with adolescents online also occurs, though not as often as portrayed by the media. In a recent study, Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell, and Ybarra (2010) found that of the number of nationally reported statutory rape claims, approximately 7% was attributed to Internet-initiated sex crimes. The psychological impact of sexual assault on adolescents has been studied extensively. Consistent with literature that has examined the effects of rape on adult women, teens that are sexually assaulted are more likely to develop PTSD and to be at greater risk for comorbid diagnoses, including depression, substance abuse, and other anxiety disorders (Hanson, 2002). Adolescent rape victims are more likely to have problems with low self-esteem, panic episodes, sleep problems, disordered eating, sexual problems, and social functioning (Vickerman & Margolin, 2009). Moreover, these ill effects, if left untreated, may continue to impact the adolescent adversely well into adult life.

Integrative Treatment of Complex Trauma for Adolescents (ITCT) John Briere and Cheryl Lanktree (2008) developed the Integrative Treatment of Complex Trauma for Adolescents (ITCT) approach to assist adolescents who are struggling with the impacts of multiple traumas in their families and communities. The ITCT recognizes the cultural setting of the adolescent. Briere and Lanktree note that their approach, presented in a comprehensive manual, is a semi-structured approach that can be adapted on a case-by-case basis by the therapist to meet the specific needs of the adolescent, including attention to his or her cultural/ethnic background, developmental level, and psychological functioning. The core components of the ITCT approach to working with adolescent trauma survivors include: • Assessment-driven treatment, with standardized trauma-specific measures administered at 2- to 4-month intervals to identify symptoms requiring special clinical attention.

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

• Attention to complex trauma issues, including post-traumatic stress, attachment disturbance, behavioral and affect dysregulation, interpersonal difficulties, and identity-related issues. • Use of multiple treatment modalities, potentially including cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, mindfulness/meditation training, and relational treatment in individual and group therapy, based on the specific symptomatology of the youth. This approach also attempts to involve family members for family therapy sessions and parenting support and collateral sessions for caregivers. • Early attention to immediate trauma-related issues such as acute stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress in order to increase the capacity of the client to explore more chronic and complex trauma issues. In some clients, this may include the use of psychiatric medication. • Skills development in building emotional regulation and also problem-solving capacities. • Advocacy and interventions at the system level (e.g., family, forensic/ protection, and school) to establish healthier functioning and to address safety concerns. • Allowance for a flexible time-frame for treatment, since the multiproblem nature of complex trauma sometimes precludes short-term therapy. (Briere & Lanktree, 2008)

Other treatments have also been developed focusing specifically on treating adolescent victims of sexual and physical assault. Evidence-based treatment of adolescent rape victims has generally employed a cognitivebehavioral approach. The overarching goals of treatment are to reduce anxiety, panic, and distress symptoms, assist the survivor in constructing a holistic narrative of the trauma, and use exposure to allow reprocessing and prevent the development of PTSD and other mental health disorders. Some of the more common treatment modalities have included stress inoculation training, prolonged exposure therapy, and cognitive processing therapy (Vickerman & Margolin, 2009), which have been adapted for use with the adolescent victim. Stress inoculation training focuses on using Meichenbaum’s anxiety management procedures with rape victims through psychoeducation, in vivo exposure targeting rape-related phobias, and training with coping strategies. Prolonged exposure therapy focuses on decreasing anxiety associated with the rape memory through imagined reexposure to the assault in treatment and homework assignments. Cognitive processing therapy relies on psychoeducation, exposure, and cognitive techniques. A particular focus of treatment with adolescent sexual assault victims is on the distorted cognitions that may occur as a result of the rape trauma. Self-blame and self-devaluation are a common effect of rape and may

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interact with social rape myths in such a way to impact negatively the trauma survivor’s overall psychological functioning. Moor (2007) advocates a treatment that specifically addresses the rape victim’s tendency to blame herself and to engage in negative self-appraisal, which prevents the formation of a healing narrative. The therapist uses therapeutic empathy, reality testing, reframing, and the provision of corrective information, which challenges the distorted myths and beliefs that the adolescent rape victim may hold. A specific developmental concern that may arise when treating the Â�adolescent victim of sexual assault is to prevent the disruption of normal developmental pathways in terms of sexual identity, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Since many teens have limited sexual experiences, a sexual assault may have the additional impact of disrupting the development of a healthy sexual identity. Therefore, in addition to addressing the distress symptoms, the treatment must also focus on resolving residual impacts of sexual trauma on the emerging and developing sense of a sexual self.

Adolescent Intimate Partner Violence The prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in adolescent dating relationships ranges from 30% to 80% (Hickman, Joycox, & Arnoff, 2004). The disparities in prevelance rates are likely due to how IPV is defined and the age of participants, among other factors. IPV is generally defined broadly and includes both verbal aggression, such as name calling and swearing, and physical aggression, such as throwing objects and shoving. Recent research estimates the prevalence of serious dating violence, including sexual and physical assault or drug/alcohol facilitated rape, at 2.7% of adolescent girls and .6% of adolescent boys (Wolitzky-Taylor et al., 2008). Given that a significant percentage of adolescents have been engaged in dating violence, adolescent therapists would do well to consider the potential of IPV, and its subsequent impact, in their work with clients. Those most at risk for IPV are adolescents with histories of maltreatment as children. Some studies suggest that victims of child maltreatment are 3.5 times more likely to be involved in violent dating relationships as adults as compared to those children without histories of abuse (Coid, Petruckevitch, Chung, Richardson, Moorey, & Feder, 2003). More specific risk factors for victimization vary by gender. For girls, in addition to �maltreatment, other risk factors include age, African American ethnicity, low parent education, delinquent behavior,

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

sex with partner, alcohol use, having a friend who is a victim of IPV, and depression (Buzy et al., 2004; Foshee et al., 2004; Foster, Hagan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2004). Less is known about specific risk factors for boys. However, sex with partner, low self-esteem, and physical fighting with peers have been associated with male victimization (Foshee et al., 2004; Kaestle & Halpern, 2005). Adolescent males and females are victimized by dating violence at similar rates (Graves, Sechrist, White, & Paradise, 2005; White & Smith, 2004), although recent studies of college students document more women engaging in physical aggression than men. However, although the prevalence of IPV is similar among males and females, it is important to note that the outcomes of the perpetration vary by gender (Wolfe, Scott, & Crooks, 2005). According to White (2009), “similar prevalence rates are not indicative of women’s and men’s partner violence being the same. The meaning and motives are different” (p. 3). Girls are more likely to be injured or experience psychological distress as compared to boys (Frieze, 2005; Williams and Frieze, 2005), and up to 10% of intentional injuries to girls are due to IPV (Griffin & Kossn, 2002). Girls are also more likely to be victims of sexual assault (Swan & Snow, 2006). The presence of intimate partner violence has been correlated with multiple mental health issues. Suicidal ideation, substance use, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder are all associated with intimate partner violence during adolescence (Callahan, Tolman, & Saunders, 2003; Silverman, Raj, Mucci, & Hathaway, 2001). Therefore, when IPV is present, it is critical for therapists to assess for other comorbid diagnoses. Further, adolescents with a history of IPV have poorer mental health outcomes as compared to adolescents who have not been victimized (Brown et al., 2009). Given the significant relationship between child maltreatment and IVP, in addition to addressing safety issues in the dating relationship, therapists may also need to assess safety issues at home. Most of the treatment literature on adolescent IPV focuses on prevention and there is little empirical support for these interventions. The only evidenced-based intervention specifically targeted at reducing, in addition to preventing, adolescent IPV is the Safe Dates Program (Foshee et al., 1996; Foshee et al., 1998). The Safe Dates Program is a curriculum-based program that was developed for use with middle and high school age students. The major components include a 10-session curriculum on IPV; a play about dating abuse; a poster contest; and parent materials, including a letter, newsletter, and the Families for Safe Dates Program. There is also an evaluation questionnaire. The program is designed to be used in

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multiple settings, including psychoeducation groups and other treatment settings. Research evaluating the effectiveness of the program indicates that adolescents who participate experience 56–92% less physical, serious physical, and sexual IPV victimization and perpetration than nonparticipating adolescents and that these results were maintained over a three-year period (Foshee et al., 2005).

Interventions for Bullying and School Violence School violence can take many forms. The most common forms of violence include fighting, verbal conflict, disruptive behavior, and bullying (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005). It is important to take note of and address these relatively milder forms of aggression, as research has shown that they can escalate into more overt violence (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005). There are great costs to the individuals involved in incidents of bullying and school violence. These negative impacts are seen in many arenas of functioning: psychological, behavioral, emotional, physical, academic, and social. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that those who are victimized often experience psychological distress, poor self-esteem, and internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2009a). Emotions such as anger, sadness, frustration, and stress were expressed. Students reported physical difficulties as well, including headaches, vomiting, sleep disturbance, enuresis, abdominal pains, and increased medication use. Academically, victimized students had higher levels of absenteeism, negative school attitudes, and lowered academic achievement. Socially, these students reported social isolation and poor peer relationships. In terms of mental health and illness, there was a greater prevalence of major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, suicidality, substance abuse, self-injurious behaviors, and trauma symptoms, as well as a greater vulnerability to psychosis. Students who were the victims of repeated occurrences of school violence became trapped in abusive relationships (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2009b). Negative effects were also apparent with the aggressors, who learned how to use power and aggression to control others (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2009b). Overall, school violence and bullying have costly effects on the educational system and lasting effects on the individuals, both on the perpetrators and the victims of the violence.

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

Common Elements in School Violence Prevention Programs While research is lacking regarding the efficacy of school-based programs (Smith, Ryan, & Cousins, 2007), several common elements have been proposed for school violence prevention programs and antibullying programs. Recommended elements include: 1. Providing a definition of bullying. 2. Creating awareness of the various forms of bullying. 3. Addressing the specific issues of each school (for example, social skills training [Hymel, Schonert-Reichl, & Miller, 2006] or the notion of justice and fairness). 4. Teaching students how to develop healthy relationships, as compared to the bullying dynamic. 5. Training from a systemic perspective, including teachers, students, parents, and school staff, and providing training materials. 6. Using multimodal delivery of information (e.g., including school-wide education, routine interventions built into school policy, and intensive individual interventions) (Vreeman & Carroll, 2007). 7. Using peer processes to address bullying and encourage prevention. 8. Creating a systemic, fully integrated, and ongoing program that involves parents, students, classes, school staff, and the community (Tutty et al., 2005). 9. Providing interventions to students who are bullied and students who bully. 10.  Developing protocols to report bullying incidents that minimize fear of retribution. 11. Providing systematic, periodic evaluation of the program. 12. Providing safe intervention programs for bystanders. 13. Developing and improving students’ social behavior by promoting a positive school climate, which includes elements such as warm relationships and high standards for behaviors (Orpinas & Horne, 2006; Smokowski & Kopasz, 2005).

Effectiveness of Interventions Overall, research indicates mixed results regarding school-based educational approaches to preventing school violence (Hunt, 2007). However, research studies are suggesting that there are certain common elements and themes in successful programs. Wilson and Lipsey (2005) examined 219 studies on the efficacy of different school-based interventions. The researchers found that the following were common elements of effective interventions: • More effective programs had greater session frequency per week. • Shorter programs were more effective than longer programs.

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• Larger treatment effects were found with higher-risk students, especially with elementary school students. • Different modalities are equally effective (e.g., social skills training, cognitivebehavioral programs, counseling).

Interestingly, a school climate that is based on restorative justice (which views school violence as a violation of relationships) tends to be more effective than a school climate that involves punitive policies (which views school violence as a violation of rules) (Smith, 2008). Because of this, zero tolerance policies and punitive discipline strategies have not been shown to be effective in increasing school safety and decreasing school violence (Stinchcomb, Bazemore, & Rienstenberg, 2006). Overall, researchers have found that successful interventions involve comprehensive, systematic interventions, specific moment-to-moment interventions, adult leadership, and student involvement and leadership (Pepler, Jiang, & Craig, 2006; Smokowski & Kopasz, 2005). School-based violence prevention programs, in general, have also been found to be effective. On average, bullying decreased by 20–23% and victimization by 17–20% following the implementation of school-based programs (Farrington & Ttofi, 2009).

Treatment for Individuals Individual treatment is comprised of two types: treatment for the aggressor and treatment for the victim. Treatments that have been found to be effective with victims of school violence are usually consistent with trauma and grief-focused interventions. One modality is school-based group therapy, developed by Saltzman, Pynoos, Layne, Steinberg, and Aisenberg (2001). This treatment has five foci: (a) the traumatic experience, (b) reminders of trauma and loss, (c) the interplay of trauma and grief, (d) post-trauma adversities, and (e) developmental progression. This treatment is specially designed to screen for trauma exposure in students, reduce distress in trauma-related outcomes, and improve academic performance. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been suggested to help victims reduce their anxiety regarding attending school following an incident of school violence. Some researchers have suggested the use of exposure by encouraging the child gradually to face increasingly anxiety-provoking situations and events while practicing relaxation techniques and cognitivebehavioral techniques designed to reduce anxiety (Silverman, 2010). Treatment for aggressors involves building more adaptive social skills. These are often similar to the programs developed as part of school

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

curriculum. However, the individual or small group format of delivering the training allows the training to be tailored to the individuals in the group.

Community Violence Another adolescent group in need of treatment includes teenagers who have been victims of community violence. Community violence has been variously defined in the literature, and one of the criticisms is the lack of a consensus definition (Guterman, Cameron, & Staller, 2000). Some authors define community violence as the presence of violence and violencerelated events within an individual’s proximal environment (Seiger, Rojas-Vilches, McKinnney, & Renk, 2004). Other have defined community violence as instances in which individuals are assaulted by persons other than family members or partners while in the community (Denson, Marshall, Schell, & Jaycox, 2007). This may include direct exposure to violence through physical assault, fighting, or gang violence or through witnessing violent acts in one’s home, neighborhood, or school. Also included are witnessing gang assaults, finding victims, exposure to weapons, and living in an unsafe neighborhood with high incidents of crime. There is considerable evidence to suggest adolescents exposed to this type of violence are at risk for a variety of difficulties, including reduced academic achievement; aggressive, delinquent, or high-risk sexual behaviors; substance use and dependence; and trauma reactions, including PTSD, anxiety, and depressive symptoms (Saltzman et al., 2001). Moreover, traumatic death may be a result of community violence, resulting in the teen being forced to reconcile grief and loss issues in tandem with post-traumatic stress reactions. Unfortunately, teens that have witnessed or been victims of community violence appear to be an overlooked treatment group who rarely seek services independently and may actively deny or minimize such traumatic exposure when talking to parents, educators, and treatment providers (Saltzman et al., 2001). Treatment interventions for adolescents who have been exposed to community violence are generally of two types: preventive interventions to decrease the likelihood of developing more severe psychopathology and interventions to decrease post-traumatic distress and accompanying risk factors. School-based approaches are particularly popular, and interventions have advocated either a group-based or an individually focused set of interventions. Research on adolescent survivors of community violence has determined that although many survivors experience a stress reaction in the

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face of exposure to community violence, only a small subset of individuals display full symptoms of PTSD. Denson and colleagues (2007) conducted a longitudinal study of male Hispanic survivors of community violence and found acute symptom severity, measured five days after the initial trauma exposure, was the biggest predictor of later development of PTSD. In light of this research, many treatment programs have focused on the ability to prevent and reduce psychological sequelae after exposure to gang or community violence. If offered treatment shortly after exposure to the traumatic event, the chances of developing a post-traumatic stress reaction may be sharply reduced. Treatment of adolescent community violence victims has extended to include other group-based therapeutic approaches with a trauma focus. One such approach focused on middle school adolescents who were exposed to community violence (Saltzman et al., 2001). After receiving an initial screening and survey, students who met criteria for group inclusion were offered group therapy. Twenty sessions focused on five modules (building group cohesion, therapeutic processing of selected traumatic experiences, management of the interplay between trauma, loss, and complicated bereavement, and problem-solving current adversaries to restore normal developmental progression). Group participation was associated with improvements in post-traumatic stress, grief symptoms, and academic performance. Since adolescents and their parents are often exposed to the same community violence events, treatment should include a family therapy or parent education component. While the family may serve a protective function in ameliorating distress symptoms, parents underestimate the rates at which their children are exposed to community violence (Hill & Jones, 1997) and may be too distressed themselves to recognize the need for treatment. Seiger and colleagues (2004) recommend family-based interventions that focus on reestablishing a sense of order and routine, providing the teen with a developmentally appropriate explanation of the event, and improving overall parent-child relationships. They note that it may be difficult to intervene when the parents are more traumatized than the youth and may overreact by sharply curtailing the amount of time that the teen is allowed to spend outside of the home.

Summary Adolescents are victims of severe, often multiple types of violence, including verbal abuse and severe teasing, bullying, physical assault, and sexual assault and incest. While research on the impacts and treatment of

Treatment of Adolescent Victims of Violence

child abuse, including physical abuse and assault, has increased extensively over the last 30 to 40 years, we have only more recently begun to attend to difficulties such as the level of potential bullying that adolescents experience at school and over the Internet and the impact of trauma as it occurs within settings that are edges of society, such as homeless adolescents, those living in violent neighborhoods, or LGBTQ adolescents who are victims of bullying, assault, or even murder because of their sexual identity. Adolescents who reside in communities where there is significant violence surrounding them are at risk for developing complex post-traumatic symptoms that must be addressed adequately in order for the adolescents to move beyond their current situations. Adolescents who have a less stable living environment for multiple reasons, whether because the severity of their symptoms requires psychiatric hospitalization, their behavior has put them within the context of the juvenile justice system, or they reside within the foster care or residential treatment system, are particularly at risk and require the best from those of us who provide treatment to them. Mental health clinicians and researchers have recognized that adolescents who are victims of violence are ripe for intervention and assistance from those adults who develop caretaking, counseling, or mentoring roles with them. The adolescents who receive support and services, including effective evidence-based treatments, have an opportunity to break a cycle of violence and live a good life. The tools surveyed in this chapter can help all of us as we work with these adolescents and give them hope for a better future.

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Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K. J., & Ybarra, M. L. (2010). Online predators and their victims: Myths, realities, and implications for prevention and treatment. Psychology of Violence, 1, 13–35. Wolfe, D. A., Scott, K. S., & Crooks, C. (2005). Abuse and violence in adolescent girls’ dating relationships. In D. J. Bell, S. L. Foster, & E. J. Mash (Eds.), Handbook of behavioral and emotional problems in girls (pp. 381–414). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Wolitzky-Taylor, K., Ruggiero, K. J., Danielson, C. K., Resnick, H. S., Hanson, R. F., Smith, D. W., et al. (2008). Prevalence and correlates of dating violence in a national sample of adolescents. Journal of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 47, 755–762.

CHAPTER THREE

Effects of Playing V↜iolent V↜ideo Games Craig A. Anderson and Sara Prot

Introduction Video games are extremely popular among children, teens, and adults. A wide spectrum of games is available on consoles (such as the Wii, XBox, and PlayStation), handheld players (such as Nintendo DS or an iPod), and cell phones. A recent study of media use among American youths done on a sample of more than 2,000 children and teens showed that there has been a significant increase in video gaming over the past five years (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010). On any given day, 60% of young people play video games, spending an average of about 1 hour at the controller. Video game playing peaks among 11- to 14-year-olds, who average 1.5 hours per day. Boys continue to play more than girls (1 hour 37 minutes compared to 49 minutes). Ten years ago, over 85% of games contained some violence, and about half included serious violent actions (Children Now, 2001). Violence in video games is often portrayed as justified, fun, and without negative consequences (Funk, Baldacci, Pasold, & Baumgardner, 2004). A majority of children prefer playing violent games over nonviolent ones (Funk et al., 2004). It is a worrying fact that only 30% of children and teens report that their parents have rules about which video games they can play and how much time they can spend playing (Rideout et al., 2010). Research

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shows that parents often aren’t familiar with the content of their children’s favorite video games and underestimate their children’s exposure to violence while playing (Funk, Hagan, & Schimming, 1999). In response to congressional pressure, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was founded in 1994 by the game industry in order to aid consumers in determining a game’s content and suitability for children and adolescents. The ESRB rates video games and displays age-based rating symbols and content descriptors on the game box. The rating system should, in theory, aid parents in controlling the kind of video game content to which their children are exposed. However, despite some improvements over the years, the existing rating system is flawed in multiple ways (Gentile, 2008). For example, almost 50% of T-rated games (“Teen,” appropriate for persons 13 years or older) include potentially objectionable content that was not described on the box (Haninger & Thompson, 2004). Many parents don’t understand the ratings. Only 19% of adolescents report that their parents have ever used the ratings to keep them from getting a game (Gentile, Lynch, Linder, & Walsh, 2004). Most adolescents play games rated as inappropriate for their age. Furthermore, a recent analysis of ESRB ratings found that 31% of E games (Everyone), 91% of E10+ games (Everyone 10 and older), 91% of T games (Teens ages 13 and over), and 89% of M games (Mature, ages 17 and older) contained violence (Gentile, 2008). Because such a large number of children, teens, and adults play video games and because such a large proportion of games include violent content, it is important to understand the short-term and long-term effects that violent video games have on players. This chapter describes a theoretical framework for understanding effects of playing violent video games, gives a short explanation of research designs and scientific causality, and then describes the current knowledge of violent video game effects. Effects of violent video games on aggression and related variables are described in detail. Effects of violent video games on prosocial behavior are briefly described, as are effects of video games on attention and cognitive control, school performance, and video game addiction.

Theoretical Frameworks Several early and recent social cognitive models can provide useful contexts for understanding effects of exposure to violent media. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory and Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1973, 1983) proposes that children can learn behavioral responses by observing

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behaviors of others and by observing the outcomes of those behaviors. Classical experiments by Bandura and his colleagues using the Bobo doll paradigm showed that children can learn aggressive behavior through observation of both actual and filmed aggression (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961, 1963a). Children are more likely to imitate a witnessed behavior if that behavior is rewarded and less likely to imitate the behavior if it is punished (e.g., Bandura, 1965; Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963b). Huesmann (1986, 1998) proposed that people’s behavior is guided by the acquisition, internalization, and application of behavioral scripts. Scripts are sets of highly associated concepts that guide perception of social events and enactment of social behavior. Children who are exposed to a lot of media violence are more likely to acquire behavioral scripts that contain aggression and violence. An aggressive script can become chronically accessible through repeated rehearsal. Numerous aspects of script theory have been empirically confirmed, both within the aggression domain as well as in other domains. For example, playing a violent video game increases the amount of aggressive content in a story completion task (Bushman & Anderson, 2002). Two recent relevant models are the General Aggression Model (GAM; e.g., Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Anderson & Carnagey, 2004; Anderson & Huesmann, 2003; Barlett & Anderson, in press) and the General Learning Model (GLM) (Buckley & Anderson, 2006; Gentile et al., 2009; Swing & Anderson, 2008). GAM integrates social learning theory, script theory, and a host of other models, including cognitiveneoassociation theory (Berkowitz, 1984), cultivation theory (Comstock & Scharrer, 2007), desensitization theory (Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007), and social information processing theory (Crick & Dodge, 1994). GLM extends the basic processes underlying GAM to other domains of social behavior. An overview of the General Aggression Model is shown in Figure 3.1. GAM is a biosocial-developmental model that describes the personal and situational factors and processes that influence an individual’s aggressive behavior in a social episode. It also provides a way to understand how biological factors interact with environmental factors to yield behavior in context (Raine, Brennen, Farrington, & Mednick, 1997). GAM describes two sets of processes that influence the probability that a person will respond aggressively in a particular social encounter: distal factors and proximate factors. Distal factors (displayed in the upper part of Figure 3.1) are developmental factors that have helped shape an individual’s personality. Distal factors operate by increasing proximate factors that facilitate aggression or by decreasing proximate factors that

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Figure 3.1â•… The General Aggression Model: Overall view. From Anderson & Carnagey, 2004.

inhibit aggression. Distal factors that influence aggression include biological modifiers (e.g., low arousal levels, low serotonin, ADHD, hormonal imbalances; Anderson & Carnagey, 2004) and environmental modifiers (e.g., harsh or inconsistent parenting practices, cultural influences, poverty; Anderson & Carnagey, 2004). Proximate factors (displayed in the lower part of Figure 3.1) are person and situation variables that are present and active in the current social episode. Situational factors that have been shown to influence aggression include exposure to media violence (Anderson et al., 2003), provocation (Bettencourt & Kernahan, 1997), heat (Anderson, 1989), and ostracism (Warburton, Williams, & Cairns, 2006). Person factors that influence

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aggression include trait aggression (Bushman, 1995), psychoticism (Markey & Scherer, 2009), trait hostility (Kirsh, Olczak, & Mounts, 2005), and anger (Berkowitz, 1984). Numerous person and situation factors influence the individual’s present internal state—cognitions, affect, and arousal. These internal state variables influence one another and affect the probability of aggressive behavior. The contents of one’s present internal state influence appraisal and decision processes. Appraisals can be made automatically, resulting in an impulsive behavior. If the individual has the time and resources to reappraise the situation and if the outcome is important and unsatisfying, a thoughtful behavior is likely to occur. Both impulsive and thoughtful behaviors can be aggressive or nonaggressive. The ensuing behavior influences the ongoing social encounter. In return, the results of the social encounter influence the situational input factor. Thus, GAM includes a feedback loop that can lead to a violence escalation cycle (Barlett & Anderson, in press; Anderson, Buckley, & Carnagey, 2008). The long-term effects of any repeated episodic encounter (such as bullying, rejection), including the repeated play of violent video games, are illustrated in Figure 3.2. Long-term consumers of violent media can become more aggressive in outlook and can develop hostile perceptual biases, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Development, automatization, and reinforcement of aggression-related knowledge structures can lead to long-term personality changes (Carnagey & Anderson, 2003; Bartholow, Sestir, & Davis, 2005). It is important to keep in mind that the learning processes described by GAM are general processes that cognitive, developmental, and social psychologists have studied for decades. Therefore, they can be applied not only to aggression but also to other kinds of behavior—for example, learning prosocial behavior (Gentile et al., 2009). The General Learning Model (GLM; Barlett & Anderson, in press; Buckley & Anderson, 2006; Gentile et al., 2009; Swing & Anderson, 2008) is an extension of GAM that illustrates how long-term attitudes and knowledge structures are formed with continued exposure to any type of repeated social encounter (including media). Short-term processes described by GLM are similar to those in GAM—situational and personality factors influence one’s internal state (cognitions, affect, and arousal). Internal state variables influence appraisal and decision processes that lead to different types of behavior. In turn, one’s behavior influences the situational input factor. GLM also predicts long-term changes that result from repeated learning. The main difference between GAM and GLM is that the latter

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Figure 3.2â•… The General Learning Model. Extension of GAM to nonviolent contexts: Long-term processes. From Barlett & Anderson, in press.

explicitly states that the same learning processes apply to all types of social behavior. In addition, the most recent version of GLM categorizes the outcome of long-term effects in a somewhat different way, as illustrated in Figure 3.2. As applied to media effects, GLM (Barlett & Anderson, in press) notes that repeated exposure to any type of media influences personality through the development of precognitive and cognitive constructs (perceptual schemata, beliefs, and behavioral scripts), cognitive-emotional constructs (attitudes and stereotypes), and emotional constructs (conditioned emotions and affective traits). Considerable support for GLM comes from research exploring prosocial media influences on prosocial behavior (e.g., Gentile et al., 2009; Greitemeyer, 2009; Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2009, 2010).

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

Types of Studies in Video Game Research Empirical researchers generally use three basic types of studies: experimental studies, cross-sectional correlational studies, and longitudinal studies (Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Swing & Anderson, 2010). Each study type has advantages and drawbacks and each is appropriate for certain kinds of research problems. Results obtained from different kinds of studies complement each other and allow researchers to get a complete picture of media violence effects. In experimental studies, researchers manipulate exposure to media violence and view the short-term results of brief exposure. Participants are randomly assigned to different conditions (e.g., playing a violent or nonviolent video game). With all other factors controlled, a difference between two groups in, for example, aggression establishes a causal link between violent media and subsequent aggression. A potential disadvantage of experimental research is that certain types of more extreme physical aggression cannot ethically be used in such studies. For example, one cannot randomly assign children to play a violent or nonviolent video game and then give each of them a gun to see which group more frequently attempts to shoot other people. The best field experiments use measures of real physical aggression in natural settings, such as hitting, pushing, and fighting on the playground. The best laboratory experiments use well-validated paradigms to test important hypotheses. In general, experimental research in the aggression domain has shown high generalizability (Anderson & Bushman, 1997). Cross-sectional correlational studies test for positive or negative relationships among theoretically relevant variables (e.g., a relationship between violent video game exposure and aggressive affect). The strengths of good correlational studies include the ability to measure more extreme forms of aggression, to test specific alternative explanations, and to suggest new hypotheses about causal relationship. However, the main disadvantage is that the results of a single correlational study (or of several) cannot establish cause and effect because the variables are measured at the same single point in time. Nonetheless, such studies are relevant to testing causal hypotheses because they provide an opportunity for falsification of the causal hypothesis, can test alternative hypotheses (and thus rule them out or support them), and allow the research to control for extraneous variables by statistical procedures. In a longitudinal study researchers collect data on the same group of people at two or more points in time. This allows stronger causal statements than cross-sectional correlation studies because of the temporal relations

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among the variables. For example, one can assess media habits and aggressive behavior tendencies both early and late in a school year and then test whether amount of media violence exposure at Time 1 predicts aggressive behavior at Time 2 after statistically controlling for Time 1 behavior tendencies. Longitudinal studies have allowed researchers to document the real-life consequences of repeated exposure to large amounts of media violence. The main disadvantages of longitudinal studies are that they are time-consuming and expensive. Each research design has its place in the study of media violence, and strong causal conclusions depend on consistent results across each of these designs (Abelson, 1995; Swing & Anderson, 2010). Meta-analytic procedures can be used to combine results of several studies and draw conclusions from integrated data. The most comprehensive metaanalysis of all three types of violent video game studies yielded consistent evidence that violent video game play causes an increase in the likelihood of physical aggression and a decrease of prosocial behavior (Anderson et al., 2010).

Probabilistic Causality and the Risk Factor Approach To understand how violent video games influence players, it is important to understand the concept of probabilistic causality. Modern scientific causality is probabilistic, rather than “necessary and sufficient.” That is, a variable X causes an increase in the likelihood of an outcome Y (Anderson, 2004). For example, saying that “smoking causes lung cancer” means that repeated smoking increases the likelihood that one will contract lung cancer. It does not mean that all smokers get lung cancer (a violation of sufficient causality). Also, in some cases nonsmokers get lung cancer (a violation of necessary causality). Similarly, saying that “violent video games cause aggression” does not mean that any person who plays violent video games will become aggressive or that any aggressive act is a product of violent video game play. It means that exposure to violent video games causes an increase in the likelihood of aggression. Probabilistic causality is a result of the fact that human behaviors (such as aggression or prosocial behavior) are multi-causal. They are influenced by a large number of interacting factors, and exposure to violent media is just one of those factors. No one causal factor can explain more that a small proportion of the variance of that behavior. This same modern view of causality applies in numerous other scientific domains as well, medical science being an obvious example (heart disease, cancer).

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

A useful approach for understanding how multiple causes determine behavior is the risk and resilience approach (Gentile & Sesma, 2003). This approach focuses on life experiences (biological, environmental, social) that may put people at risk for future maladaptation (risk factors) and those factors that serve to protect from this risk exposure (protective factors). Within this approach, violent media are viewed as a risk factor for aggression. Other risk factors for aggression include genetic predispositions (Hudziak et al., 2003), poor parenting practices (Patterson, 1995), poverty (Ewart & Suchday, 2002), and having been bullied (Osofsky & Osofsky, 2001), among many others. Protective factors that decrease the risk of aggression include being female (Archer, 2004), having a positive family environment (Estévez López, Pérez, Ochoa, & Ruiz, 2008), and high empathy (Björkqvist, Österman, & Kaukiainen, 2000), among others. Effects of risk and protective factors are cumulative—each additional risk factor increases the likelihood of aggression and each protective factor decreases it. No single factor alone is sufficient to elicit more extreme forms of aggression, but each is relevant and steps could be taken to minimize them (Anderson, Gentile, & Dill, in press). One nonobvious implication of this approach is that from a practical standpoint, we, as parents and as members of society, cannot allow exposure to violent video games (or any other single risk factor) to be used as a completely exonerating excuse for violence. Several key aggression-inhibiting factors rely on the individual’s belief that he or she is responsible for his or her own behavior and will be held responsible by others.

Violent Video Game Effects Short- and Long-Term Effects on Aggression and Related Variables Effects of violent video games on aggression are a topic that has received a lot of attention and has been much discussed, both by researchers and by the general public. A large body of research papers has been published on the subject, as well as several review papers (Barlett, Anderson, & Swing, 2009; Bensley & Van Eenwyk, 2001; Dill & Dill, 1998; Emes, 1997; Griffiths, 1999) and meta-analyses (Anderson, 2004; Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Anderson, et al., 2004; Sherry, 2001). The most recent and most comprehensive meta-analysis in this domain (Anderson et al., 2010) combined a total of 136 research papers with 381 effect size estimates involving over 130,000 participants. This is a

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much larger sample than in previous meta-analyses, both because of the rapid expansion of violent video game research in the past few years and because of the inclusion of previously unavailable studies from Japan. Six outcome variables were included in the meta-analysis: aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, desensitization/low empathy, and prosocial (helping) behavior. Results reported in this chapter are based on the sample of studies whose methodology met all best practices criteria (the “Best Raw” sample in Anderson et al., 2010). The “Best Raw” sample includes 221 effect sizes and a total of 61,000 participants. Both the best practices sample and the full sample yielded the same results—violent video games had significant affects on all six outcome variables, proving that video game violence is indeed a risk factor for increased aggression and decreased prosocial behavior. The main findings of the meta-analyses are shown in Figure 3.3. Results according to type of research design are displayed in Table 3.1. Are the effect sizes large enough to be considered important? Because aggressive behavior is determined by a large number of factors (e.g., genetic predispositions, parental practices, cultural influences, personality, arousal

Figure 3.3â•… Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, empathy/desensitization, and prosocial behavior (results from the “Best Raw” sample, Anderson et al., 2010). K 5 number of effects. N 5 total sample size. Vertical capped bars are the upper and lower 95% confidence intervals.

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Table 3.1â•… Average effect size of violent video game play. Design

Total N

K

Aggressive Behavior Experimental ╇ 2,513 27 ╅ Longitudinal ╇ 4,526 12 ╅ Cross-Sectional 14,642 40 ╅

Ave. Effect (r+) â•…â•… Z

â•… .210 â•… .203 â•… .262

10.512** 13.787** 32.291**

Aggressive Cognition Experimental ╇ 2,887 24 ╅ ╅ .217 Longitudinal ╇ 3,408 ╇ 8 ╅ ╅ .115 Cross-Correlational ╇ 9,976 27 ╅╅ .183

11.695** 6.728** 18.445**

Aggressive Affect Experimental ╇ 1,454 21 ╅ ╅ .294 Longitudinal ╇ 2,602 ╇ 5 ╅╅ .075 Cross-Correlational ╇ 5,135 11 ╅ ╅ .101

11.289** 3.836** 7.227**

Physiological Arousal ╛╇ ╛633 ╇ 4 ╅╅ 2.182 2,778 ╇ 5 ╅╅ 2.114 3,495 ╇ 7 ╅╅ 2.093

24.599** 26.022** 25.506**

Desensitization and Empathy Experimental ╇ ╛249 ╇ 1 ╅╅ 2.138 Longitudinal 2,421 ╇ 4 ╅╅ 2.184 Cross-Correlational 3,910 10 ╅╅ 2.203

22.175* 29.147** 212.845**

Experimental Longitudinal Cross-Correlational

* p < .05â•… ** p < .001 Total N is the total number of participants in all of the summarized studies. K is the number of different studies. The average effect (r1) is the weighted average effect size, expressed as an r-value. Z is the Z-test of whether the effect is significantly different from zero. Source: Results from the “Best Raw” data (Anderson et al., 2010).

levels, etc.; Anderson & Huesmann, 2003), no single factor can explain more than a small proportion of the individual differences in aggression. However, even small effect sizes can have important practical consequences. If large portions of the population are exposed to a risk factor and if effects accumulate across time, the risk factor can significantly influence the individual and society (Anderson et al., 2010). In fact, the obtained effect size of violent video games on aggression compares favorably to such risk factors as substance abuse, abusive parents, and poverty (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001).

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Aggressive behavior. The notion that playing violent video games causes aggressive behavior has been supported by substantial research evidence. The consistency of the results from experimental, cross-correlational, and longitudinal studies demonstrate that violent video game play is a causal risk factor for physical aggression. This effect occurs in short-term and long-term contexts, across gender and culture, and to children and adolescents. For example, in an experimental study by Konijn, Bijvank, and Bushman (2007), adolescent boys played a violent or a nonviolent video game. Next, the boys competed with a supposed partner, and the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones (the aggression measure). The boys who had played a violent video game were more prone to behave aggressively, and especially so if they had identified with the violent characters in game. Identification with violent characters in the virtual world influenced the adolescents to behave more aggressively against others in the real world. In a correlational study, adolescents exposed to greater amounts of video game violence were more likely to be involved in physical fights than those with lesser exposure (Gentile et al., 2004). The link between exposure to video game violence and physical aggression remained significant even when gender and trait hostility were statistically controlled. A two-year-long longitudinal study tracked children’s exposure to violent media and their violent and delinquent behavior between the ages of 12 and 14 years (Hopf, Huber, & Weib, 2008). Exposure to violent video games at the age of 12 was a significant predictor of violence (b 5 .18) and delinquency (b 5 .29) at the age of 14, even after controlling for earlier violence and delinquency and several other important variables. That is, violent video game play led to a relative increase in violent and deliquent behavior over time. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that video game violence is a significant risk factor for physical aggression is provided by the new meta-analysis cited earlier and displayed in Figure 3.3 and Table 3.1. This effect was significant regardless of the type of research design. The overall average effect size for best practices studies was r1 5 .244, p < .01. The significant effect found in longitudinal studies (r1 5 .203, p < .01) shows that playing violent video games can increase aggression over time. The relationship between violent video game play and aggressive behavior was moderated neither by sex nor by culture. It seems that effects of violent video games on aggression are robust, affecting both men and women and individuals from Western and Eastern cultures. A marginally significant age effect was found, suggesting that

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

children might be more susceptible than adults. However, more research is needed to clarify this question (Anderson et al., 2010). Aggressive cognition. Exposure to violent video games can have a number of cognitive consequences that can, in turn, lead to aggressive behavior. GAM predicts that violent video game exposure will have both short-term and long-term effects on cognition. In the short term, media violence can prime aggressive thoughts, making them more accessible (Anderson & Huesmann, 2003). Repeated exposure to virtual violence activates and strengthens aggression-related knowledge structures, such as perceptual and expectation schemas and behavioral scripts. It also reinforces normative beliefs that aggression is an appropriate response in a particular situation (Bushman & Huesmann, 2006; Carnagey & Anderson, 2003). These predictions have been confirmed by experimental, cross-sectional correlational, and longitudinal research. An experimental study by Kirsh (1998) showed that playing violent video games can lead to the development of a hostile attribution bias. In this experiment, children who had played a violent video game were more prone to attribute malevolent intent to the wrongdoer in an ambiguous provocation story. The tendency to interpret ambiguous behaviors of others as malevolent can increase the likelihood that children will respond to real-life ambiguous provocation situations with aggression. Similar findings have been reported in other experimental studies (e.g., Bushman & Anderson, 2002). A correlational study by Funk and colleagues (2004) explored the possibility that media presentations of justified violence may change the belief that violent behavior is wrong, encouraging the development of proviolence attitudes. Indeed, exposure to video game violence was positively associated with proviolent attitudes (r 5 .30, p < .01) and with diminished empathy (r 5 2.24, p < .01). Similar findings have occurred in numerous studies (e.g., Anderson et al., 2004). A longitudinal study by Möller and Krahé (2009) tracked adolescents’ violent video game usage, endorsement of aggressive norms, hostile attribution bias, and aggression over a period of 30 months. Results show that exposure to violent video games at the first time of measurement influenced physical aggression 30 months later via an increase of aggressive norms and hostile attribution bias. Similar findings have been reported in the other major longitudinal studies (e.g., Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007). The meta-analysis by Anderson and colleagues (2010) has shown that exposure to violent video games is significantly related to higher levels of aggressive cognition, regardless of research design. The average effect

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size was r1 5 .175, p < .01. Perhaps the most important finding is the significant longitudinal effect of violent video games on aggressive cognition. Together with the findings of experimental and cross-sectional studies, the data provide strong evidence that violent video game play is a significant causal risk factor for both short-term and long-term increases in aggressive thinking (Anderson et al., 2010). Furthermore, several of the longitudinal studies show that these changes in aggressive thinking at least partially mediate the long-term effects of violent video games on physical aggression. Aggressive affect. Violent media increase aggression, at least in part, by producing feelings of anger and hostility (Swing & Anderson, 2010). Short-term effects of violent video game play on mood dissipate quickly (Barlett, Branch, Rodeheffer, & Harris, 2009), but repeated exposure to violent media can lead to the development of a hostile personality (e.g., Bartholow, Sestir, & Davis, 2005; Bushman & Huesmann, 2006). An experimental study by Markey and Scherer (2009) on a sample of late adolescents and young adults showed that playing a violent video game caused the participants to feel more hostile. The relationship between exposure to video game violence and ensuing hostility was moderated by trait psychoticism—the negative effect of violent video games on mood was greater for individuals with high psychoticism scores. This finding is consistent with other research showing that persons with high trait aggression (Bushman, 1995) and high trait hostility (Kirsh, Olczak, & Mounts, 2005) might be more susceptible to some effects of violent media. Other studies, however, have found that brief exposure to violent video games increases the hostile affect of game players regardless of aggressive personality (e.g., Anderson & Carnagey, 2009, Experiment 2). In a cross-sectional study, Bartholow, Sestir & Davis (2005) found that hostility mediated the relationship between habitual violent video game exposure and physical aggression (z 5 2.26, p < .05). Numerous correlational studies have found positive correlations between video game violence and aggressive affect (e.g., Gentile et al., 2004). These findings suggest that increased hostility provides one pathway through which exposure to video game violence influences aggression. The abovementioned two-year-long longitudinal study by Hopf, Huber, and Weib (2008) showed that both media-stimulated and real experiences of aggressive emotions associated with the motive for revenge are core risk factors for later violent behavior and delinquency. The authors conclude that continued exposure to real and virtual violence can lead to long-term emotional consequences. The Anderson and colleagues (2010) metaanalysis found that the average effect size for best practices studies of the

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violent video game effect on aggressive affect was r1 5 .124, p < .01. These effects were statistically significant in experimental, cross-correlational, and longitudinal studies. Physiological arousal. Playing video games, both violent and nonviolent ones, tends to produce physiological arousal (Swing, Gentile, & Anderson, 2009). Arousal can be measured in experimental studies using indicators such as heart rate, blood pressure, or skin conductance. The average effect size of violent video games on physiological arousal found in the metaanalysis by Anderson and his colleagues (2010) was r1 5 .184, p < .01. Aggression can be influenced by arousal in several ways. Heightened arousal strengthens the dominant action tendency, including aggressive tendencies. If a person is provoked to aggress while highly aroused, the result is a higher likelihood of aggression (Geen & O’Neal, 1969). According to excitation transfer theory, arousal can increase aggression if arousal from one source (e.g., exercise) is mislabeled as anger resulting from provocation (Zillmann, 1983). For example, arousal from viewing an erotic film can increase provoked aggression (Zillmann, 1971). Research suggests that several features of video games can influence the amount of arousal they generate. Violent video games tend to produce more arousal that nonviolent ones (e.g., Fleming & Rickwood, 2001). Playing a realistic violent video game has been shown to stimulate more arousal and more aggressive thoughts than playing an unrealistic violent video game (Barlett & Rodeheffer, 2009). The presence of blood in a violent video game can lead to higher arousal, as well as more hostile feelings and cognitions (Ballard & Wiest, 1996; Farrar, Krcmar, & Nowak, 2006; Barlett, Harris, & Bruey, 2008). How long do these effects last? A study by Barlett, Branch and colleagues (2009) shows that heightened arousal immediately after game play lasts between 4 and 9 minutes. Aggressive feelings and thoughts may last as few as 4 minutes. However, authors suggest that these short-term changes can start aggression-promoting processes that last much longer than 4 to 9 minutes. Desensitization and empathy. Exposure to violent media can lead to desensitization—a reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to violence (Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007). Although lessening anxiety can be a positive outcome in many contexts (e.g., treatment of phobias or PTSD), desensitization of children and other civilians to violent stimuli can have several harmful consequences. Anxiety associated with violence can serve to inhibit violent behaviors, so desensitization to violence could be expected to lead to disinhibition of aggression. This kind of emotional blunting may also lead to an underestimation of the seriousness of observed violence and reduce the likelihood of helping a victim (Carnagey & Anderson, 2003).

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Empathy refers to the degree to which a person subjectively identifies and commiserates with a victim and feels emotional distress (Anderson et al., 2010). One of the predicted consequences of desensitization is a decrease in empathy for violence victims (Carnagey, et al., 2007). The fact that viewing violent films can lead to desensitization to violence and decreased empathy for victims has been shown by a body of empirical research (e.g., Dexter, Penrod, Linz, & Saunders, 1997; Mullin & Linz, 1995). The hypothesis that violent video games can have those same effects have also received empirical support from experiments, correlational studies, and longitudinal studies. For example, in an experimental study (Carnagey et al., 2007) participants played a violent or a nonviolent game for 20 minutes and then watched a videotape containing scenes of real-life violence. Their physiological reactions while viewing violence were measured by monitoring their heart rate galvanic skin response (GSR). Participants who had played a violent video game had a lower heart rate and GSR, showing evidence of physiological desensitization to violence. Evidence of chronic desensitization to violence through playing video games also exists. A study by Bartholow, Bushman, and Sestir (2005) shows that habitual violent game players have reduced amplitudes of the P300 component of the event-related brain potential while viewing violent images. P300 is associated with activation of the aversive motivational system. This reduced brain response while viewing violence predicted increased aggressive behavior in a later competitive task. The previously mentioned study by Bartholow, Sestir & Davis (2005) showed that both short-term and long-term exposure to violent video games are associated with increased aggression. Mediators in the relationship between long-term exposure to violent video games and aggressive behavior were variables related to desensitization (decreased empathy, hostile perceptions, and hostile personality). Although there are only a few high quality studies in this domain, metaanalytic results (Anderson et al., 2010) confirm that violent video game play is related to decreased empathy and desensitization. The average effect size for best practices studies was r1 5 2.194, p , .01.

Helpful and Prosocial Behavior Prosocial behavior can be defined as behavior involving helping or rewarding others, especially when this behavior brings no benefit to the helper (Barlett, Anderson, & Swing, 2009). The same learning processes that link violent video games to aggressive behavior could also be expected

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

to suppress and interfere with prosocial behavior, at least in some contexts. In fact, several studies have documented reduced prosocial behavior in response to violent game play. An experimental study by Bushman and Anderson (2009) showed that violent video game play can decrease helping a victim. Participants played a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes. Afterward, while completing a lengthy questionnaire, they heard a loud fight outside the lab in which one person was injured. Participants who had previously played a violent game were less likely to notice the fight, perceived the fight as less serious, and took longer to help the injured victim. The authors suggested that people exposed to media violence may become “comfortably numb” to the pain and suffering of others and are consequently less helpful. A correlational study by Gentile and colleagues (2009) assessed video game habits of a large sample of Singaporean children, along with several prosocial measures. Playing prosocial video games was shown to be positively related to helping, empathy, and cooperation. In contrast, violent video game play was negatively related to helping behavior. A longitudinal study by Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley (2007) monitored children’s violent media exposure, aggression, and prosocial behaviors two times during a school year. High exposure to video game violence at Time 1 significantly predicted a relative decrease in prosocial behavior (as rated by teachers and peers) at Time 2 (explaining 8% of the variance in prosocial behavior, t 5 25.14, p < .001). Results of the meta-analysis by Anderson and colleagues (2010) confirm that exposure to violent video games is significantly related to lower levels of prosocial behavior. The average effect size was r1 5 2.110, p < .01. The effect was significant in experimental, cross-correlational, and longitudinal studies. It is also important to note that prosocial and antisocial behaviors are not simply opposite sides of the same coin. People can be high in both aggressive and prosocial behaviors—for example, hostile toward enemies and helpful toward friends (Gentile et al., 2009). Prosocial and aggressive measures tend to be negatively correlated, but not strongly so.

Effects on Attention and Cognitive Control Benefits to visuospatial attention. A number of correlational and experimental studies show that video game play can have beneficial effects on a wide array of visual and spatial skills (e.g., Castel, Pratt, & Drummond, 2005; Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007; Green & Bavelier, 2003, 2006).

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Habitual video game players outperform nonplayers on several different visual tasks—for example visual enumeration, useful field of view, and target localization (Green & Bavelier, 2003, 2006). Nonplayers trained on action video games show improvements in such skills. For example, in an experiment by Feng, Spence, and Pratt (2007), participants substantially improved their spatial attention and mental rotation after only 10 hours of training with an action video game. Women benefited more than men, and so playing the action game reduced gender differences in spatial cognition. In their review of video game effects on visual skills, Achtman, Green, and Bavelier (2008) conclude that action video games can be effectively used to train visual skills. Action video games offer a new way of rehabilitation for different patient groups (e.g., stroke patients with visual field deficits). Interestingly, these beneficial effects on visuospacial processing have been found only for action games, not all video games in general (Green, Li, & Bavelier, 2010). Many action games include violent content, which shows that one video game can have both positive effects (improved visuospatial skills) and negative effects (increased aggression). However, both violent and nonviolent games have been associated to spatial-cognitive gains (e.g., Barlett, Branch, et al., 2009; De Lisi & Wolford, 2002). Therefore, players do not need to use a violent video game in order to achieve the spatial-cognitive benefits of video game exposure. Attention deficits. The beneficial effects of video games on visuospatial skills have sometimes been misinterpreted as a claim that video games enhance attention in general. However, an emerging line of research suggests that video games may also have disruptive effects on attention and cognitive control. Television viewing has been linked with greater subsequent attention problems in childhood (e.g., Landhuis, Poulton, Welch, & Hancox, 2007; Levine & Waite, 2000; Mistry, Minkovitz, Strobino, & Borzekowski, 2007). Researchers propose that, because most television programs involve high excitement and rapid changes of focus, exposure to television may harm children’s abilities to sustain focus on less exciting tasks and shorten their attention spans (Christakis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, & McCarty, 2004). Because many video games share these characteristics, it can be expected that they have the same type of negative effects on attention. Several studies have found a higher prevalence of attention-related problems and/or ADHD/ADD diagnoses among habitual video game players (Bioulac, Arfi, & Bouvard, 2008; Gentile, 2009; Mistry et al., 2007). Swing, Gentile, Anderson, and Walsh (2010) conducted the first longitudinal study to explore the effects of violent video games on attention.

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

School-aged children were assessed over a 13-month period. More frequent game play and television viewing over this period of time each led to more teacher-reported attention problems. These results were significant even when effects of previous attention problems and gender were partialled out. Furthermore, the video game effect was stronger than the TV effect. This study provides the strongest evidence yet that the association between video game play and attention problems may be causal, not merely coincidental. Note that this study did not distinguish between violent and nonviolent media. Swing and colleagues (2010) also reported a correlational study on a sample of late adolescents/early adults. The associations of exposure to screen media and attention problems found on this sample were similar to those found on the middle childhood sample, suggesting that adolescents are still vulnerable to these effects. Disruption of cognitive control. Evidence from a small number of studies shows that video game experience may also be negatively related to cognitive control—the ability to maintain goal-directed information processing in the face of distraction or competing response alternatives (Bailey, West, & Anderson, 2010). Cognitive control can be measured using the Stroop interference task. In one version of this task, participants are shown a series of words and are asked to name the color. The words can be printed in either congruent colors (the word “red” printed in red) or incongruent colors (the word “red” printed in blue). The reaction time for naming the color of congruent words is faster than for incongruent ones, which is known as the Stroop effect. Kronenberger and colleagues (2005) showed that adolescents who spent a lot of time viewing violent media (both television and video games) performed more poorly on the Stroop task than those who rarely consumed violent media. The association between violent video games and attention problems remained significant even after the level of exposure to violent television was controlled, showing that there is a unique effect of video game exposure on attention. A study by Mathews and colleagues (2005) measured neural recruitment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while individuals performed a counting Stroop task. In low gamers, a typical pattern of neural recruitment was observed, which reflected greater activation of the anterior cingulated and lateral frontal cortex for incongruent blocks of trials relative to neutral blocks of trials. In contrast, high gamers failed to activate these brain structures while performing the incongruent trials. Bailey and colleagues (2010) explored the effect of video game experience on proactive and reactive cognitive control. Proactive control represents a

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future-oriented form of control that serves to optimize task preparation. Reactive control represents a just-in-time form of control that serves to resolve conflict within a trial (Braver, Gray, & Burgess, 2007). Participants with extended versus limited experience with playing video games performed the Stroop task while event-related brain potentials were recorded. The results showed that the conflict adaptation effect (a behavioral measure of proactive control) was poorer in high gamers relative to low/no gamers when there was a long delay between trials. This effect was associated with attenuation of the ERP indicators of medial frontal negativity and frontal slow wave (ERP indices of proactive control) in high gamers. There was no difference between high gamers and low/no gamers in reactive cognitive control. This suggests that video game experience has a negative effect on proactive but not reactive cognitive control. These correlational findings complement evidence of an association between playing video games and attention deficits/hyperactivity and lead to the suggestion that video game experience may have a selective effect on proactive cognitive control processes that allow one to maintain optimal goal-directed information processing (Anderson et al., in press). Additional experimental and longitudinal research is required to establish the existence of a causal relationship between video game experience and cognitive control. However, these results constrain the claims that playing video games improves attention in general (e.g., Green & Bavelier, 2006).

School Performance A number of studies have found a significant negative association between the amount of screen time (video game play and television viewing) and school performance of children, adolescents, and college students (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007; Chan & Rabinowitz, 2006; Cordes & Miller, 2000; Gentile, 2009; Gentile et al., 2004; Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010; Sharif & Sargent, 2006). For example, a longitudinal study of elementary schoolchildren found that screen time (the amount of time spent on television and video games combined) was a significant negative predictor of children’s grades (Anderson et al., 2007). Gentile and colleagues (2004) explored gaming habits of adolescents and the level of parental monitoring of adolescent video game use. A significant negative correlation was found between the amount of video game play and grades. Parental involvement acted as a protective factor, showing a positive association with school performance.

Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

One explanation of this relationship is the displacement hypothesis. Regardless of content, the amount of play could affect grades negatively by displacing time spent in other educational activities (such as reading, homework, etc.; Gentile et al., 2004). The displacement hypothesis has received some empirical support. A study on a large nationally representative sample of youths showed that gamers spent 30% less time reading and 34% less time doing homework than nongamers, indicating that video game play is a distraction from school-related activities (Cummings & Vandewater, 2007). Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts (2010) found that nearly half (47%) of heavy media users get poor grades, compared to 23% of light media users. However, further research is needed to establish whether mechanisms other than displacement might also be involved in the association of media exposure and school performance (Barlett, Anderson, & Swing, 2009). It also might be true that children who have trouble at school seek to play games to feel a sense of mastery, or that attention problems cause both poor school performance and an attraction to games (Gentile, 2009).

Gaming Addiction There is growing concern among researchers, educators, and parents about the addictive potential of video games. Most researchers studying the pathological use of video games have defined it similarly to how pathological gambling is defined—based on damage to family, social, school, occupational and psychological functioning (Anderson et al., in press). This approach appears to be valid, since both pathological video game use and pathological gambling are types of behavioral addictions (Griffiths, 2000; Tejeiro Salguero & Bersabé Morán, 2002). Games, like gambling, are initially played as a form of entertainment, because they are stimulating and produce positive emotions. At first this activity isn’t pathological, but it can become so for some people when it begins to produce serious negative life consequences (Gentile, 2009). Video game addiction has not yet been included in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a formal diagnosis. In the draft for the DSM-V, which is due to be published in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association proposed a category of addictionlike behavioral disorders. Gambling disorder has been moved into this category, and other addictionlike behavioral disorders such as Internet addiction will be considered as potential additions to this category as research data accumulate (American Psychiatric Association, 2010). Before Internet addiction and video game addiction can be accepted as a recognized mental health disorders, more

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research is needed to discover how large a problem this is, who is most at risk, the etiology of the disorder, how long it lasts, what the outcomes are, whether treatment is needed, and what types of treatment are most effective. Researchers have started gathering knowledge on these topics. Gentile (2009) investigated video-gaming habits of a large nationally representative sample of American youths (aged 8 to 18 years). This study found that about 8% of video game players in this sample exhibited pathological patterns of play. Pathological gamers spent twice as much time playing than nonpathological gamers and received poorer grades. Pathological gaming also showed comorbidity with attention problems. In a large European sample, 11.9% of gamers fulfilled diagnostic criteria of addiction concerning their gaming behavior (Grusser, Thalemann, & Griffiths, 2007). A considerable prevalence of gaming addiction was found in samples from other parts of the world, for example Korea (Kim, Namkoong, Ku, & Kim, 2008) and Taiwan (Hsu, Wen, & Wu, 2009). Researchers have also started exploring the predictors and risk factors of video game addiction. Online game addiction has been associated with lower self-control, aggression, and narcissistic personality traits (Kim et al., 2008) and a preference for virtual life (Liu & Peng, 2009). It seems that gaming addiction is a problem affecting a considerable number of people worldwide and that additional research in this area is needed (Anderson et al., in press).

Conclusions The recent explosion in video game research has helped improve our understanding of how video games in general and violent video games in specific affect players. A wealth of research now shows that playing violent video games is a causal risk factor for aggression and several aggressionrelated variables. One common mechanism for both the short- and longterm increases in aggressive behavior is increased accessibility of aggressive cognitions. The recent comprehensive meta-analysis yielded theoretically and empirically consistent findings, including significant effects of violent video game exposure on aggressive behavior, cognition, affect, and arousal, as well as negative effects on empathy/desensitization and prosocial behavior. These effects were similar across experimental, crosssectional, and longitudinal designs; for males and females; for children, adolescents, and young adults; and for individuals from both Eastern and Western cultures (Anderson et al., 2010). Useful frameworks for understanding media effects on aggression as well as other types of learning (e.g., prosocial behavior) are provided by the General Aggression Model and the General Learning Model.

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A smaller but not insignificant number of studies demonstrate that violent video games also have significant effects on attention and cognitive control. Some of these effects are positive—action games can improve some visual and spatial skills (e.g., Green & Bavelier, 2003, 2006). However, there also is growing evidence that video games may have negative effects on proactive cognitive control (e.g., Bailey et al., 2010) and are linked to attention deficits (e.g., Swing et al., 2010). Another reason for concern is the negative relation between time spent playing video games and school performance (e.g., Gentile et al., 2004; Sharif & Sargent, 2006). A growing number of studies are investigating the phenomenon of gaming addiction (e.g., Gentile, 2009). To sum up, violent video games have been shown to have some limited positive effects (benefits to visuospatial functioning) and a host of negative effects. Although these effects aren’t huge, they also are not trivial in size. Considering that a large number of children, adolescents, and adults play violent video games, the accumulation of these effects can have a significant impact on individuals and on our society.

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Kirsh, S. J., Olczak, P. V., & Mounts, J. R. W. (2005). Violent video games induce an affect processing bias. Media Psychology, 7, 239–250. Konijn, E. A., Bijvank, N. M., & Bushman, B. J. (2007). I wish I were a warrior: The role of wishful identification in effects of violent video games on aggression in adolescent boys. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1038–1044. Kronenberger, W. G., Matthews, V. P., Dunn, D. W., Wang, Y., Wood, E. A., Giauque, A. L., Larsen, J. L., Rembusch, M. E., Lowe, M. J., & Li, T. Q. (2005). Media violence exposure and executive functioning in aggressive and control adolescents. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61, 725–737. Landhuis, C. E., Poulton, R., Welch, D., & Hancox, R. J. (2007). Does childhood television viewing lead to attention problems in adolescence? Results from a prospective longitudinal study. Pediatrics, 120, 532–537. Levine, L. E., & Waite, B. M. (2000). Television viewing and attentional abilities in fourth and fifth grade children. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 21, 667–679. Liu, M., & Peng, W. (2009). Cognitive and psychological predictors of the negative outcomes associated with playing MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games). Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 1306–1311. Markey, P. M., & Scherer, K. (2009). An examination of psychoticism and motion capture controls as moderators of the effects of violent video games. Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 407–411. Mathews, V. P., Kronenberger, W. G., Wang, Y., Lurito, J. T., Lowe, M. J., & Dunn, D. W. (2005). Media violence exposure and frontal lobe activation measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging in aggressive and nonaggressive adolescents. Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, 29, 287–292. Mistry, K. B., Minkovitz, C. S., Strobino, D. M., & Borzekowski, D. L. (2007). Children’s television exposure and behavioral and social outcomes at 5.5 years: Does timing of exposure matter? Pediatrics, 120, 762–769. Möller, I., & Krahé, B. (2009). Exposure to violent video games and aggression in German adolescents: A longitudinal analysis. Aggressive Behavior, 35, 75–89. Mullin, C. R., & Linz, D. (1995). Desensitization and resensitization to violence against women: Effects of exposure to sexually violent films on judgments of domestic violence victims. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 449–459. Osofsky, H., & Osofsky, J. (2001). Violent and aggressive behaviors in youth: A mental health and prevention perspective. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 64, 285–295. Patterson, G. (1995). Coercion as a basis for early age of onset for arrest. In J. McCord (Ed.), Coercion and punishment in long-term perspectives (pp. 81–105). New York: Cambridge University Press. Raine, A., Brennen, P. A., Farrington, D. P., & Mednick, S. A. (Eds.). (1997). Biosocial bases of violence. London: Plenum Press. Rideout, V. J., Foehr, U. G., & Roberts, D. F. (2010). Generation M2—Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Role of V↜ictimization Experiences in Adolescent Girls and Young Women’s Aggression in Dating Relationships Katie M. Edwards, Christina M. Dardis, and Christine A. Gidycz

Overview Dating violence—which includes physical, sexual, and psychological abuse—is a major public health problem with far-reaching consequences to both victims and society. Much of the dating violence research has focused on girls and women as victims and boys and men as perpetrators. However, there is a burgeoning body of literature demonstrating that girls and young women engage in aggressive behaviors toward their dating partners. In a meta-analysis, Archer (2002) reported that women were slightly more likely than men to perpetrate physical aggression toward heterosexual partners. Data derived from adolescent samples suggest similar findings. Across studies of adolescents, 28% to 44% of girls report engaging in physical aggression toward a dating partner, whereas 11% to 39% of boys report engaging in similar behaviors (see Hickman, Jaycox, & Aronoff, 2004, for a review). Magdol and colleagues (1997) found that among young adults in New Zealand, 22% of men and 37% of women

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reported perpetrating physical aggression in dating relationships Â�during the past 12 months and 86% of men and 95% of women reported perpetrating psychological aggression in dating relationships during the past 12 months. Similarly, Edwards, Desai, Gidycz, and VanWynsberghe (2009) found that 12% of college women reported perpetrating physical aggression, and 74% reported perpetrating psychological aggression (broadly defined) over a brief two-month follow-up period. Importantly, however, research with both adolescents and young adults suggests that the vast majority of sexual assaults, including those that occur within the context of dating relationships, are perpetrated by boys and young men (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000; Foshee, 1996; Hickman et al., 2004). Although adolescent girls and young women appear to engage in similar rates of physical and psychological aggression toward dating partners as boys and young men, there are several caveats to this data: (a) adolescent girls’ and young women’s aggression is often motivated by fear and self-defense, whereas adolescent boys’ and young men’s use of aggression is often motivated by power and control; (b) adolescent boys and young men often engage in more serious forms of perpetration than adolescent girls and young women; and (c) adolescent girls and young women report greater injury, fear, and psychological consequences to dating violence victimization than do male victims of dating violence (Archer, 2000; Foshee, 1996; Molidor & Tolman, 1998; O’Keefe & Treister, 1998; Swan et al., 2008; Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). Additionally, there are gender differences in risk factors for perpetration of dating violence. In particular, research demonstrates that victimization experiences are a stronger and more consistent predictor of adolescent girls’ and young women’s engagement in aggression than adolescent boys’ and young men’s engagement in aggression (Follette & Alexander, 1992; Graves, 2007; Luthra & Gidycz, 2006; Magdol et al., 1997; O’Keefe, 1998). Indeed, there is a growing consensus in the literature that adolescent girls’ and young women’s experiences of perpetrating dating violence must be considered within the context of their own victimization experiences in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood (Edwards et al., 2009; Graves, Sechrist, White, & Paradise, 2005; Swan & Snow, 2002; Zahn, 2007). Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of research that has assessed the relationship between adolescent girls’ and young women’s experiences of victimization and their own use of aggression in dating relationships. Additionally, theoretical explanations for these relationships and implications for gender-sensitive prevention efforts are discussed. Of note, although there are factors other than victimization experiences (e.g., socioeconomic status, antisocial behavior, association

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with delinquent peer group) that affect adolescent girls’ and young women’s use of aggression in dating relationships, they are beyond the scope of this review and discussed elsewhere (e.g., Graves, 2007). Further, given that the vast majority of dating violence research has been conducted with heterosexual adolescents and young adults, adolescent girls’ and young women’s perpetration of same-sex dating violence is not addressed in this review, although this is an important area for future research (for a review, see Murray & Mobley, 2009).

Research Evidence There are a number of studies that have assessed the role of victimization experiences in adolescent girls’ and young women’s use of aggression in dating relationships. Much of this research focuses on the role of childhood abuse and exposure to domestic violence and young women’s subsequent use of aggression in adolescence and young adulthood. Although there is some conflicting evidence in the research literature (Foo & Margolin, 1995; Graves et al., 2005; O’Keefe, 1997), most data support the general finding that childhood abuse and/or exposure to domestic violence in childhood increases adolescent girls’ and young women’s risk for perpetrating dating violence (Follete & Alexander, 1992; Kaura & Allen, 2004; Luthra & Gidycz, 2006; O’Keefe, 1998). For example, in a sample of adolescent girls, O’Keefe (1998) found that among females who witnessed high levels of interparental violence, having additionally experienced child abuse increased the likelihood of both perpetrating and receiving dating violence. In a college sample, Crawford and Wright (2007) found that childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse predicted subsequent perpetration of dating aggression (generally defined as physical, verbal, and/or sexual aggression). Similarly, Magdol, Moffitt, Caspi, and Silva (1998) found that harsh punishment in childhood (including items consistent with physical and verbal abuse) was significantly correlated with young women’s subsequent perpetration of both verbal and physical abuse in their dating relationships. Moreover, research generally suggests that childhood abuse perpetrated by fathers is more predictive of subsequent dating violence perpetration than childhood abuse perpetrated by mothers (Edwards et al., 2009; Kaura & Allen, 2004; Luthra & Gidycz, 2006). A possible explanatory mechanism for these findings is that paternal abuse is often more severe than maternal abuse (Paterson, Fairbairn-Dunlop, Cowley-Malcolm, & Schluter, 2007) and causes children to feel more helpless and defenseless than maternal abuse (Miller, Downs, & Testa, 1993; Paterson et al., 2007).

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Despite the importance of early abusive experiences, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that more recent victimization experiences in adolescence and/or young adulthood are more predictive of adolescent girls’ and young women’s use of aggression than childhood experiences. Research with adolescent girls documents that dating violence perpetration is strongly associated with dating violence victimization during this time period (Cano, Avery-Leaf, Cascardi, & O’Leary, 1998; O’Keefe, 1997). For example, O’Keefe (1997) found that, among predictors of dating violence including attitudes toward dating violence, childhood experiences with violence, dating violence conflict, and alcohol or drug use, the strongest predictor of inflicting dating violence for adolescent girls was having received past physical violence from a dating partner. This pattern progresses into young adulthood. For example, Luthra and Gidycz (2006) found that women who reported paternal abuse in childhood were three times more likely to report physical dating violence perpetration than women who did not report paternal abuse histories. However, a much stronger relationship was found between physical dating violence victimization in adolescence and college women’s reports of physical dating violence victimization; in fact, women who reported being the victim of physical dating violence in adolescence or young adulthood were 103 times more likely to engage in physical dating violence perpetration than women without histories of physical dating violence victimization. Research using longitudinal, prospective designs provide further evidence that childhood experiences are often less predictive of dating violence perpetration than victimization experiences that occur in the context of dating relationships (Edwards et al., 2009; Graves et al., 2005; Magdol et al., 1997). For example, using a prospective design, Edwards and colleagues (2009) found that reports of childhood abuse at the first survey session were unrelated to women’s reports of perpetrating physical and psychological aggression over a 2-month interim period. In fact, results from the two prospective, longitudinal regression analyses suggested that verbal victimization over the interim predicted women’s reports of verbal perpetration over the interim and that physical victimization over the interim predicted women’s reports of physical perpetration over the interim. The Edwards and colleagues (2009) study also showed that sexual victimization in adolescence/young adulthood increases young women’s likelihood of perpetrating dating violence during this same time period. These findings are consistent with other research showing that women who are sexually victimized by a dating partner are more likely to reciprocate with physical or verbal aggression rather than sexual

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aggression (DiLillo, Giuffre, Tremblay, & Peterson, 2001). Further, this supports the notion that women likely match their conflict resolution and resistance strategies to those being used by their dating partner (Abel, 2001; Gidycz, McNamara, & Edwards, 2006; Ullman, 1998). However, future research that assesses the temporal sequencing in abusive dating interactions is needed to better document the extent to which adolescent girls’ and young women’s aggression occurs in response to adolescent boys’ and young men’s threatening behaviors. In another prospective study of college women, Graves and colleagues (2005) found that although childhood abuse was unrelated to women’s reports of physical perpetration in adolescence, physical dating violence victimization in adolescence predicted women’s reports of physical dating violence perpetration in adolescence and subsequent physical dating violence perpetration in college. Additionally, in a longitudinal study that followed a New Zealand birth cohort for 20 years, results showed that women physically victimized by partners were 10 times more likely to perpetrate physical aggression than women not victimized by partners; abusive experiences in childhood were generally not as predictive of dating violence perpetration as more recent victimization experiences (Magdol et al., 1997). These studies are consistent with the hypothesis that the effects of family-of-origin violence may attenuate over time, and concurrent factors, such as being victimized within the context of a relationship, become stronger predictors of dating aggression. Similarly, it has also been suggested that childhood abuse increases adolescent girls’ and young women’s risk for subsequent victimization in these later developmental periods, which in turn increases their propensity to use aggression against a dating partner (Edwards et al., 2009; Swan et al., 2008). Thus, future work is needed to explore the extent to which earlier family-of-origin abuse indirectly affects subsequent perpetration by placing one at risk for abuse in intimate relationships that occur beginning in adolescence.

Theoretical Explanations The theories that are used most commonly to explain the relationship between adolescent girls and young women’s victimization experiences and use of aggression in dating relationships are self-defense, social learning theory, and developmental traumatology theory. Although other theories have been provided to explain dating violence perpetration, these three theories are reviewed because they (unlike other theories) have victimization as the central, explanatory variable.

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Self-Defense Much prior research has postulated that adolescent girls and women perpetrate intimate partner violence out of self-defense (Abel, 2001; Dasgupta, 1999; Hamberger & Guse, 2002; Swan et al., 2008), whereas for men issues of power and control are prominent (Dasgupta, 2002; Rennison & Welchans, 2000). O’Keefe’s (1997) study of high school students found that adolescent girls were significantly more likely than adolescent boys to use violence for reasons of self-defense. Noonan and Charles (2009) also found that self-defense was a key motivator for girls slapping boyfriends among middle school youths. In a study of 14- to 18-year-olds, Molidor and Tolman (1998) found that 36% of girls reported that they defended themselves when physically assaulted by male partners. The idea that women are not the likely initiators of violence is supported by empirical research, as 70% of adolescent girls report that their male partner initiated violence in their relationships (Molidor & Tolman, 1998). Further, Foshee and colleagues (2007) found that 39% of aggressive acts reported by girls were either in self-defense or retaliatory in response to patterns of violence committed by the male partner and that an additional 17% of aggressive acts were perpetrated in a situation in which it was the first time a girl’s partner aggressed against her. The study by Foshee and colleagues (2007) underscores that adolescent girls and young women may use aggression toward a partner out of self-defense in the immediate presence of danger or days or even months following their victimization or a pattern of violence. This latter type of response is termed retaliatory aggression (as opposed to self-defense) in which adolescent girls and young women aggress against their partners in response to a pattern of violent victimization in the relationship, even if not in the immediate presence of danger (Dasgupta, 1999; Faith, 1993; Fiebert & Gonzalez, 1997; Follingstad, Wright, Lloyd, & Sebastian, 1991). However, it could be argued that it is difficult to distinguish retaliatory aggression and aggression for self-defense purposes.

Social Learning Theory and Intergenerational Transmission of Violence Theory According to social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) and the intergenerational transmission of violence theory (Widom, 1989), children who witness and/or experience parent-to-child or parent-to-parent violence within their families are more likely to adopt and imitate these behaviors within their dating relationships; they view it as an appropriate means for resolving conflict. In support of this theory, Riggs and O’Leary (1996) found that positive attitudes about dating aggression were related

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to having witnessed parental aggression and experiencing child abuse. Further, positive attitudes toward dating aggression, having a history of aggressive behavior, and high levels of conflict in one’s relationship predicted female perpetration of dating violence. Although some studies (e.g., Riggs & O’Leary, 1996; Magdol et al., 1997; Tontodonato & Crew, 1992) have found empirical support for the social learning theory in understanding dating violence perpetration, other studies have failed to document relationships among childhood abuse, positive attitudes toward dating violence, and dating violence perpetration (Follette & Alexander, 1992; O’Keefe & Treister, 1998; Schwartz, O’Leary, & Kendziora, 1997). In addition to the relationship between previous victimization experiences and subsequent perpetration of dating violence, exposure to a partner’s attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviors regarding violence can affect the other partner’s attitudes about violence and their own use of violence (Sellers, Cochran, & Branch, 2005), which is consistent with social learning theory. For example, the chance of physical aggression toward one’s partner becomes greater when the other partner endorses and displays the behavior himself/herself (Riggs & O’Leary, 1989; O’Keefe & Treister, 1998). Further, interdependence theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959) suggests that close others influence adolescent behavior, and because adolescents have not had extensive relationship experiences, it is posited that adolescents form standards based on observation of close others (e.g., friends, parents). Standards of acceptable interaction can shape perpetration or victimization interactions. In support of this theory, adolescents with peers who are perpetrators or victims of dating violence are more likely to experience dating violence in their own relationships (Arriaga & Foshee, 2004; Gwartney-Gibbs, Stockard, & Bohmer, 1987). Thus, the social learning theory posits that perpetration of aggression is both a product of childhood experiences of abuse as well as the abuse experienced within intimate relationships. And while research generally supports the tenets of the social learning theory, not all studies find relationships between victimization experiences in childhood and subsequent perpetration of dating violence (Foo & Margolin, 1995; Graves et al., 2005; O’Keefe, 1997). Further, not all adolescent girls and young women who grow up in abusive households perpetrate dating violence, and some females who perpetrate dating violence come from households in which they did not experience violence. Given the limitations of the social learning theory and its exclusive focus on victimization, Riggs and O’Leary (1989) expanded on this theory by proposing that a history of victimization and other background factors (e.g., aggressive personality characteristics, arousability, psychopathology) interact with situational factors

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(e.g., interpersonal conflict, substance abuse, relationship satisfaction, problem-solving skills, communication styles) to determine whether or not an individual will engage in dating violence. Several studies have found empirical support for this theory in predicting the perpetration of violence among both adolescent girls and boys and young women and men (Luthra & Gidycz, 2006; Magdol et al., 1997; Riggs & O’Leary, 1996).

Developmental Traumatology Theory and Affect Theory According to developmental traumatology theory (DeBellis & Putman, 1994), trauma-related symptomatology mediates the relationship between a history of maltreatment and subsequent maladaptive outcomes (which could include dating violence perpetration) due to stress-induced neurobiological changes. For example, stress during child abuse could lead to structural and functional brain changes, resulting in a variety of potential maladaptive outcomes, including higher episodic responses to traumatic cues. Similarly, affect theory posits that individuals characterized by affective profiles including hostility, anxiety, and depression are more likely to engage in violent behavior generally (Starzomski & Nussbaum, 2000) and interpersonal violence specifically (Magdol et al., 1997) and that these profiles can occur due to child maltreatment. This theory is supported by the fact that young women tend to experience sexual abuse over extended periods of time and at younger ages than young men, putting women at a higher risk for trauma symptom development (Simkins & Katz, 2002). Thus, researchers postulate that violence may provide an outlet for the emotional distress experienced by females who have traumatic experiences such as child maltreatment and prior dating violence (Simkins & Katz, 2002; Swan & Snow, 2002). In support of this theory, Capaldi and Crosby (1997) found that among 18-year-old women with abuse histories, those young women who reported both depression symptoms and low self-esteem were more likely to commit violence against their dating partners than those without such symptomtology. A study of adolescent dating violence similarly found that females with a history of child maltreatment were more than seven times as likely to have clinically significant difficulties with anger and depression and more than nine times as likely to experience clinically significant levels of anxiety and PTSD than those without a maltreatment history and that such women were marginally more likely to perpetrate abuse than women who were not as severely traumatized (Wolfe, Scott, Wekerle, & Pittman, 2001). Further, Wolfe, Wekerle, Scott, Straatman, and Grasley (2004) studied high school students longitudinally, finding that child maltreatment was related to trauma-related anger at Time 1, which prospectively

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predicted dating violence perpetration. In this study, trauma symptoms were the only variable that predicted an increase in violent perpetration longitudinally, whereas attitudes toward violence, self-efficacy, and empathy were not related to perpetration of violence over time, suggesting a unique role of post-traumatic stress symptoms above and beyond relationship factors and attitudes toward violence. Thus, victimization experiences in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood may predict dating violence perpetration through negative affective states.

Conclusion and Implications The purpose of this chapter was to review the literature on adolescent girls’ and young women’s use of aggression in dating relationships. Although this is a relatively new area of research, overall studies suggest that adolescent girls and young women engage in similar rates of physical and psychological dating aggression as do adolescent boys and young men (Hickman et al., 2004; Magdol et al., 1997). Nevertheless, research shows that there are important gender differences in the risk factors, developmental trajectories, motivations, functions, manifestations, and consequences of dating violence (Archer, 2000; Foshee, 1996; Molidor & Tolman, 1998; O’Keefe & Treister, 1998). In this chapter, we focused specifically on how experiences of victimization relate to adolescent girls’ and young women’s use of physical and psychological dating aggression. Although a number of studies have documented relationships between childhood abuse and exposure to domestic violence and subsequent dating violence perpetration, victimization experiences in adolescence and young adulthood are generally more salient predictors of dating violence perpetration than childhood experiences (Cano et al., 1998; O’Keefe, 1997). Indeed, there is a growing consensus in the literature that among adolescent girls and young women concurrent factors (e.g., dating violence victimization) are stronger predictors of dating aggression than family-of-origin violence (O’Keefe, 1997; Luthra & Gidycz, 2006). Theoretical explanations for these relationships draw on self-defense, social learning, intergenerational transmission of violence, developmental traumatology, and affect theories (Dasgupta, 1999; DeBellis & Putnam, 1994; Hamberger & Guse, 2002; Riggs & O’Leary, 1996). Given the endemic rates of dating violence and the negative consequences of dating violence to victims and society, there have been increasing efforts aimed at the primary prevention of dating violence. A number of dating violence prevention programs have been developed for adolescents and young adults. Whereas some programs are

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guided by feminist theory and/or social learning theory, other programs adapt a more skills-based and gender-neutral approach (for reviews, see Hickman et al., 2004; Whitaker et al., 2006). In fact, most dating violence prevention programs target mixed-gender audiences and do not take into account gender differences in dating violence perpetration. Furthermore, only a small number of studies have used rigorous methodologies to assess the effects that dating violence programming has on participants’ attitudes and, most importantly, reduction in aggressive dating behaviors (Hickman et al., 2004; Whitaker et al., 2006). Indeed, only two programs (Safe Dates and Youth Relationships Project) that have undergone controlled evaluations have demonstrated actual reductions in dating violence (although these reductions do not always remain consistent over time) (Foshee, 1996; Foshee et al., 1996, 1998, 2000, 2004; Wolfe et al., 2001, 2003). Both Safe Dates and Youth Relationships Project employ intensive, multi-session curricula with mixed-gender, adolescent audiences. However, the target audiences for these two programs are somewhat different: Safe Dates is a school-based program that targets all youths, whereas the Youth Relationships Project is a community-based program that targets high-risk youths with histories of maltreatment. Interestingly, although the effects of the Safe Dates program did not vary by gender (Foshee et al., 2004), the effects of the Youth Relationships Project were stronger for girls than for boys (Wolfe et al., 2003). Preliminary findings from outcome evaluation studies of dating violence prevention programs underscore the importance of potential gender differences in program effectiveness. Accordingly, it has been suggested that gender-specific programming may be more effective in presenting dating violence and sexual assault than mixed-gender programming (Edwards et al., 2009; Gidycz, Orchowski, & Edwards, in press; Graves, 2007), especially in light of the fact that most evaluations of these programs find null results (Gidycz et al., in press; Hickman et al., 2004; Whitaker et al., 2006). Given the documented gender differences in dating violence, and consistent with proposed theoretical explanations of adolescent girls’ and young women’s aggression, it is presumable that programming grounded in female-specific socialization experiences and experiences of past victimizations will be more effective than genderneutral programming (Edwards et al., 2009; Graves, 2007; Zurbriggen, 2009). Whereas some programming efforts are critical for both sexes (e.g., definitions of dating violence, identification of risky dating situations, healthy conflict resolution strategies, changing norms associated with dating violence, decreasing bystander behavior), some genderspecific information (e.g., coping with past trauma, self-defense strategies)

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might best be delivered in single-gender programs. Ultimately, it is an empirical question about whether mixed- or single-gender programs are most effective in reducing dating violence. In the past decade, our understanding of adolescent girls and young women’s perpetration of dating violence has increased. However, more research is needed in order to better understand the gender variations in risk factors for and theoretical explanations of dating violence. Although research demonstrates that many adolescent girls and young women aggress in response to men’s aggression, there is clearly a subset of women who are initiators and primary perpetrators of aggression in relationships, which warrants further empirical investigation. We also need to develop a better understanding of the temporal sequencing of violence within adolescent relationships as well as the role of peer norms and substance abuse in dating violence (and if gender moderates any of these relationships). As our understanding of gender variations in dating violence increases, this information can be used to refine, develop, and evaluate dating violence prevention programs in schools and communities while advocating for broader institutional and societal changes to promote healthy dating relationships.

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Capaldi, D. M., & Gorman-Smith, D. (2003). The development of aggression in young male/female couples. In P. Florsheim (Ed.), Adolescent romantic relations and sexual behavior: Theory, research, and practical implications (pp. 243–278). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Crawford, E., & Wright, M. O. (2007). The impact of childhood psychological maltreatment on interpersonal schemas and subsequent experiences of relationship aggression. Journal of Emotional Abuse, 7, 93–116. doi:10.1300 /J135v07n02_06 Dasgupta, S. D. (1999). Just like men? A critical view of violence by women. In M. F. Shepard & E. L. Pence (Eds.), Coordinating community responses to domestic violence: Lessons from Duluth and beyond (pp. 195–222). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dasgupta, S. D. (2002). A framework for understanding women’s use of nonlethal violence in intimate heterosexual relationships. Violence Against Women, 8, 1364–1389. doi:10.1177/107780102762478046 DeBellis, M. D., & Putnam, F. W. (1994). The psychobiology of childhood maltreatment. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 3(4), 663–678. DiLillo, D., Giuffre, D., Tremblay, G. C., & Peterson, L. (2001). A closer look at the nature of intimate partner violence reported by women with a history of child sexual abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 16, 116–132. doi:10.1177/088626001016002002 Edwards, K. E., Desai, A. D., Gidycz, C. A., & VanWynsberghe, A. (2009). College women’s aggression in relationships: The role of childhood and adolescent victimization. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33, 255–265. doi:10.1111 /j.1471-6402.2009.01498.x Faith, K. (1993). Unruly women: The politics of confinement and resistance. Vancouver, Canada: Press Gang. Fiebert, M. S., & Gonzalez, D. M. (1997). College women who initiate assaults on their male partners and the reasons offered for such behavior. Psychological Reports, 80, 583–590. Fisher, B. S., Cullen, F. T., & Turner, M. G. (2000). The sexual victimization of college women (NCJ 182369). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Follette, V. M., & Alexander, P. C. (1992). Dating violence: Current and historical correlates. Behavioral Assessment, 14, 39–52. Follingstad, D. R., Wright, S., Lloyd, S., & Sebastian, J. (1991). Sex differences in motivations and effects in dating violence. Family Relations, 40, 51–57. doi:10.2307/585658 Foo, L., & Margolin, G. (1995). A multivariate investigation of dating violence. Journal of Family Violence, 10, 351–377. doi:10.1007/BF02110711 Foshee, V. A. (1996). Gender differences in adolescent dating abuse prevalence, types, and injuries. Health Education Research, 11, 275–286. doi:10.1093 /her/11.3.275-a Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Arriaga, X. B., Helms, R. W., Koch, G. G., & Linder, G. F. (1998). An evaluation of Safe Dates, an adolescent dating violence prevention program. American Journal of Public Health, 88(1), 45–50. doi:10.2105 /AJPH.88.1.45

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Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Ennett, S. T., Linder, G. F., Benefield, T., & Suchindran, C. (2004). Assessing the long-term effects of the Safe Dates program and a booster in preventing and reducing adolescent dating violence victimization and perpetration. American Journal of Public Health, 94, 619–624. doi:10.2105 /AJPH.94.4.619 Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Greene, W. F., Koch, G. G., Linder, G. F., & MacDougall, J. E. (2000). The Safe Dates program: 1-year follow-up results. American Journal of Public Health, 90(10), 1619–1622. doi:10.2105 /AJPH.90.10.1619 Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Linder, F., Rice, J., & Wilcher, R. (2007). Typologies of adolescent dating violence: Identifying typologies of adolescent dating violence perpetration. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 22, 498–519. doi:10.1177/0886260506298829 Foshee, V. A., Linder, G. F., Bauman, K. E., Langwick, S. A., Arriaga, X. B., Heath, J. L., et al. (1996). The Safe Dates project: Theoretical basis, evaluation design, and selected baseline findings. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 12, 39–47. Gidycz, C. A., McNamara, J. R., & Edwards, K. E. (2006). Women’s risk perception and sexual victimization: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11(5), 441–456. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2006.01.004 Gidycz, C. A., Orchowski, L. M., & Edwards, K. M. (in press). Sexual violence: Primary prevention. In J. White, M. Koss, & A. Kazdin (Eds.), Violence against women and children: Consensus, critical analysis, and emergent priorities. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Graves, K. N. (2007). Not always sugar and spice: Expanding theoretical and functional explanations for why females aggress. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 12, 131–140. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2004.08.002 Graves, K. N., Sechrist, S. M., White, J. W., & Paradise, M. J. (2005). Intimate partner violence perpetrated by college women within the context of a history of victimization. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 29, 278–289. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2005.00222.x Gwartney-Gibbs, P. A., Stockard, J., & Bohmer, S. (1987). Learning courtship aggression: The influence of parents, peers, and personal experiences. Family Relations, 36, 276–282. doi:10.2307/583540 Hamberger, L. K., & Guse, C. E. (2002). Men’s and women’s use of intimate partner violence in clinical samples. Violence Against Women, 8, 1301–1331. doi:10.1177/107780102762478028 Hickman, L. J., Jaycox, L. H., & Aronoff, J. (2004). Dating violence among adolescents: Prevalence, gender distribution, and prevention program effectiveness. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 5, 123–142. doi:10.1177/1524838003262332 Kaura, S. A., & Allen, C. M. (2004). Dissatisfaction with relationship power and dating violence perpetration by men and women. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 19, 576–588. doi:10.1177/0886260504262966 Luthra, R., & Gidycz, C. A. (2006). Dating violence among college men and women: Evaluation of a theoretical model. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 21, 717–731. doi:10.1177/0886260506287312

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Magdol, L., Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Newman, D. L., Fagan, J., & Silva, P. A. (1997). Gender differences in partner violence in a birth cohort of 21-yearolds: Bridging the gap between clinical and epidemiological approaches. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 65, 68–78. doi:10.1037 /0022-006X.65.1.68 Magdol, L., Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., & Silva, P. A. (1998). Developmental antecedents of partner abuse: A prospective longitudinal study. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 107, 375–389. doi:10.1037/0021-843X.107.3.375 Miller, B. A., Downs, W. R., & Testa, M. (1993). Interrelationships between victimization experiences and women’s alcohol use. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 11, 109–117. Molidor, C., & Tolman, R. M. (1998). Gender and contextual factors in adolescent dating violence. Violence Against Women, 4, 180–195. doi:10.1177/1077801298004002004 Murray, C. E., & Mobley, A. K. (2009). Empirical research about same-sex intimate partner violence: A methodological review. Journal of Homosexuality, 56(3), 361–386. doi:10.1080/00918360902728848 Noonan, R. K., & Charles, D. (2009). Developing teen dating violence prevention strategies: Formative research with middle school youth. Violence Against Women, 15, 1087–1105. doi:10.1177/1077801209340761 O’Keefe, M. (1997). Predictors of dating violence among high school students. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 12, 546–568. doi:10.1177/088626097012004005 O’Keefe, M. (1998). Factors mediating the link between witnessing interparental violence and dating violence. Journal of Family Violence, 13, 39–57. doi:10.1023/A:1022860700118 O’Keefe, M., & Treister, L. (1998). Victims of dating violence among high school students. Violence Against Women, 4, 195–223. doi:10.1177/107780 1298004002005 Paterson, J., Fairbairn-Dunlop, P., Cowley-Malcolm, E., Schluter, P. (2007). Maternal childhood parental abuse history and current intimate partner violence: Data from the Pacific Islands Families Study. Violence and Victims, 22, 474–488. Rennison, C. M., & Welchans, S. (2000). Intimate partner violence. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Riggs, D. S., & O’Leary, D. K. (1989). A theoretical model of courtship aggression. Violence in dating relationships: Emerging social issues. New York: Praeger Publishers. Riggs, D. S., & O’Leary, D. K. (1996). Aggression between heterosexual dating partners: An examination of a causal model of courtship aggression. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 11, 519–540. doi:10.1177/088626096011004005 Schwartz, M., O’Leary, S. G., & Kendziora, K. T. (1997). Dating aggression among high school students. Violence and Victims, 12, 295–305. Sellers, C. S., Cochran, J. K., & Branch, K. A. (2005). Social learning theory and partner violence: A research note. Deviant Behavior, 26, 379–395. doi:10.1080/016396290931669

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Simkins, S., & Katz, S. (2002). Criminalizing abused females. Violence Against Women, 8, 1474–1499. doi:10.1177/107780102237966 Starzomski, A., & Nussbaum, D. (2000). The self and the psychology of domestic homicide-suicide. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 44(4), 468–479. doi:10.1177/0306624X00444005 Swan, S. C., Gambone, L. J., Caldwell, J. E., Sullivan, T. P., & Snow, D. L. (2008). A review of research on women’s use of violence with male intimate partners. Violence and Victims, 23, 301–314. doi:10.1891/0886-6708.23.3.301 Swan, S. C., & Snow, D. L. (2002). A typology of women’s use of violence in intimate relationships. Violence Against Women, 8, 286–319. doi:10.1177/107780120200800302 Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. (1959). The Social Psychology of Groups. New York: Wiley. Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (2000). Prevalence and consequences of maleto-female and female-to-male intimate partner violence as measured by the National Violence Against Women Survey. Violence Against Women, 6, 142–161. doi:10.1177/10778010022181769 Tontodonato, P., & Crew, B. (1992). Dating violence, social learning theory, and gender: A multivariate analysis. Violence and Victims, 7, 3–14. Ullman, S. E. (1998). Does offender violence escalate when rape victims fight back? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 13, 179–192. doi:10.1177/088626098013002001 Whitaker, D. J., Morrison, S., Lindquist, S., Hawkins, S. R., O’Neil, J. A., Nesius, A. M., et al. (2006). A critical review of interventions for the primary prevention of perpetration of partner violence. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11, 151–166. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2005.07.007 Widom, C. W. (1989). The cycle of violence. Science, 244(April), 160–244. Wolfe, D. A., Scott, K., Wekerle, C., & Pittman, A.-L. (2001). Child maltreatment: Risk of adjustment problems and dating violence in adolescence. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 40(3), 282–289. doi:10.1097/00004583-200103000-00007 Wolfe, D. A., Wekerle, C., Scott, K., Straatman, A., & Grasley, C. (2004). Predicting abuse in adolescent dating relationships over one year: The role of child maltreatment and trauma. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 113, 406–415. Wolfe, D. A., Wekerle, C., Scott, K., Straatman, A., Grasley, C., & Reitzel-Jaffe, D. (2003). Dating violence prevention with at-risk youth: A controlled outcome evaluation. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 71, 279–291. Zahn, M. A. (2007). The causes of girls’ delinquency and their program implications. Family Court Review, 45, 456–465. doi:10.1111/j.1744-1617.2007.00161.x Zurbriggen, E. L. (2009). Understanding and preventing adolescent dating violence: The importance of developmental, sociocultural, and gendered perspectives. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33, 30–33. doi:10.1111/j.14716402.2008.01471.x

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PART II

Educational Responses to Teen V↜iolence

CHAPTER FIVE

Educating Teens to Discriminate Abusive from Nonabusive Situations Imelda N. Bratton, Christopher P. Roseman, and William E. Schweinle

Research on How Adolescents Experience Abuse Over the past 30 years, there has been an increase in media attention on scientific research into the abuse that adolescents experience. Makepeace (1981) originally noted this phenomenon, which eventually lead to awareness that adolescent abuse and abusiveness are a serious public health issue. For instance, the most current data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, 2010) found that 772,000 children (1 to 17 years of age) were victims of child abuse or neglect in 2008. Approximately 71.1% experienced neglect; 16.1% experienced physical abuse; 9.1% experienced sexual abuse; and 7.3% experienced emotional or psychological maltreatment. Other research estimates place overall rates from 9% to 80% (e.g., BoneyMcCoy & Finkerlhor, 1995; Ely, Dulmus, & Wodarski, 2002; Hickman, Joycox, & Arnoff, 2004; O’Keefe & Treister, 1998; Perry & Fromuth, 2005; Roberts & Klein, 2003). Variance between the different reported results tends to depend on how the researchers operationally define the word “abuse.” Regardless, these findings do suggest that abuse occurs to at least roughly 1 in 10 teens.

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The majority of abuse research has focused on physical abuse and has identified an association between teenagers’ experience of abusive situations and mental health issues. For example, teens who experience dating violence have an increased rate of depression, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts or ideation, as well as diminished mental and physical wellbeing (Ackard & Neumak-Sztainer, 2002; Coker et al., 2000). Furthermore, females who experience dating violence encounter more psychological abuse than males (Ely et al. 2002; Foshee, 1996; Fredland et al., 2005; Hamby & Sugarman, 1999; Molidor & Tolman, 1998; Simons, Lin, & Gordon, 1998). Psychological abuse is common among teenagers and serves to intimidate or control the victim. The prevalence of psychological abuse between teens has been estimated at 20% to 96% (James, West, Deters, & Armijo, 2000; Jezl, Molidor, & Wright, 1996; Molidor, 1995). Foshee (1996) identified threatening behaviors, behavior monitoring, personal insults, and emotional manipulation among various types of psychological abuse used by teenagers. Although both male and female teens exhibit these behaviors, adolescent females are more likely than adolescent males to use emotional abuse. Additionally, Kasian and Painter (1992) reported an association between the use of psychological abuse in relationships and the risk of physical relationship violence. Learning requires the ability to focus and concentrate, which can be difficult for students who have other things (e.g., abuse) on their mind. Although adolescents frequently experience abusive situations, there are few studies examining the academic effects of these abusive experiences. However, some studies offer important insight. For instance, Luster, Small, and Lower (2002) found that girls and boys who experienced abuse from an adult had lower grade-point averages. More recently, Banyard and Cross (2008) replicated these results and emphasized the importance of social support in moderating the effect of abuse on students’ academic performance. Specifically, Banyard and Cross found that abused male teens who perceived that they had neighborhood support had better grades, while abused female teens who perceived that they had parental and neighborhood support reported only a reduced frequency of suicidal thoughts. It is clear then, that abuse, whether from adults or from peers, does negatively affect students’ school performance.

Adolescents’ Attitudes toward Abuse The ability to recognize abuse can be difficult for adults. It can be especially difficult for inexperienced teenagers. For instance, among teenagers abuse is not easy to distinguish from “just kidding around” or rough play (Sears, Byers,

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Whelan, & Saint-Pierre, 2006). These distinctions are especially ambiguous in the complex social and developing intra- and interpersonal worlds of adolescents. The inability to make this important distinction could be related to the developmental stages of adolescence. And teen relationships are typically unstable, which can increase the likelihood of violence. Foshee, Bauman, Linder, Rice, and Wilcher (2007) found that adolescents who initially reported they had perpetrated acts of violence toward their dating partners were actually referring to playful—but perhaps inappropriate or inept—flirting. More specifically, Foshee and colleagues found that among both male and female adolescents, slapping, pushing, or hitting others is a common occurrence in various relationships and does not signify an act of violence. This plausibly explains, at least in part, why adolescents may have a difficult time identifying an abusive situation. Several studies have examined the possibility that parental violence is a factor leading to acceptance of abuse in future peer relationships (Foshee, Ennett, Bauman, Benefield, & Suchindran, 2005; Lichter & McCloskey, 2004; White & Smith, 2009). For instance, Fredland and colleagues (2005) conducted a qualitative study exploring the perspectives of adolescents. Fredland et al. identified several personal experiences in adolescents’ home environment that impacted the acceptance of abuse in their friendship or dating relationships. Although the adolescents in the study recognized that violence is not part of a healthy relationship, they were not surprised that it can be present in relationships. Some adolescents even described the need to assault their partners when talking does not solve relationship issues. Males listed the following physical acts as examples: slapping, hitting, kicking, etc. Additionally, some of the male participants argued that it was acceptable to strike a female if the female initiated the physical altercation, or that it was fine to strike a female partner but not in the face. These “rules” describing when it is acceptable to strike females shows that young men know they should not generally use violence with females. However, the boys appeared to be confused about whether violence against one’s female partner is never acceptable. Overall, Fredland and colleagues found that both male and female adolescents viewed violence as acceptable in relationships. In the past, it has been assumed that males were typically perpetrators of partner abuse. However, emerging research indicates that males and females may initiate adolescent violence equally (Arriaga & Foshee, 2004; Gray & Foshee, 1997; Ozer, Tschann, Pasch, & Flores, 2004; Rennison, 2002; Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).

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Teenagers are often reluctant to intervene in peer violence situations (Weisz & Black, 2008). This could be due to the belief that it is not their business or responsibility, though it is possible that they simply do not know how to intervene effectively. Females in the Weisz and Black study reported concern about negative consequences for intervening and expressed fear that the violence may be turned toward them. This is a realistic concern, as the majority of teenagers reported to Weisz and Black they had either experienced or perpetrated violence within 6 months of the study. Other theories speculate that teenagers are hesitant to intervene because they like to think that they could take care of their own issues and do not want someone else to intercede in their relationship conflicts. On the other hand, teenagers are more likely to intervene in someone else’s relationship abuse if they know either the perpetrator or victim of abuse (Black & Weisz, 2005; Tisak & Tisak, 1996). Immaturity, lack of experience, fear, and previous abuse experience may lead teenagers into and keep them in abusive situations. While friendships and dating relationships are a natural part of the social development process, abuse should not be so easily accepted in this process. Still, emerging research indicates that teenagers have a high rate of abuse in their relationships, do not interact with clear or correct definitions of abuse, have an overall accepting view of abusive situations, and are generally hesitant to intervene in abusive situations between their peers.

Abuse in the Literature One of the critical issues in researching and in adjudicating abuse is operationally defining “abuse.” Among academic literature, the law, advocacy organizations, and researchers, one can find various views on how abuse should be defined. Although some definitions are somewhat similar, there are distinct differences. Initially, definitions of abuse tended to reflect the legal definition, which included only behaviors that resulted in physical harm or included the threat of physical harm to another person. However, more recent definitions have expanded on this and take into consideration some of the contextual issues surrounding potentially abusive behavior. For example, several authors consider dating violence to include physical, sexual, and/or psychological aggression or threats in an unmarried relationship (Glass et al., 2003; Herrman, 2009). The inclusion of sexual and psychological aggression greatly expands on the scope of older research, as well as on clinical and legal definitions of abuse. Furthermore, there has been a variety of terms used to denote violence in teenagers’ relationships (e.g., dating violence,

Educating Teens to Discriminate Abusive from Nonabusive Situations

intimate partner violence, and partner abuse). This has also inhibited a clearer definition and understanding of abuse. This definitional variance is further evident in the differences between specific state laws, which define abuse in forensic settings. Although statutes may vary from state to state, the more broad definition of abuse does not. Lawyers and courts typically consult Black’s Law Dictionary for descriptions and meanings of terms in legal preparations and proceedings. Black’s Law Dictionary defines abuse as “physical or mental maltreatment, often resulting in mental, emotional, sexual, or physical injury.” In addition, violence is defined as “the use of physical force, usually accompanied by fury, vehemence, or outrage; physical force unlawfully exercised with the intent to harm . . . violence between members of a household . . . the infliction of physical injury, or the creation of a reasonable fear that physical injury or harm will be inflicted, by a parent or a member or former member of a child’s household, against a child or against another member of the household.” These common definitions are used when lawyers prepare for custody, abuse/neglect hearings, and protection orders. There are many national and state advocacy organizations devoted to the prevention of abuse and domestic violence of children, adolescents, and adults. These organizations publish valuable information related to abuse and violence, which can usually be accessed through the Internet. This information generally includes a definition of abuse or violence, checklists of examples of abuse or violence, how to get help, and contact information for local and national resources. For instance, the Advocacy Center and the Domestic Abuse Project (2010) define domestic violence and emotional abuse as “behaviors used by one person in a relationship to control the other. Partners may be married or not married; heterosexual, gay, or lesbian; living together, separated, or dating.” Importantly, this definition encompasses the notion of power and control over the victim. In 2010, the Advocacy Center and Domestic Abuse Project definition was expanded by the National Center for Victims of Crime to include “willful intimidation.” Both of these organizations consider emotional, sexual, and physical acts as components of abuse or violence. The National Council on Child Abuse and Family Violence is unique by specifying gender in their definition: “domestic violence includes physical abuse, sexual violence, psychological and/or emotional abuse of a woman by her mate or companion” (Domestic Abuse Project, 2010). These are only a few of the definitions of abuse and violence that are used by various advocacy organizations nationwide. However, the operating definitions used by advocacy organizations concur in

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continuing to broaden their definitions of abuse and in their consideration of the contexts and outcomes of behaviors that could be considered abusive. In the past, researchers commonly operationally defined abuse or violence for participants in surveys or qualitative interviews. Two definitions generally employed by researchers were “the use or threat of physical force or restraint carried out with the intent of causing pain or injury to another” (Sugarman & Hotaling, 1991) and “any attempt to control or dominate another person physically, sexually, or psychologically, causing some level of harm” (Wolfe et al., 1996). These definitions were frequently used interchangeably or in conjunction with one another to describe the type of incident(s) being investigated. More recently, researchers have revisited the definitions of abuse and violence. The growing body of research literature indicates that abuse is bidirectional (e.g., Straus, 2008) and that the assumption that males are the only ones who perpetrate is sexist (Ross & Babcock, 2010). Interestingly, Ross and Babcock question who the victim is in bidirectional violence. Historically, men have been typically blamed for initiating violence, though this assumption is not categorically accurate. Although some women react in self-defense, other women instigate and perpetrate violence. Some couples are mutually violent. Furthermore, assuming the male is solely at fault prohibits the study of female-initiated perpetration, which has been an area that is relatively unresearched. Ultimately, this is disadvantageous for both female and male partners, as researchers have not developed the necessary understanding of this phenomenon to intervene effectively when females are violent. A majority of feminist researchers agree that violence needs to be considered in context. Consistent with the introduction of new ideas, researchers are debating the most appropriate method to contextualize violence. Researchers have used instruments such as the Conflict Tactics Scales, the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales, the National Crime Victimization Survey, and the Women’s Experiences of Battering to obtain data. Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) recently explored how researchers and practitioners can effectively measure partner violence. Based on her findings, she recommends that practitioners and researchers assess injuries, experienced fear, motivation behind the violence, and antecedents to the violence, as well as the cultural context of each individual involved in the violent situation. Obtaining the “big picture” of violence may allow researchers to gain richer data that can yield better understanding in this research area. Effective early adolescent prevention strategies can be developed based on this data, as can unique intervention techniques for males and females.

Educating Teens to Discriminate Abusive from Nonabusive Situations

Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) reviewed the work of various dyadic researchers and functional typologies to differentiate subtypes of intimate partner violence. The typologies do not include a gender focus, which makes them generalize to homosexual and heterosexual relationships and allow for the possibility that males or females or both partners could perpetrate violent acts. Langhinrichsen-Rohling included a call to researchers to arrive at some consensus that there are different subtypes of intimate partner violence perpetrators (which is applicable for both males and females). Variables such as severity of violence, generalization of violence, motivation for violence, and extent of alcohol or drug use should be established to differentiate subtypes of perpetrators. Langhinrichsen-Rohling argued that the use of typologies in research would allow for a better understanding of etiology, intervention, and treatment strategies, as well as expand research focused on women’s use of violence. However, Langhinrichsen-Rohling’s controversial perspective on intimate partner violence has received some criticism from her colleagues. For instance, although Ross and Babcock (2010) supported LanghinrichsenRohling’s view that females are perpetrators of violence and that the field lacks knowledge of female perpetration, and although they agreed that female-instigated/perpetrated violence should be researched (and raised the question of who the victim actually is in cases of bidirectional abuse), they did not concur with applying typologies to couples who experience violence. Ross and Babcock argue that not all perpetrators fit into categories. And, based on this premise, Ross and Babcock recommended the use of a dimensional approach, in which abuse can be evaluated using one or more oblique and orthogonal continua, which results in a profile of a given abusive behavior rather than a discrete category. Ross and Babcock suggest that researchers should identify and develop measures for these continuous abuse-related dimensions and establish evidence-based links to possible interventions. Stark (2010) concurred with the argument that both males and females participate in violence. Stark also suggested that clinicians may be able to use a form of typology in clinical work with abusive partners. He defined abuse as having the following components. It is: non-voluntary, characterized by exercising authority over another and reallocating opportunities that will benefit the abuser. Stark recommended examining acts of violence in their historical context by exploring subjective information from the victim and taking into consideration whether the victim experienced fear or psychological trauma. Additionally, Stark argued that viewing abuse in historical contexts supports research and

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victims’ reports that abuse can be a continuous “process” rather than one or more isolated categorical events. It is important to note here that the additive outcomes of long-term abuse may be substantially more detrimental to victims than any single incident. However, minor abuse is generally minimized in the courts, which treat minor abusive episodes as uniquely occurring misdemeanors. Unlike Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Stark supported the continued research of male-dominated abuse, arguing that males who are assaulted by females do not desire or need additional assistance, support, or protection. Based on his research, Johnson (2010) created a control-based typology. Types include intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and situational couple violence. Intimate terrorism is the use of violence, along with other tactics, to gain control over the partner. Violent resistance is the use of violence to resist being controlled. Johnson also reported that males for the most part perpetrate violence. Partners who are in intimate terrorism relationships can also employ and experience violent resistance. Johnson argued on the basis of data collected from advocacy agencies that these are the two main types of violence. Johnson further argued that this is the case because intimate terrorism occurs continuously over the length of the relationship. This also concurs with Starks’s assertion that abuse should be viewed in context. The third type of abuse, situational couple violence, refers to disputes that escalate into verbal and physical aggression. Situational couple violence is not ongoing, does not have a control motive, and is perpetrated by both males and females. Johnson further argued that situational violence dominates general research data and declared that the differences between sources of data, agencies, and researchers are what have led to historically inconsistent frequency estimates and research findings about intimate partner violence. Johnson suggested that data from agencies is truly representative of violence and that general research data does not accurately represent violence. He adds that there is a higher level of male than female violence perpetration and intimate terrorism. Clearly, as this brief literature review reveals, defining abuse is difficult. And, based on the current legal, political, advocacy, and scientific debates revolving around the definition(s) of partner abuse, it appears that more debate, and hopefully more research, will help better clarify this issue. However, for the time being, abuse can be defined as an amalgam of the different definitions we have discussed above. Abuse is the threat to act or action that leads to physical, psychological, or sexual harm to a person.

Educating Teens to Discriminate Abusive from Nonabusive Situations

Involvement in Abusive Relationships For both the perpetrator and the victim, tendencies toward abusive relationships may begin to reveal themselves before full adulthood. These tendencies are often a manifestation of formative childhood experiences, such as having been the victim of parental abuse or having witnessed abusive behavior between parents (see Dutton, 2007, for a thorough review of these predisposing and related personality factors). For instance, a child’s observation and subsequent perception of patterns of abusive behavior or the child’s observation of a victim’s willingness to remain in an abusive relationship may be mirrored in the child’s early romantic relationships. This is why it is valuable to identify warning signs of abusive tendencies and educate teenagers at these early stages. For both perpetrator and victim, intervention may have invaluable long-term implications. We thus direct the focus of our current discussion toward recognized and recognizable abuse tendencies in teenage relationships. Teenage romantic engagement is a particularly powerful emotional time in life. Both boys and girls struggle to understand their complex feelings of attachment, their sexual desires, and the social and ethical nuances of dating. This is already a tumultuous period in one’s psychosocial development, even without any significant abuse or neglect in a teenager’s life. For teens who also struggle with childhood trauma, or who simply are prone to wild mood swings, violence, and abusive behavior, the furor of the dating world is likely to encourage a number of inappropriate to severely dysfunctional responses toward an intimate partner. Similarly, for those who struggle with low self-esteem, insecurity, and difficulty establishing a sound personal identity, there may be a tendency to enter into and remain in almost any relationship, including an abusive one. The discussion hereafter will consider the dynamic between a teenager’s desire to engage in healthy, appropriate relationships and recognizing both signs and situations that lend themselves to abuse in teenage relationships.

Recognizing Abusive Situations As discussed earlier in this chapter, the first task in addressing the phenomenon of abuse in teenage relationships is defining abuse and framing it as something recognizable. According to Eckhardt, Jamison, and Watts (2002), there is a clear connection between one’s anger arousal, management of that anger, and the likelihood of violence. They compared the scores of nonviolent (NV) men to men who have committed acts of dating violence (DV) on two formally endorsed modes of anger testing: the

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State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) and the articulated thoughts during simulated situations (ATSS) instruments. Following these tests, Eckhardt and colleagues coded the participants’ articulated thoughts for anger-related affect, other negative emotions, and aggressive verbalizations. Relative to NV men, the DV men scored significantly higher on STAXI Trait Anger, Anger In, and Anger Out scales. The DV men also scored lower on STAXI Anger Control. Finally, the DV men articulated more aggression during ATSS anger arousal than the NV men did (Eckhardt et al., 2002). The results of the Eckhardt and colleagues (2002) study indicate that nonviolent men generally have a greater ability to manage their emotions and, simultaneously, are able to recognize their emotional interactions with greater accuracy. By contrast, violent men tend to interpret a majority of events as motivated or designed to invoke their anger. The apparent differences underscore either an emotional management deficiency among the violent men or a greater appetite for violence in their relationships. These findings are useful in recognizing abuse patterns or tendencies among potential partners. When members of a peer group or adults see an adolescent who is quick to anger irrationally, it may seem reasonable, or even imperative, for the adult or peer member to intervene. The need to seek out interventions may be particularly important when this anger tends to be expressed toward a relationship partner. While poor anger control or an extreme appetite for violence may not inherently predict a violent or abusive relationship, these characteristics should be seen as evidence that there may be an underlying emotional dysfunction present in the relationship. This prompts consideration of the scientific obstacles to effective evaluation of the causes of intimate partner violence (IPV). Specifically, clinical research has documented a myriad of behaviors that would be clinically perceived as abuse. For example, Bell and Naugle (2008) argue that many theories provide conceptual explanations for IPV. Each of these theories is supported by empirical findings. However, these theories offer only limited explanation of IPV episodes and are not explanatory enough to have a good impact on IPV treatment and prevention programs. This lack of understanding makes it difficult for clinical and lay observers to predict and intervene in violence—especially in teenage relationships. The repeated emphasis throughout most research is on the tendency of men to be the perpetrators and women the victims of IPV. Many studies have focused investigative inquiry on illuminating and understanding the characteristics exhibited by abusive men. It is here that such personality assessment tools as the MMPI come into consideration. Eckhardt, Samper, and Murphy (2008) identified characteristics such as (a) having experienced abuse during the formative childhood years, (b) having scored higher

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on psychopathology measures, and (c) having substance abuse problems as contributing to male tendencies toward IPV. Eckhardt and colleagues conclude that most partner-abusive men do not appear to have anger-related personality issues. However, teen anger problems may be indicative of personality traits that can enable IPV and that may make treatment difficult. Again, these precursors are useful for identifying patterns of abuse. That stated, the findings by Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) also require us to question the primacy of male-centered abuse observation and consider that many other forms of abuse go unreported. Langhinrichsen-Rohling suggests that this represents a core problem for researchers and clinicians who work at trying to identify and predict abuse. She further argues that data from broader samples, including information about uni- and bidirectional abuse, need to be aggregated and analyzed. These arguments suggest that in attempting to identify patterns of abuse in teenage relationships, it is necessary to look for all varieties of abusive behavior and contexts, rather than simply those that appear to be modal.

Teenage/Adolescent Patterns of Abuse In teenage romantic relationships, it is important to identify patterns of abuse. Research findings indicate that the incidence of dating violence and abusiveness in teenage relationships is on the rise and that there is a problematic tendency toward acceptance of these behaviors among teenage peer groups. Accordingly, there is pressure on peers, parents, teachers, counselors, and religious leaders to notice the signs of abuse and possibly to intervene. Moreover, there is a need to make young individuals who are entering romantic relationships for the first time aware of the warning signs of abuse, which are not always unambiguous and/or immediately evident. Young men who (a) tend to lose their temper quickly, (b) show a proclivity toward unpredictable moodiness, (c) are unable to process personal feelings of distress, and/or (d) are inclined to assign blame to those closest to them when faced with difficulties are more likely to abuse their relationship partner, but the abuse may not occur early in the relationship. The same may be true of young men who are inherently overprotective, demanding, jealous, or insecure within the context of a romantic relationship.

Abusive Behaviors Checklist Abusive relationships can sometimes occur in this evolving fashion; it reinforces the compelling need for techniques or approaches of differentiating between abusive and nonabusive relationships. It often falls on

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caring friends and a strong support system to help individuals recognize and leave abusive situations. Therefore, the checklist below is directed at teenagers, their friends, their parents, and their teachers. It is intended to serve as a resource by which they might identify patterns of abuse in relationships among adolescents. While this list not all-inclusive, it is based on similar checklist models currently available. Observing any combination of two of the following conditions justifies concern about the possibility of abuse: Visual signs of unexplained injury Evidence of abusive verbal behavior by one or both partners Pushing, shoving, or signs of physical confrontation in front of others Depression or mood swings in one or both partners Tendencies toward social withdrawal and isolation from friends or family Reduced interest in previous hobbies or activities Isolation within the relationship and a tendency to avoid interaction with other couples Showing signs of fear over upsetting or angering partner Possessiveness, jealousy, or insecurity of one or both partners Frequently making excuses or apologies for partnerâ•›’â•›s behavior Sudden tendencies toward substance abuse

References Ackard, D. M., & Neumak-Sztainer, D. (2002). Date violence and date rape among adolescents: Associations with disordered eating behaviors and psychological health. Child Abuse and Neglect, 26, 455–473. Arriaga, X., & Foshee, V. (2004). Adolescent dating violence: Do adolescents follow in their friends’, or their parents’, footsteps? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 19, 162–184. Banyard, V., & Cross, C. (2008). Consequences of teen dating violence: Understanding intervening variables in ecological context. Violence Against Women, 14, 998–1013. Bell, K., & Naugle, A. (2008). Intimate partner violence theoretical considerations: Moving toward a contextual framework. Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 1096–1107. Black, B. M., & Weisz, A. N. (2005). Dating violence: A qualitative analysis of Mexican-American youths’ views. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 13, 69–90.

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Boney-McCoy, S., & Finkerlhor, D. (1995). Psychosocial sequelae of violent victimization in a national youth sample. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 61, 726–736. Coker, A., McKeown, R., Sanderson, M., Davis, K., Valois, R., & Huebner, S. (2000). Severe dating violence and quality of life among South Carolina high school students. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 19, 220–227. Domestic Abuse Project. (2010). Retrieved on July 11, 2010, from http://www .domesticabuseproject.org/definitions_of_abuse.asp. Dutton, D. (2007). The abusive personality: Violence and control in intimate relationships. New York: Guilford. Eckhardt, C., Jamison, T. R., & Watts, K. (2002). Anger experience and expression among male dating violence perpetrators during anger arousal. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 17, 1102–1114. Eckhardt, C., Samper, R., & Murphy, C. (2008). Anger disturbances among perpetrators of intimate partner violence: Clinical characteristics and outcomes of court-mandated treatment. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23, 1600–1617. Ely, G., Dulmus, C., & Wodarski, J. (2002). Adolescent dating violence. In L. A. Rapp-Paglicci, A. R. Roberts, & J. S. Wodarski (Eds.), Handbook of violence (pp. 33–53). New York: Wiley. Foshee, V. (1996). Gender differences in adolescent dating abuse prevalence, types and injuries. Health Education Research, Theory, and Practice, 11, 275–286. Foshee, V., Bauman, K., Linder, F., Rice, J., & Wilcher, R. (2007). Typologies of adolescent dating violence: Identifying typologies of adolescent dating violence perpetration. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 22, 498–518. Foshee, V., Ennett, S., Bauman, K., Benefield, T., & Suchindran, C. (2005). The association between family violence and adolescent dating violence onset: Does it vary by race, socioeconomic status, and family structure? Journal of Early Adolescence, 25, 317–344. Fredland, N., Ricardo, I., Campbell, J., Sharps, P., Kub, J., & Yonas, M. (2005). The meaning of dating violence in the lives of middle school adolescents: A report of a focus group study. Journal of School Violence, 4, 95–114. Glass, N., Fredland, N., Campbell, J., Yonas, M., Sharps, P., & Kub, J. (2003). Adolescent dating violence: Prevalence, risk factors, health outcomes, and implications for clinical practice. Journal of Obstetrical, Gynecological, and Neonatal Nursing, 32, 227–238. Gray, H., & Foshee, V. (1997). Adolescent dating violence: Differences between one-sided and mutually violent profiles. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 12, 136–141. Hamby, S., & Sugarman, D. (1999). Acts of psychological aggression against a partner and their relation to physical assault and gender. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 61, 959–970. Herrman, J. (2009). There’s a fine line . . . Adolescent dating violence and prevention. Pediatric Nursing, 35, 164–170.

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CHAPTER SIX

Young People’s Representations of Bullying Causes Robert L. Thornberg

Bullying is a complex phenomenon and therefore has to be investigated and understood by several theoretical and methodological positions. Nevertheless, in the growing body of bullying research, investigating children’s and teenagers’ own perspectives on why bullying occurs is still a rather overlooked issue. At the same time, social psychological and social developmental theories, such as the social information processing (SIP) models (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006) and symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969; Charon, 2007), claim that the way in which children and teens interpret and make sense of social situations and people (including themselves) in these situations affects and guides their behavior. For example, in Crick and Dodge’s (1994) SIP model, children’s and adolescents’ cognitive processes of social information for solving social problems include a variety of constructs from the online processing of current social stimuli to latent knowledge structures or social schemas in their memory (see also Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006). Children’s and teens’ assumptions and conceptions of social situations and the people involved in these situations influence how they process social information and thus how they respond and act in these social situations (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Gifford-Smith & Rabiner, 2004). Their social cognitions, at least in part and as a complement to situational or contextual factors such as social influence, cultural constructions, and reinforcements, can explain why they act as bullies or take on different bystander roles in bullying situations.

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This chapter reviews research in which children’s or adolescents’ representations of bullying causes have, at least in part, been investigated. Whereas most of these studies have used qualitative methods (e.g., Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Horowitz et al., 2004; Swart & Bredekamp, 2009; Teräsahjo & Salmivalli, 2003), others have made use of a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, so-called mixed methods (e.g., Frisén, Holmqvist, & Oscarsson, 2008; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press), and a few have operated with quantitative methods (e.g., Erling & Hwang, 2004; Hoover, Oliver, & Hazler, 1992). The review of this literature indicates that typical themes in children’s and young people’s representations of bullying causes are: (a) the deviant victim, (b) the struggle for status, power, and friendship, (c) the disturbed bully, (d) having fun and avoiding boredom, (e) group pressure, and (f) mindless bullying. This chapter describes these themes and then concludes by specifically examining research on bullying causes from the bullies’ point of view.

The Deviant Victim Research has shown that a common explanation among children and teens about why bullying occurs is that the victim is different, odd, or deviant in some way (Bosacki, Marini, & Dane, 2006; Buchanan & Winzer, 2001; Burns, Maycock, Cross, & Brown, 2008b; Erling & Hwang, 2004; Frisén et al., 2008; Frisén, Jonsson, & Persson, 2007; Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Hoover, Oliver, & Hazler, 1992; Teräsahjo & Salmivalli, 2003; Thomson & Gunter, 2008; Thornberg, 2010; Varjas et al., 2008). For instance, according to Buchanan and Winzer’s (2001) interview study, the most commonly reported characteristic that could lead to being bullied was being different in some way. In Teräsahjo and Salmivalli’s (2003) focus group study with 10- to 12-year-old students, the most common reason for bullying that came up in their conversations was the deviance of the children being bullied. Teräsahjo and Salmivalli labeled this “the odd student repertoire.” According to a survey study in which 207 students participated (Hoover et al., 1992), “didn’t fit in” was one of the highest ranked items of possible factors motivating bullying. Other very highly rated items were “physically weak,” “short tempered,” “the clothes,” “facial appearance,” “cried/was emotional,” “overweight,” and “good grades,” which can all be interpreted as expressions of being “different” or “deviant.” Erling and Hwang (2004) conducted a survey study in which 960 children participated. The most frequent answers concerning why some students get bullied were that these students have a different appearance (43%) or are

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deviant in other ways than by appearance (31%). In Thornberg’s (2010) interview study with 10- to 13-year-old students, 82% of them used reaction to deviance as at least one of their explanations why bullying occurs in school. In their focus group study with 11- to 14-year-old middle school students, Horowitz and colleagues (2004) found that “being different in any way” was the core theme underlying students’ explanations why a peer becomes a victim of bullying or teasing. This theme permeated four major categories that emerged from their data analysis process: (a) physical appearance, (b) personality and behavior, (c) family and environment, and (d) school-related factors. Examples of deviancy or differentness, according to school students, that make people more prone to being bullied are wearing “weird,” wrong, or “non-cool” clothes (Bosacki et al., 2006; Buchanan & Winzer, 2001; Frisén et al., 2008; Hoover et al., 1992; Horowitz et al., 2004; Thornberg, 2010), having a different or deviant appearance (Frisén et al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008; Hoover et al., 1992; Horowitiz et al., 2004; Teräsahjo & Salmivalli, 2003; Thomson & Gunter, 2008; Thornberg, 2010), being ugly or not looking good (Bosacki et al., 2006; Cranham & Carroll, 2003; Frisén et€al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008; Horowitz et al., 2004), being nerds, dorks, or geeks (Buchanan & Winzer, 2001; Burns et al., 2008b; Horowitz et al., 2004; Owens, Shute, & Slee, 2000; Thomson & Gunter, 2008; Thornberg, 2010), being quiet, shy, or socially insecure (Buchanan & Winzel, 2001; Burns et al., 2008b; Cranham & Carroll, 2003; Frisén et al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008; Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Horowitiz et al., 2004; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press), not being good at sports (Buchanan & Winzer, 2001; Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Horowitz et al., 2004), being fat or overweight (Frisén et al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008; Hoover et al., 1992; Horowitz et al., 2004; Swart & Bredekamp, 2009; Thomson & Gunter, 2008; Thornberg, 2010), being thin (Frisén et al., 2007; Swart & Bredekamp, 2009; Thornberg, 2010), being childish (Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Thornberg, 2010), belonging to a minority, different, or “wrong” culture, race, or ethnic group (Frisén et al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008; Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Horowitz et al., 2004; Teräsahjo & Salmivalli, 2003; Thomson & Gunter, 2008), talking too much (Horowitz et al., 2004), having weird or strange speech (Erling & Hwang, 2004; Frisén et al., 2007; Thornberg, 2010), being provocative or annoying or saying annoying things (Burns et al., 2008b; Frisén et al., 2008; Hoover et€al., 1992; Owens et al., 2000; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press), having a disability or a physical handicap (Horowitz et al., 2004; Thornberg, 2010), being “too stupid” (Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Horowitz et al., 2004; Thornberg, 2010), displaying academic or social shortcomings (Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Hoover

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et al., 1992), being “too smart” in class (Burns et€al., 2008b; Horowitz et al., 2004), being a teacher’s pet (Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Hoover et al., 1992; Horowitiz et€al., 2004), acting too much like the other sex (Horowitz et al., 2004), playing with peers of the opposite sex (Thornberg, 2010), being hyperactive (Horowitz et al., 2004), behaving clumsy (Thornberg, 2010), being emotional, oversensitive, or short tempered (Frisén et al., 2008; Hoover et al., 1992), acting “gay” (Horowitz et al., 2004), having nonaccepted, “weird,” or different friends (Hoover et al., 1992; Horowitz et al., 2004), not having any friends (Frisén et al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008; Horowitz et al., 2004; Owens et€al., 2000; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press), or having aspects of one’s family, neighborhood, or housing that do not meet with peer group approval (Frisén et al., 2008; Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Horowitz et al., 2004; Thornberg, 2010). In a mixed-methods study conducted by Frisén and colleagues (2008), 877 students (13 years old) filled out a questionnaire regarding bullying. An open-ended question about why they thought children were bullied was included in the questionnaire and the teens’ responses were analyzed qualitatively and then statistically. According to their findings, 36% of the teens attributed bullying to victims’ appearance (e.g., ugly, fat, or looking different), 21% reported that bullying occurs because victims are different in ways that are not explained (e.g., they stand out in a crowd, are simply “wrong” or different), 19% attributed bullying to the victims’ behavior (e.g., strange, different, or ridiculous behavior, or are provocative or rude in some way), 19% attributed bullying to the victims’ clothes (e.g., wear ugly or “wrong” clothes, have an ugly haircut, or wear glasses that are out of fashion), 10% explained bullying as a result of being a lonely or socially insecure victim, and 8% attributed bullying to victims’ backgrounds (e.g., they come from a different country, their parents’ occupations are unusual, or they have low socioeconomic status). Furthermore, they found that adolescents who had not been bullied were more likely than adolescents who had been bullied to report victims’ appearance as well as victims’ behavior. In Hamarus and Kaikkonen’s (2008) study, 85 teenagers (13–15 years old) were asked to write essays about their own experiences of bullying. In addition, 10 of them, who had admitted bullying others, were interviewed individually. Qualitative analysis revealed that difference was at the core of the teenagers’ perceptions of bullying. This was claimed as one reason for bullying. “The qualities relating to the ‘differences’ of the pupil being bullied were considered to be negative characteristics within the youth culture, and respectively their opposites were culturally desired and appreciated. Quietness, shyness, being timid, sensitivity and being

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unfashionable, sickness/illness, race, stupidity, childishness, or exaggerated swottishness or religiosity are opposites of the cultural ideals represented by the students” (Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008, p. 337). According to the findings from a minor qualitative study in which 10 students aged 14–16 years old were interviewed (Cranham & Carroll, 2003), students’ understanding and interpretation of what ensures an individual’s popularity as well as the risk of being bullied and isolated in school was heavily determined by aspects of social rules of the school. In order to be popular and to avoid being bullied, individual students have to understand and comply with the subtle and complex rules that have been developed within the social framework in the school by the students and to understand the subtleties of social constructs and dynamic processes within friendships. Deviance from peer norms and standards was associated with being socially excluded and bullied. In a mixed-methods study (Thornberg & Knutsen, in press), in which 176 students (15–16 years old) responded to a questionnaire and wrote down their explanations for bullying, 42% of them operated with victim attributing as at least one of their bullying explanations. Victim attributing refers to attributing the cause of bullying to the victim. The most common one was the account of the deviant victim (37%), and then accounts of the irritable victim (9%), the weak victim (8%), and the mean victim (4%). Furthermore, the statistical analysis revealed that significantly more male students attributed causes of bullying to the victim compared to female students. This confirmed previous research findings showing that boys blamed the victims more than girls in hypothetical bullying situations (Gini, 2008) and in self-reports regarding bullying experiences (Hara, 2002). In contrast, many more teenage girls attributed causes of bullying to the bully compared to teenage boys (Frisén et al., 2008; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press). However, in a qualitative study in which teenage girls participated, the girls tended to blame the victims as a result of doing something annoying or irritating, starting a conflict, or being indiscreet in some way (“usually they do something to bring it on themselves”; Owens et al., 2000).

The Struggle for Status, Power, and Friendship Another significant theme found in many studies investigating children and adolescents’ representations of bullying causes is the struggle for status, power, and friendship (Erling & Hwang, 2004; Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Owens et al., 2000; Phillips, 2003; Swart & Bredekamp, 2009; Teräsahjo & Salmivalli, 2003; Thornberg, 2010; Thornberg & Knutsen, in

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press; Varjas et al., 2008). For example, in Owens and colleagues (2000), teenage girls often explained peer harassment among girls as a result of a desire to be part of the group and have close friendships. Bullying was then linked to (a) attention seeking (“Hey, notice me. I’m important!”), and (b) group inclusion (“I’m in and you’re out”). Being accepted by the peer group was crucial, and once accepted, girls made great efforts to retain their position within the group. Hence, girls participated in the group’s spreading of rumors and ostracizing others in order to protect themselves and their position within the group. Varjas and colleagues (2008) showed that many students attribute the motive of becoming a higher status person as a cause of bullying behavior. Some of the students in Erling and Hwang (2004) reported that they thought bullying happens because the bullies think they are cool or want to show that they have power. Whereas both boys and girls explained bullying as status positioning and power positioning, only girls attributed bullying to friendship positioning. Teräsahjo and Salmivalli (2003) relate this issue to what they called “girls talk.” In girls talk, friendship, fights, and bullying seemed to be strongly connected. Teräsahjo and Salmivalli (2003) concluded that, “from the point of view of this repertoire, the most crucial meaning of bullying is closely related to fear of losing important friends and their acceptance” (p. 150). Phillips (2003) conducted interviews with 31 female college students (aged 16–22 years old) about their secondary school and college experiences as victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of aggressive and violent behavior. According to these students, abusing others allowed the bully to show how “hard” she was and to boost her reputation and strengthen her position within the social hierarchy of the school. In Thornberg and Knutsen (in press), 32% of the teens argued that bullying occurs because those who bully others want to manifest, maintain, or boost their power, status, or popularity (e.g., “Some people want to show off as ‘popular.’ They think they are so cool, and really want to show that by bullying someone else,” “You want power”), or they try to protect themselves from social exclusion, harassment, or bullying (e.g., “They want to prove that they are ‘tough’ so nobody else bullies them back”). Many students in Swart and Bredekamp (2009) felt that there was a hierarchy at their school, and according to these students, the social hierarchy supported the formation of cliques and the culture of bullying. Cullingford and Morrison (1995) interviewed young offenders aged between 16 and 21. One of the most enduring memories of school among the participants was the general atmosphere of bullying and aggression that pervaded life in school. “Bullying and fighting are part of the general ethos of the school and are accepted

Young People’s Representations of Bullying Causes

by children as normal aspects of school life” (p. 550). Hence, these young people attributed bullying to the overall atmosphere of aggression in the school. Frisén and her colleagues have found that some teens reasoned that bullying occurs because the bullies want to feel tough or cool (Frisén et al., 2007; Frisén et al., 2008), want to impress others (Frisén et al., 2007), or bully others to avoid being bullied themselves (Frisén et al., 2008). Twenty-six percent of the teenagers in Frisén and colleagues (2007) claimed that some children and adolescents bully others because they feel cool. In Phillips (2003), the female students reported a social order of girls at school with the majority of girls falling between the two extremes. At the top of the hierarchy was the “in-group,” and according to the reports, the in-group established and maintained their powerful position by bullying other girls, especially those in a lower position in the hierarchy. Even girls in the middle of the pecking order could use the same tactics to harass similarly ranked girls or those at the bottom of the hierarchy. The girls in the study also reported that those who were at the bottom of the hierarchy were vulnerable to victimization, particularly from the in-group. Hence, bullying among girls was explained by referring to this “pecking order” process. In addition, in many studies, some children and teens also attributed bullying to jealousy (Bosacki et al., 2006; Frisén et al., 2007; Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Thornberg, 2010; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press)—a psychological motive that might explain at least some positioning behavior.

The Disturbed Bully Another bullying explanation among children and teens is attributing bullying as a result of a “disturbed bully”; in other words, bullying takes place because the bully is a person who has low self-confidence, malicious personality, is mean, lacks empathy, or is insecure, and so on. According to Hazler and Hoover (1993), the students had a variety of ideas about why bullies bullied others, but they generally agreed that most bullying is the result of the bully’s own lack of self-esteem. In Frisén and colleagues (2008), some adolescents explained that bullying occurs because the bullies have low self-confidence, are sad, or have pent-up anger, which they need to vent. All in all, 36% of the teens in the study attributed bullying to the bullies’ personality, background, or motives (including social positioning motives). Teens who had been bullied were more likely than teens who had not been bullied to mention the bullies’ personality, background, and motives. In Frisén and colleagues (2007), 28% of the teens thought that bullies bully others because they have low self-esteem; 15% thought it happens

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because bullies have problems; and 4% thought it happens because the bullies are also victims. According to Thornberg (2010), 36% of the schoolchildren in the study expressed a social representation of bullying causes in terms of the “work of a disturbed bully.” The bully is regarded as a child who has a bad temper, an angry or bad personality, ADHD, or poor self-esteem; feels insecure; feels bad; or does not know what to do with all his or her pent-up anger. Bullying is then explained as a result of these kinds of personal problems or characteristics in the bully. Some of the students connect the work-of-a-disturbed-bully explanation with family problems—the bully has been “disturbed” because there are a lot of quarrels or problems in his or her family, such as aggressive parents or siblings, alcoholism or drug problems, divorce, or bad or negligent parents. In Thornberg and Knutsen (in press), 32% of the teens attributed bullying to the bully’s inner flaws, which means that they reasoned that bullying occurs because the bully feels “bad” or insecure, has poor self-confidence, low self-esteem, psychological problems, or a weak mind, which causes him or her to bully others (e.g., “The reasons why they bullied us were their problems with self-esteem and self-confidence”). Another related category of bully attributing found in their study was explaining bullying in terms of boosting their sense of well-being. Sixteen percent of the teens explained that the bully torments others to feel better or enhance his or her selfconfidence or self-esteem. Furthermore, Thornberg and Knutsen (in press) coded teens’ explanations that attributed bullying to a problematic family of bullying (e.g., poor parenting, lots of quarrelling or conflicts, divorce, abuse, or harsh or nonloving parents) as a separate category and found that 14% of the teens used this attribution as at least one of their bullying explanations. Eight percent of the teens explained bullying in terms of the bully’s “bad” personality. In other words, they reasoned that the bully is a bad, immoral, unempathic, or mean person, and thus he or she starts bullying others. According to some students in Bosacki and colleagues (2006), instrumental motives (e.g., “He wants her lunch/money”) as well as psychological motives (e.g., “It makes him feel better about himself if the other feels bad”) within the bully could cause his or her bullying behavior. According to Buchanan and Winzer (2001), one of the most common responses given by the students why some children become bullies was a poor home environment.

Having Fun and Avoiding Boredom Another reason that teenagers associate with initiating and maintaining bullying is to have some fun (Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Hazler & Hoover, 1993; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press) or to create excitement

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(Owens et al., 2000) and to break the boredom of everyday life in school (Hamarus & Kaikkonen, 2008; Owens et al., 2000; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press). In Thornberg and Knutsen (in press), 8% of the teens used the account of doing it for fun, meaning that bullying occurs because the bullies think it is a funny or amusing thing to do and they just want to have some fun, as at least one bullying explanation. In addition, 5% of the teens expressed that bullying occurs because students have nothing to do or are bored as a result of the school life or structure as at least one of their bullying explanations. According to Owens and colleagues (2000), this was the most common explanation among the girls who participated in their study. Some of the young participants in Cullingford and Morrison (1995) expressed a view that some children verbally bully others in order to have fun and without any hurtful intentions. Among the younger students in Thornberg (2010), the explanation of bullying as an amusing game, in other words, that bullying takes place because the bullies are amused by it in some way, was reported by 21% as at least one of their bullying explanations. Some of them reasoned that children may act like this because they have nothing else to do or are bored at school. Others reasoned that it was the reaction of the victim that was perceived as amusing or funny by the bullies, and then they picked victims based on how they react. According to some children, bullying is sometimes just intended as a joke and not with any intention to harm the victim seriously. Others reasoned that bullying takes place because bullies think it is fun to be naughty or mean. Finally, the amused response of the audience was viewed as a bullying motivating factor.

Group Pressure Thirteen percent of the teens in Thornberg and Knutsen (in press) explained bullying as a consequence of group pressure as at least one of their bullying explanations. Group pressure as an explanation of bullying was also found among younger students in Thornberg (2010). For example, a victim in the study reported how classmates who could be nice and kind to her became mean and began to bully her when they got together as a group. Well, I know that when they are here at school, and perhaps they are with me or with others, they are really nice and kind, but when they come together, they maybe want to be much tougher in order to avoid being seen as a nerd. And I have really noticed that they want to be very tough when they are all together. (12-year-old girl, in Thornberg, 2010, p. 318)

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This particular student and others used an explanation repertoire in which they blamed the group and explained bullying as the result of group pressure. Fear of becoming a new bullying target and fear of social exclusion could motivate peers to conform to the group pressure and join in bullying, some of them reasoned. According to some, peers in such groups think, “If I don’t bully that kid too, then maybe I will be frozen out of the group.” In Erling and Hwang (2004), 7% of the children used peer pressure as an explanation why students are bullied. According to Frisén and colleagues (2007), 9% of the teenagers in the study thought children and adolescents bully others because of peer pressure. In their study, Hamarus and Kaikkonen (2008) noted that, even those who do not actively participate in bullying do not want to be with the victim because of group pressure. According to Buchanan and Winzer (2001), one of the most common responses given by the students as to why some children become bullies was peer pressure.

Mindless Bullying In Thornberg (2010), 14% of the students used “bullying as a thoughtless happening” or so-called “mindless bullying” as at least one of their bullying explanations, meaning that the bullies do not think at all about what they are doing and why they are doing it; it just happens. The bullies do not see the consequences of their behavior and they do not realize that they are actually being bullies, these students reasoned (e.g., “And then they say something and then maybe the other person becomes upset, and perhaps they say something everyday without thinking about it, and then it becomes bullying”). According to this explanation, the thoughtlessness among bullies causes and perpetuates bullying. Some students in Teräsahjo and Salmivalli (2003) constructed an argument in their talks about bullying that describes bullying as harmless interaction. By representing the parties not as victims and bullies but more as participants in the game, “this talk’s function is not only to construct the interaction itself but also to underestimate the appearance of bullying” (p. 144). This repertoire of underestimation was very commonly used among the students. Whereas the young offenders in Cullingford and Morrison (1995) viewed physical bullying as harmful and intentional, verbal bullying was often viewed as harmless, unintentional, and normal during their school life.

Bullying Causes from Bullies’ Point of View A few studies have investigated how bullies explain bullying and why bullying takes place, according to them. In an interview study with students who bullied others (Burns, Maycock, Cross, & Brown, 2008a,

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2008b), perceived provocations, peer group, and school factors emerged as key themes when they discussed reasons for initiating and persisting with bullying behavior. The subtheme “peer group” was associated with belonging and enhancing group status, which emphasizes the need to maintain inclusion within the peer group. Furthermore, according to the findings, “several students suggested that students bullied others because once they had started and became known as a ‘bully,’ or were involved in the group who bullied, it was difficult to stop” (Burns et al., 2008a, p. 1712), indicating a labeling process. “If their label provides status and power it might be difficult to relinquish that title. In addition, if students are likely to think of themselves in terms of someone who others think of as ‘tough’ or ‘not to challenge,’ they are more likely to act in ways that are consistent with the label” (Burns et al., 2008a, p. 1712). Not joining in with bullying was also related to a potential loss of social status within the group. Furthermore, Burns and colleagues (2008b) found that all the students used perceived provocation as a justification for bullying that they or others conducted. The perceived provocation was either direct or indirect. Direct perceived provocation refers to reaction to perceived aggression, especially in terms of being bullied in the first place and as a reaction to that, teasing, calling names, or hitting back or seeking out other students to bully. Indirect perceived provocation refers to being provoked by annoying or “different” students, which in turn incited aggressive acts. Both types of perceived provocation were used to justify bullying behavior. Some of the young offenders in Cullingford and Morrison (1995) had also bullied others during their school life. They often saw taunting other children as an acceptable, even normal, part of social behavior and something that takes place within an overall atmosphere of aggression in school. Hence, to a great extent, they explained bullying or intimidation as a result of the school ethos. They also viewed certain types of bullying as “harmless” or “harmless fun,” without any consideration for the point of view of the victim. Hence, based on these findings, Cullingford and Morrison concluded that the traditional emphasis on intentionality of harm in the concept of bullying is misleading, “in so far as it leaves out the point of view of many ‘bullies.’ . . . What may seem like harmless fun can be extremely distressing to the victim” (p. 551). Furthermore, some of the former bullies perceived themselves as powerless to control their own aggressive impulses or the difficulty of resisting the temptation to tease people in “fun.” Although the participants in Cullingford and Morrison (1995) spoke openly about their involvement in fighting, they never defined their own actions in terms of bullying. In their own eyes, they did not bully others but just had

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some harmless fun, retaliated to provocation, or showed off and proved they could “look after themselves.” Thornberg and Knutsen (in press) found that more teens who had a prior history of being a bully attributed causes of bullying to the victim, and teens who had a prior history of being a victim, a bystander, or a bully/victim attributed the cause to the bully. In the students’ conversations in Teräsahjo and Salmivalli (2003), the “deviance” was often associated with a repertoire of deserving (e.g., “she gets what’s coming to her”), thereby constructing bullying and hostile attitudes against the victim as acceptable. Lahelma (2004) also found that students used this constructed “differentness” to justify bullying. Findings from Hara (2002) showed that bullies were more likely to blame the victims than were students who assumed other participation roles in bullying. In their study, Hymel, RockeHenderson, and Bonanno (2005) actually found that students who did not report engaging in bullying reported the lowest levels of moral disengagement, whereas those students who repeatedly bullied others reported the highest level of moral disengagement. Among the moral disengagement items, those that emerged as significant predictors of bullying were efforts to justify bullying as “okay” and efforts to blame the victims. These findings might be explained in terms of a self-serving bias among bullies.

Implications for Practitioners In light of a social psychological perspective such as symbolic interactionism (cf. Blumer, 1969; Charon, 2007), bullying has to be understood as a joint action, and the meaning of bullying, its participants (victims, bullies, and bystanders), and causes are derived from or arise out of social interactions among students. These meanings are dealt with and modified through the interpretive process used by the students in dealing with the bullying they encounter or witness. Bullying prevention efforts and interventions should investigate and target teenagers’ conceptions of the causes of bullying, since such mental representations are a source of interpretations, attitudes, and behavior in real situations (cf. Crick & Dodge, 1994). First, practitioners have to investigate and reflect on how teenagers think and reason about why bullying occurs. They have to build their instructions, explanations, conversations, and practices on teenagers’ contemporary repertoire of knowledge, conceptions, and skills regarding bullying and other social and moral issues. “Moral growth comes about through the child’s progressive construction of ways of understanding the world, and not just an accommodation to the positions and practices of adults and society” (Nucci, 2006, p. 663).

Young People’s Representations of Bullying Causes

Second, some of the underlying moral assumptions in children’s and teens’ representations of bullying causes have to be challenged, which in turn show the urgency of relating moral and citizenship themes into bullying prevention and intervention. Thornberg (2010) gave some examples: The dominating social representation on bullying causes as a reaction to deviance among the children and its underlying logic of conformism and intolerance can, for example, be challenged by pointing out and inviting students into a deliberative discussion about the values of multiplicity, heterogeneity, social inclusion, caring community, and tolerance. The social representation on bullying as social positioning and its underlying logic of “social Darwinism,” the social representation on bullying as social contamination and its underlying logic of “just do what others do,” and the social representation on bullying as an amusing game and its underlying logic of sadism can all be challenged by inviting and promoting students to establish a moral atmosphere built on cooperation, participation, caring, and prosocial values. (p. 323)

Third, teenagers’ gender has to be considered when designing and conducting bullying prevention and intervention practices among young people. As the preceding review indicates, boys more often explain bullying by blaming the victims as compared to girls (Gini, 2008; Hara, 2002; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press), who more often than boys blame the bullies (Frisén et al., 2008; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press). Such gender differences in explaining bullying and thus blaming the victim versus blaming the bully might at least in part contribute to better understanding why girls are more likely to show positive attitudes toward victims (e.g., Menesini et al., 1997; Rigby, 1996; Rigby & Slee, 1993) and are more likely to support or defend victims and less likely to reinforce bullies than boys (O’Connell, Pepler, & Craig, 1999; Salmivalli, Lagerspetz, Björkqvist, Östermalm, & Kaukiainen, 1996; Salmivalli & Voeten, 2004). Practitioners have to be aware of these gender differences and especially target boys’ tendency to blame the victim. Simultaneously, they have to be aware that girls also blame the victim (e.g., Owens et al., 2000; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press). Fourth, the preceding review indicates that bullies more often explain bullying by blaming the victims as compared to others, who more often than bullies blame the bullies (Hara, 2002; Hymel et al., 2005; Thornberg & Knutsen, in press). Bullying prevention and intervention programs have to deal with these differences. With reference to Bandura (2002) and Hoffman (2000), Thornberg and Knutsen (in press) argue, “blaming the victim as a self-serving bias among bullies helps them to minimize or

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diffuse their own role and responsibility as well as hindering their empathic arousal and moral concerns regarding the bullying situations, the victim’s distress, and their own actions.” In bullying prevention programs as well as when dealing with and educating identified bullies, practitioners have to address issues of: blaming the victim, justifying bullying by defining or labeling the victim as negatively deviant, empathy, and moral disengagement. While the research on how children and teens explain bullying has been overlooked and is still low in numbers, a growing body of studies has recently emerged. Students’ representations of and assumptions about bullying and people involved are critical components in the complex process of bullying. This review suggests that considering children’s and teenagers’ representations of bullying causes has the potential of yielding new insights into the ways in which we understand and address bullying.

References Bandura, A. (2002). Selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31, 101–119. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bosacki, S. L., Marini, Z. A., & Dane, A. V. (2006). Voices from the classroom: Pictorial and narrative representations of children’s bullying experiences. Journal of Moral Education, 35, 231–245. Buchanan, P., & Winzer, M. (2001). Bullying in schools: Children’s voices. International Journal of Special Education, 16, 67–79. Burns, S., Maycock, B., Cross, D., & Brown, G. (2008a). The power of peers: Why some students bully others to conform. Qualitative Health Research, 18, 1704–1716. Burns, S., Maycock, B., Cross, D., & Brown, G. (2008b). “Woodpushers are gay”: The role of provocation in bullying. International Journal of Mental Health Promotion, 10, 41–50. Charon, J. M. (2007). Symbolic interactionism: An introduction, an interpretation, an integration (9th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Cranham, J., & Carroll, A. (2003). Dynamics within the bully/victim paradigm: A qualitative analysis. Educational Psychology in Practice, 19, 113–132. Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social informationprocessing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 74–101. Cullingford, C., & Morrison, J. (1995). Bullying as a formative influence: The relationship between the experience of school and criminality. British Educational Research Journal, 21, 547–560. Dodge, K. A., Coie, J. D., & Lynam, D. (2006). Aggression and antisocial behavior in youth. In N. Eisenberg, D. William, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child

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psychology: Vol. 3. Social, emotional, and personality development (pp. 719–788). New York: Wiley. Erling, A., & Hwang, C. P. (2004). Swedish 10-year-old children’s perceptions and experiences of bullying. Journal of School Violence, 3, 33–43. Frisén, A., Holmqvist, K., & Oscarsson, D. (2008). Thirteen-year-olds’ perception of bullying: Definitions, reasons for victimization, and experience of adults’ response. Educational Studies, 34, 105–117. Frisén, A., Johnson, A., & Persson, C. (2007). Adolescents’ perception of bullying: Who is the victim? Who is the bully? What can be done to stop bullying? Adolescence, 42, 649–761. Gifford-Smith, M., & Rabiner, D. L. (2004). Social information processing and children’s social competence: A review of the literature. In J. Kupersmidt & K. A. Dodge (Eds.), Children’s peer relations: From development to intervention to policy (pp. 61–79). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Gini, G. (2008). Italian elementary and middle school students’ blaming the victim of bullying and perception of school moral atmosphere. Elementary School Journal, 108, 335–354. Hamarus, P., & Kaikkonen, P. (2008). School bullying as a creator of pupil peer pressure. Educational Research, 50, 333–345. Hara, H. (2002). Justifications for bullying among Japanese schoolchildren. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 197–204. Hazler, R. J., & Hoover, J. H. (1993). What do kids say about bullying? Education Digest, 58, 16–20. Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hoover, J. H., Oliver, R., & Hazler, R. J. (1992). Bullying: Perceptions of adolescent victims in the Midwestern USA. School Psychology International, 13, 5–16. Horowitz, J. A., Vessey, J. A., Carlson, K. L., Bradley, J. F., Montoya, C., McCullough, B., & David, J. (2004). Teasing and bullying experiences of middle school students. Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, 10, 165–172. Hymel, S., Rocke-Henderson, N., & Bonanno, R. A. (2005). Moral disengagement: A framework for understanding bullying among adolescents. Special Issue of Journal of Social Sciences, 8, 1–11. Lahelma, E. (2004). Tolerance and understanding? Students and teachers reflect on differences at school. Educational Research and Evaluation 10, 3–19. Menesini, E., Esla, M., Smith, P. K., Genta, M. L., Giannetti, E., Fonzi, A., & Costabile, A. (1997). A cross-national comparison of children’s attitudes toward bully/victim problems in school. Aggressive Behavior, 29, 1–13. Nucci, L. (2006). Education for moral development. In M. Killen & J. Smetana (Eds.), Handbook of moral development (pp. 657–681). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. O’Connell, P., Pepler, D., & Craig, W. (1999). Peer involvement in bullying: Insights and challenges for intervention. Journal of Adolescence, 22, 437–452.

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Owens, L., Shute, R., & Slee, P. (2000). “Guess what I just heard!”: Indirect aggression among teenage girls in Australia. Aggressive Behavior, 26, 67–83. Phillips, C. (2003). Who’s who in the pecking order? Aggression and “normal violence” in the lives of girls and boys. British Journal of Criminology, 43, 710–728. Rigby, K. (1996). Bullying in schools and what we can do about it. London: Jessica Kingsley. Rigby, K., & Slee, P. T. (1993). Dimensions of interpersonal relation among Australian children and implications for psychological well-being. Journal of Social Psychology, 133, 33–42. Salmivalli, C., Lagerspetz, K., Björkqvist, K., Östermalm, K., & Kaukiainen, A. (1996). Bullying as a group process: Participant roles and their relations to social status within the group. Aggressive Behavior, 22, 1–15. Salmivalli, C., & Voeten, M. (2004). Connections between attitudes, group norms, and behavior in bullying situations. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 28, 246–258. Swart, E., & Bredekamp, J. (2009). Non-physical bullying: Exploring the perspectives of Grade 5 girls. South African Journal of Education, 29, 405–425. Teräsahjo, T., & Salmivalli, C. (2003). “She is not actually bullied”: The discourse of harassment in student groups. Aggressive Behavior, 29, 134–154. Thomson, P., & Gunter, H. (2008). Researching bullying with students: A lens on everyday life in an “innovative school.” International Journal of Inclusive Education, 12, 185–200. Thornberg, R. (2010). Schoolchildren’s social representations on bullying causes. Psychology in the Schools, 47, 311–327. Thornberg, R., & Knutsen, S. (in press). Teenagers’ explanations of bullying. Child and Youth Care Forum. Varjas, K., Meyers, J., Bellmoff, L., Lopp, E., Birckbichler, L., & Marshall, M. (2008). Missing voices: Fourth through eight grade urban students’ perceptions of bullying. Journal of School Violence, 7, 97–118.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Desensitization to Media V↜iolence Kostas A. Fanti and Marios N. Avraamides

Introduction Modern times are characterized by the increasing intrusion of technology and media in everyday life. People in Western societies, in particular, spend much of their time in front of television sets and computer monitors. Violent scenes are abundant in films and television programs, causing concern over the potential effects that media violence may exert on human personality and behavior. Furthermore, the increased capabilities of computers and the rise of game consoles in recent years has provided people, and especially youths, with the opportunity to interact with content that is in many cases of violent nature. Studies on the effects of violent media are steadily increasing and show that both chronic and brief exposure to violence in films and video games leads to an increase of aggression (Anderson, 2004). Although skeptics argue that the relation between media violence and aggression is spurious, with constructs such as trait aggression held responsible for both aggressive behavior and preference for violent media (e.g., Freedman, 2002), recent studies using experimental methodologies with highly controlled designs have refuted such accounts and verified the presence of causal links. A recent meta-analytic review of studies on the effects of violent video games has shown that exposure to violent video games is causally linked to increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and cardiovascular arousal, as well as decreases in helping behavior (Anderson, 2004). The evidence for a causal link between media violence and aggression is so overwhelming that

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Anderson (2004) claims that the “scientific debate over whether media violence has an effect is over” (p. 114). Moving on from the debate on the effects of media violence, studies have concentrated on uncovering the mechanisms that underlie its effects. Repeated exposure to entertainment violence is believed to be a major contributor to aggressive and violent behavior in real life (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Donnerstein & Smith, 1997; Huesmann, Moise, & Podolski, 1997), since media violence can (a) instigate imitation (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963; Gould & Shaffer, 1986; Philips & Carstensen, 1986), (b) make real-world violence more acceptable (Gunter, 1994), (c) distort viewers’ perceptions of real world crime and violence (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994), (d) desensitize viewers to the suffering of victims of violence (Linz, Donnerstein, & Adams, 1989; Linz, Donnerstein, & Penrod, 1988; Malamuth & Check, 1981), and (e) increase the accessibility of violent constructs in memory (Berkowitz, 1984; Bushman, 1998). The mechanism that will be explored in this chapter is desensitization to media violence. Wolpe (1982) defined desensitization as the diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure to it. Carnagey, Anderson, and Bushman (2007) distinguished the effects of desensitization from the actual process by linking desensitization to physiological arousal. Thus, they defined desensitization as the “reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence” (p. 490). This chapter provides a short review of the literature on desensitization to media violence and its effects on behavior. Although it is not meant to be comprehensive, the chapter offers an overview of how desensitization has been investigated in the literature and what its behavioral consequences are.

Desensitization to Media Violence Initial exposure to media violence typically produces aversive responses such as fear, increased heart rate, perspiration, discomfort, and disgust, although after prolonged and repeated exposure across a person’s lifetime, the psychological impact of media violence reduces or habituates, and the observer becomes emotionally and cognitively desensitized to media violence across time (Carnegey et al., 2007; Cline, Croft, & Courrier, 1973; Funk, Bechtoldt-Baldacci, Pasold, & Baumgardner, 2004; Smith, & Donnerstein, 1998; Thomas, Horton, Lippincott, & Drabman, 1977). Desensitization may arise from different sources of screen-based media, including TV, movies, and video games. For example, Cline and colleagues (1973) and Thomas and colleagues (1977) found that individuals who experienced

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high levels of television violence in the past were more likely to be desensitized to violent film clips compared to viewers who watched only small amounts of television violence. Carnagey and colleagues (2007) found that children who were exposed to more video game violence in the past showed lower responsiveness to real world violence and were more likely to view violence as pleasurable in comparison to children who were not exposed to this form of media violence. Furthermore, Funk and colleagues (2004) provided evidence that children’s exposure to movie or video game violence resulted in proviolence attitudes (cognitive desensitization) and lower empathy or sympathy for the victims of violence (emotional desensitization). Thus, it seems that chronic media violence exposure has lasting effects on viewers’ attitudes toward violence and viewers’ empathy toward the victims of violence through the process of desensitization. Although studies generally document desensitization to media violence by showing that people’s reactive responses to violent media are diminished after chronic experience, desensitization can also be observed during short-term exposure to media violence (Fanti, Vanman, Henrich, & Avraamides, 2009). According to Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1963) media violence may serve as an important source of imitative behavior, leading to media-mediated aggressive models. They further provided evidence that media violence has an immediate effect on an individual’s behavior, providing initial evidence of the possibility that desensitization results from short-term exposure to media violence. In one study that we have carried out in our lab, participants viewed nine 2-minute video segments that included either violent acts or comedic episodes with their reactivity measured through a questionnaire administered after each video segment (Fanti et al., 2009). Results revealed the presence of a curvilinear relationship between time (i.e., number of scenes already watched) and levels of both enjoyment and sympathy for the victims of the violent acts. The violent segments initially produced aversive responses that tended to increase in intensity after watching the first few segments. However, for later scenes participants’ levels of enjoyment started to increase and their sympathy levels to decrease dramatically. That is, even after watching 4–5 violent scenes, participants began to show evidence for desensitization to the violent content of the films. Importantly, although differences in the overall scores were found between people reporting involvement to real-life aggression acts and those who did not, desensitization was observed for both groups of participants. The study of Fanti and colleagues (2009) investigated the process of desensitization at the cognitive level of information processing. That is, it assessed how people cognitively interpreted changes in neurophysiological

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states induced by the violent content. Other studies have examined desensitization at the neural level by relying on physiological measures.

Desensitization at the Physiological Level Physiological desensitization refers to changes in the physiological state of the organisms that may be associated with chronic or brief exposures to violent content (e.g., decrease of arousal, changes in the activation of assemblies of neurons, etc.). In trying to understand the relationship between media violence and aggression, an arousal model between viewing media violence and aggressiveness was proposed by Watt and Krull (1977). This model suggests that the agent of arousal is the emotional reaction to violent content. Based on this model, research has provided evidence for the relation between physiological measures and arousal (high or low) by using electrodermal activity and heart rate (e.g., Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, & Lang, 2001; Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Vanman, Dawson, & Brennan, 1998). Electrodermal and heart rate activity reflect emotional responding to stimuli and are believed to be elicited by cognitive activity (Siddle, 1991). Both the electrodermal response and heart rate reactivity have been previously associated with violent scenes, suggesting that skin conductance and heart rate reactivity change with arousal during the viewing of violent scenes or pictures (Bradley et al., 2001; Kalamas & Gruber, 1998; Lang et al., 1993). For example, Kalamas and Gruber (1998) provided evidence that after viewing a violent television show and after hearing the sounds associated with violent media, individuals produced strong electrodermal responses. These findings indicate that viewers respond emotionally to violent stimuli. Bradley and colleagues (2001) also provided evidence of strong emotional arousal, as indicated by large skin conductance responses and cardiac deceleration recorded when participants viewed violent pictures. In addition to showing that watching violent pictures are associated with changes in skin conductance and heart rate, Lang and colleagues (1993) also provided evidence for viewers’ emotional reactions to violent pictures with the use of facial electromyography. Thus, with the use of different physiological measures, researchers demonstrate an association between the viewers’ emotional reactions and the experience of violence, either as violent pictures or as television violence. Evidence that exposure to violence in video games also causes physiological desensitization is provided by the study of Carnagey and colleagues (2007). In this study, participants played either a violent or a nonviolent video game for 20 minutes and then watched 10-minutes video segments containing real life violence. Measures of heart rate and galvanic skin response (GRS) were taken before and after video game playing as well as

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during video viewing. Results showed that while heart rate increased from pregame to postgame, the increase was equal in the violent and nonviolent game conditions. However, whereas heart rate remained at the same level for the violent game condition during violent video viewing, it increased further in the nonviolent condition. Also, while GSR levels were equal for the two game conditions in pregame and postgame measurements, they decreased substantially during video viewing but only in the violent game condition. No such decrease was found in the nonviolent condition, where in fact a small nonsignificant increase was observed. The findings of Carnagey and colleagues (2007) suggest that playing a violent game for only 20 minutes is adequate to physiologically desensitize people to real life violence. Importantly, none of the effects they reported were mediated by trait aggressiveness. Thus, their results cannot be accounted for by individual differences in the susceptibility to media violence. Bartholow, Bushman, and Sestir (2006) studied the link between violent game experience, desensitization, and aggression using electroencephalography (EEG). In this study, participants with varying levels of prior violent game experience were exposed to an oddball task in which violent or negative nonviolent pictures were occasionally presented within a series of neutral images. EEG signals were recorded throughout the picture-viewing task. Subsequently, participants carried out a version of the Competitive Reaction-Time (CRT) task (Taylor, 1967). In this task, participants are given the impression that they are competing with another participant in a task that entails fast reactions to auditory tones. In reality, however, whether a participant wins or not in a given trial was predetermined. Following winning trials, participants are given the opportunity to punish their opponent by delivering a loud noise to their ears. The intensity and the duration of the noise are used as a measure of aggression. Results from this experiment showed that a decrease in the amplitude of the P300 when viewing violent pictures was associated with greater violent game exposure. No changes in P300 were observed for negative or neutral pictures. As previous studies have shown that larger P300 amplitudes are elicited when a stimulus is evaluated as inconsistent with its context, Bartholow and colleagues (2006) suggested that the decrease of the P300 amplitude when viewing violent pictures is indicative of desensitization to violence. Furthermore, smaller P300 amplitudes for violent pictures were associated with higher aggression scores in the CRT task. Importantly, these findings remained significant even after controlling for individual differences in trait aggression. Overall, the findings of Bartholow and colleagues (2006) suggest that chronic exposure to violent games results in desensitization to violence, causing people to behave more aggressively.

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Behavioral Correlates of Desensitization Results from many studies suggest that one aspect of desensitization is the reduction of empathy (i.e., the sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others). A number of experiments conducted have demonstrated that helping behavior is reduced following exposure to media violence. For example, Bushman and Anderson (2009) had participants play a violent or a nonviolent video game in the lab for 20 minutes and then listen to the sounds of a staged fight supposedly taking place outside the lab. In the prerecorded fight, two people first argued, with one of the two persons subsequently injuring the other and leaving. Results from the experiment showed that although there was no difference in helping rates between participants exposed to the violent or nonviolent game, the former took longer to help, were less likely to report hearing the fight, and rated the fight as less serious than the latter. In a follow-up study conducted in the field, a woman confederate with a wrapped ankle dropped her crutches outside a movie theater before or after a violent or nonviolent movie show. Results revealed that the helping delay of the moviegoers was longer after having watched a violent movie than in the three other conditions. The link between media violence exposure and helping behavior may reflect desensitization caused either in the short term or long term by violent content. Researchers have thus attempted to identify variables that may mediate the links between media violence exposure and its behavioral outcomes. For example, Bartholow, Sestir, and Davis (2005) examined whether the association between chronic exposure to game violence and aggression is mediated by variables such as empathy and hostile personality. Empathy refers to the reduced sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others (Funk et al., 2004). The first study, which relied on a self-report measure of aggressive behavior, showed that the strength of the relation between aggression and violent video game experience was reduced when either empathy or hostility levels were controlled for. The second study of Bartholow and colleagues (2005) used experimental methods to investigate whether this is also the case following brief exposure to video game violence. A number of participants from the first study were brought into the lab, where they played a violent or a nonviolent video game for 20 minutes and then they carried out the CRT task. As expected, participants who played the violent video game delivered noise blasts that were longer and louder. Furthermore, participants with greater previous experience with violent video games were more aggressive in the CRT task regardless of game condition. Unlike the first study, however, only hostility scores reduced substantially the magnitude of the association between

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aggression and prior experience with violent video games. No such effect was found for empathy. Overall, the results of Bartholow and colleagues (2005) showed that chronic exposure to game violence leads to aggression, with hostility (and empathy to a lesser degree) partially accounting for this effect. Further analyses conducted in the second study suggest that chronic game violence functions to increase hostile perception biases, which in turn lead to aggression. These effects are compatible with the general hypothesis that chronic exposure to violent video games, and media violence in general, leads to desensitization to violence. In an attempt to link exposure to media violence to behavioral consequences such as increased aggression, reduced helping behavior, etc., Anderson and Bushman (2001; also Bushman & Anderson, 2002) developed the General Aggression Model (GAM). The GAM provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding the role of desensitization in the route from media violence to aggressive behavior both for short-term and chronic exposure. According to this model, each exposure to media violence constitutes a learning trial in which aggression-related schemas and scripts in memory are activated. Even brief exposures to media violence impact a person’s current internal state defined by cognitive, affective, and arousal variables. That is, each episode of media violence exposure serves to prime aggressive cognitions, to increase arousal, and to create an aggressive affective state. According to Anderson and Bushman (2001), the repeated activation of these structures leads to changes in five types of knowledge structures, namely, aggressive beliefs and attitudes, aggressive perceptual schemata, aggressive expectation schemata, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggression desensitization. Changes in these knowledge structures may induce an aggressive personality, which may in turn lead to changes in situational variables (e.g., the person seeks different types of social interactions and peer groups). Support for the GAM has been provided by various studies showing that indeed brief exposure to media violence can alter the present internal state of the individual. For example, Anderson and Dill (2000) showed that playing a violent game made aggressive thoughts more accessible than playing a nonviolent game. In this study, participants played either a violent or a nonviolent game and then were asked to pronounce a list of words. Participants who played the violent game were faster at pronouncing the violent words than those who played the nonviolent game. Furthermore, Kirsh (1998) showed that game violence increases aggressive expectations. In this study, children played a violent or nonviolent game and then listened to stories describing a protagonist in various provocative situations. They were asked to identify themselves with the protagonist and respond to

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questions regarding their expectations for imminent actions. Children who played the violent game described more aggressive next actions than those who played the nonviolent game. Similarly, Bushman and Anderson (2002) showed that adult participants who played a violent game for 20 minutes and then responded to questions regarding the actions and the feelings of a story protagonist expected the protagonist to feel more angry and aggressive and react more aggressively to the situation.

Individual Differences Although the literature provides a convincing account for the presence of a causal link between violent movies and aggression in both the laboratory and real life, it is of great importance to determine whether this link is mediated by personal characteristics. Thus, researchers also investigated the possibility that there are individual differences in the process of desensitization. Research on this topic reveals that trait aggressiveness is positively correlated with the desire to watch violent films, and media violence is found to elicit more aggression in high trait aggressive individuals than in low trait aggressive individuals (e.g., Bushman, 1995; O’Neal & Taylor, 1989). Furthermore, research has shown that participants with longer records of antisocial behavior exhibit more aggression after viewing violent films in lab-constructed situations (Hartmann, 1969). Berkowitz (1984) argued that in general violent movies can give the audience ideas that may then be translated into antisocial or overt behavior, and this behavior is likely to be in accordance with the viewers’ interpretations of whether the witnessed action was appropriate, profitable, or morally justified. Therefore, Berkowitz argues for a bidirectional relationship in which the violent movies have an adverse effect on the viewer’s behavior but in which the viewer brings his/her own interpretation of what he/she perceives. Thus, it is possible that aggressive individuals enjoy the violence portrayed in the media more and are less concerned for the suffering of victims of violence. However, all individuals, regardless of personality, seem to get desensitized to media violence similarly (Bartolow, Bushman, & Sestir, 2006; Fanti et al., 2009). In the study by Fanti and colleagues (2009) aggressive behavior was related to the initial level of enjoyment of media violence, indicating that aggressive participants enjoyed the violent scenes more in comparison to the nonaggressive participants. In terms of sympathy, the more aggressive participants reported lower initial sympathy toward the victims of violence. Although the authors identified differences in the degree of enjoyment and sympathy toward the victim of violence, all individuals regardless of aggressive habits were

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desensitized to media violence in the same manner. This finding seems to rule out the hypothesis that aggressive individuals will exhibit a different desensitization-to-violence pattern because individuals with high trait aggression have permanently reduced inhibition to aggression and blunted evaluative categorization of violent stimuli (Bartholow et al., 2006).

Discussion and Future Directions Despite the fact that most scientists agree that chronic exposure to media violence may have deleterious effects on personality and influence behavior, it is not yet fully established how these effects come about. The GAM of Anderson and Bushman (2001) offers a nice theoretical framework on which many studies have been carried out, yet the variables that are involved are so complex that further systematic research is needed before drawing definite conclusions about its validity. One avenue in which research on media violence could move is the examination of how various personality characteristics may make some people over others more prone to the effects of either brief or chronic exposure to media violence. Furthermore, as technology evolves so does the complexity of the media. Three-dimensional media is currently appearing in both TV and gaming, with the level of realism and interactivity of content continuously improving. Thus, new variables are constantly emerging, making the quest of understanding the impact of media violence more complex. For example, although many studies have shown that brief exposure to video game violence increases aggressive behavior, there is now evidence that wishful identification with the protagonists of violent video games further enhances the negative effects of media violence (Konijn, Nije Bijvank, & Bushman, 2007). Although realism and immersion did not directly influence the effects in this study, these variables were found to correlate with wishful identification. As violent content is getting increasingly more realistic and immersive in our days, so could the negative effects of media violence. Moreover, desensitization may arise from different sources of screenbased media, including TV, movies, video games, and the Internet. Even though prior research suggested that viewers’ get desensitized to TV, movie, and video game violence, it is not clear how Internet violence is related to desensitization or aggressive behavior. Moreover, current work provides evidence for a new form of violence, cyberbullying (i.e., sending threatening or harassing emails, instant messages, and chat room messages; Fanti, Demetriou, & Hawa, under review). This work suggests that individuals are not only exposed to violence through the Internet but also

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engage in these forms of violence, suggesting that Internet violence is interactive. Work currently performed in our lab provides strong support that exposure to Internet violence increases cyberbullying behaviors and cybervictimization; however, it remains unclear whether desensitization to Internet violence influences cyberbullying and cybervictimization or whether cyberbullies and cybervictims are more likely to be desensitized to media violence. In conclusion, children, adolescents, and adults are exposed to high levels of violence, and evidence suggests that violence exposure can result in maladaptive behaviors and even abnormal brain functioning (Anderson et al., 2003; Bartholow et al., 2006; Mathews et al., 2005). Individuals may get so desensitized to violence that they may start believing that violence is normative. However, what is most frightening is not that viewers get desensitized to violence but that aggressive behaviors may result from such desensitization. In closing, we should state that our belief is that the scientific literature clearly establishes the presence of deleterious effects from violence exposure and therefore it is about time that the entertainment industry took scientific findings into consideration. The media industry needs to be transformed from an industry responsible for desensitizing us to violence to an industry promoting and enhancing positive and prosocial behaviors. Our children should not live in a society that values the public viewing of violent content. Therefore, it may be prudent to consider creating a public policy against viewing such violent content to prevent long-term consequences.

Note We thank Melina Nicole Kyranides and Christina Adamou for useful comments on a previous draft of this chapter. Support was provided by internal grant “Media Violence” from the University of Cyprus.

References Anderson, C. A. (2004). An update on the effects of violent video games. Journal of Adolescence, 27, 113–122. Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., Huesmann, L. R., Johnson, J., Linz, D., Malamuth, N., & Wartella, E. (2003). The influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4, 81–110. Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal,

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and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12, 353–359. Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). The effects of media violence on society. Science, 295, 2377–2379. Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 772–790. Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1963). Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, 3–11. Bartholow, B. D., Bushman, B. J., & Sestir, M. A. (2006). Chronic violent video game exposure and desensitization to violence: Behavioral and event-related brain potential data. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 532–539. Bartholow, B. D., Sestir, M. A., & Davis, E. B. (2005). Correlates and consequences of exposure to video game violence: Hostile personality, empathy, and aggressive behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1573–1586. Berkowitz, L. (1984). Some effects of thoughts on anti- and prosocial influences of media events: A cognitive-neoassociation analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 410–427. Bradley, M. M., Codispoti, M., Cuthbert, B. N., & Lang, B. J. (2001). Emotion and motivation: Defensive and appetitive reactions in picture processing. Emotion, 1, 276–298. Bushman, B. J. (1995). Moderating role of trait aggressiveness in the effects of violent media on aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 950–960. Bushman, B. J. (1998). Priming effects of media violence on the accessibility of aggressive constructs in memory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 537–545. Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2002). Violent video games and hostile expectations: A test of the General Aggression Model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1679–1686. Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2009). Comfortably numb: Desensitizing effects of violent media on helping others. Psychological Science, 20, 273–277. Carnagey, N. L., Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2007). The effect of video game violence on physiological desensitization to real-life violence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 489–496. Cline, V. B., Croft, R. G., & Courrier, S. (1973). Desensitization of children to television violence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 360–365. Donnerstein, E., & Smith, S. L. (1997). Impact of media violence on children, adolescents, and adults. In S. Kirschner, & D. A. Kirschner (Eds.), Perspectives on psychology and the media (pp. 29–68). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Fanti, K. A., Demetriou, A., & Hawa, V. (under review). A longitudinal study of cyberbullying: Examining risk and protective factors.

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Fanti, K. A., Vanman, E., Henrich, C. C., & Avraamides, M. N. (2009). Desensitization to media violence over a short period of time. Aggressive Behavior, 35, 179–187. Freedman, J. L. (2002). Media violence and its effects on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Funk, J. B., Bechtoldt-Baldacci, H., Pasold, T., & Baumgardner, J. (2004). Violence exposure in real-life, video games, television, movies, and the Internet: Is there desensitization? Journal of Adolescence, 27, 23–39. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1994). Growing up with television: The cultivation perspective. In J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 17–41). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gould, M. S., & Shaffer, D. (1986). The impact of suicide in television movies: Evidence of imitation. New England Journal of Medicine, 315, 690–694. Gunter, B. (1994). The question of media violence. In J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 163–211). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hartmann, D. P. (1969). Influence of symbolically modeled instrumental aggression and pain cues on aggressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 11, 280–288. Huesmann, L. R., Moise, J. F., & Podolski, C. L. (1997). The effects of media violence on the development of antisocial behavior. In D. M. Stoff, & J. Breiling (Eds.), Handbook of antisocial behavior (pp. 181–193). New York: Wiley. Kalamas, A. D., & Gruber, M. L. (1998). Electrodermal responses to implied versus actual violence on television. Journal of General Psychology, 125, 31–37. Kirsh, S. J. (1998). Seeing the world through Mortal Kombat–colored glasses: Violent video games and the development of a short-term hostile attribution bias. Childhood, 5, 177–184. Konijn, E. A., Nije Bijvank, M., & Bushman, B. J. (2007). I wish I were a warrior: The role of wishful identification in the effects of violent video games on aggression in adolescent boys. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1038–1044. Lang, P. J., Greenwald, M. K., Bradley, M. M., & Hamm, A. O. (1993). Looking at pictures: Affective, facial, visceral, and behavioral reactions. Psychophysiology, 30, 261–273. Linz, D., Donnerstein, E., & Adams, S. M. (1989). Physiological desensitization and judgments about female victims of violence. Human Communication Research, 15, 509–522. Linz, D., Donnerstein, E., & Penrod, S. (1988). Effects of long-term exposure to violent and sexually degrading depictions of women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 758–768. Malamuth, N. M., & Check, J. V. P. (1981). The effects of mass media exposure on acceptance of violence against women: A field experiment. Journal of Research in Personality, 14, 436–446. Mathews, V. P., Kronenberger, W. G., Wang, Y., Lurito, J. T., Lowe, M. J., & Dunn, D. W. (2005). Media violence exposure and frontal lobe activation measured

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by functional magnetic resonance imaging in aggressive and nonaggressive adolescents. Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, 29, 287–292. O’Neal, E. C., & Taylor, S. L. (1989). Status of the provoker, opportunity to retaliate, and interest in video violence. Aggressive Behavior, 15, 171–180. Philips, D. P., & Carstensen, L. L. (1986). Clustering of teenage suicides after television news stories about suicide. New England Journal of Medicine, 315, 685–689. Siddle, D. A. T. (1991). Orienting, habituation, and resource allocation: An associative analysis. Psychophysiology, 28, 245–259. Smith, S. L., & Donnerstein, E. (1998). Harmful effects of exposure to media violence: Learning of aggression, emotional desensitization, and fear. In R. G. Geen & E. Donnerstein (Eds.), Human aggression: Theories, research, and implications for social policy (pp. 167–202). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Taylor, S. P., (1967). Aggressive behaviour and physiological arousal as a function of provocation and the tendency to inhibit aggression. Journal of Personality, 35, 297–310. Thomas, M. H., Horton, R. W., Lippincott, E. C., & Drabman, R. S. (1977). Desensitization to portrayals of real life aggression as a function of television violence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 450–458. Vanman, E. J., Dawson, M. E., & Brennan, P. A. (1998). Affective reactions in the blink of an eye: Individual differences in subjective experience and physiological responses to emotional stimuli. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 1007–1018. Watt, J. H., & Krull, R. A. (1977). Examination of three models of television viewing and aggression. Human Communication Research, 3, 99–112. Wolpe J. 1982. The practice of behavior therapy (3rd ed.). New York: Pergamon Press.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

What We Do Matters: Making Shelter When Teachers Abuse Teens Billie Wright Dziech

Someone has to be responsible. Someone has to pick up the pieces. Someone has to make shelter. May Sarton

Sexual victimization of children and adolescents by their teachers captures public attention temporarily when a local or particularly horrific case occurs. If there is something unique about the perpetrator or the school, press coverage might last longer, as in the case of Robert “Pete” Peterson, a 65-year-old social studies teacher and camp director for Sidwell Friends Middle School in northwest Washington, D.C. Accused of inappropriate touching and sharing pornography with a male student, Peterson was fired after pleading guilty to one count of child sex abuse in 2010. The behaviors themselves were commonplace for perpetrators, but where the teacher worked was another matter, as well as a reminder that educator sexual abuse can occur anytime, anywhere. Sidwell Friends is the school that President and Mrs. Obama’s daughters attend (Turque & Morse, 2010). But even this case lost its impact once the media shifted focus to more salacious or gruesome spectacles, and the unsettling irony is that sexual abuse in elementary and secondary schools remains a complex and often misunderstood issue examined primarily through imperfect government data, obscure academic studies, and media accounts of high visibility cases. An attempt to reach a better understanding of the problem occurred

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in 2001 when the No Child Left Behind Act amended Section 5414 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and mandated a study of sexual abuse in the nation’s schools. The result was Charol Shakeshaft’s Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature (2004), which discussed prevalence, offenders, targets, allegations, legal initiatives, the roles of unions, and prevention strategies. An Associated Press (AP) study of sexual misconduct in schools described the fate of the report succinctly: “[It] was largely ignored” (Irvine & Tanner, 2007). A flaw in Shakeshaft’s review of the literature was that it conflated the term “sexual abuse” with the more inclusive and general phrase “sexual misconduct,” and so an exact figure for abuse was not clear from her conclusion that 4.5 million of approximately 50 million public school students “are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade” (p. 18). Nevertheless, she later observed that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests” (quoted in Dougherty, 2004). But even the best surveys are finally only educated guesses. The most significant reason for this is that sex crimes have the lowest reporting rate of all criminal activities. Some targets never tell, and those who do often wait years to disclose. Then too principals and school boards and sometimes even parents resist reporting. Most of what we know about prevalence comes from law enforcement agencies, which cannot make accurate determinations because of underreporting and, equally significant, because not all cases that are investigated meet the rigorous standards necessary to qualify as abuse. Differential definitions and data collection practices by legal agencies and the states also prohibit a coherent view of the national prevalence rate. Congress defines sexual abuse as a behavior by which one intentionally “causes another person to engage in a sexual act by threatening or placing that other person in fear . . . (or) engages in a sexual act with another person if that other person is—(A) incapable of appraising the nature of the conduct; or (B) physically incapable of declining participation in, or communicating unwillingness to engage in that sexual act” (18 U.S.C. § 2242). But the states differ on factors related to that definition. Even though all states prohibit sex between adults and minors (those who are “incapable of appraising the nature of” sexual conduct and legally consenting to it), the term “minor” varies from state to state so that a minor is 16 in 30 states, 17 in 9 states, and 18 in 11 others. Generally used to describe the most dangerous offenders, even the term “predator” can differ from state to state. Then too data comparisons are confusing over time because

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some states compose crime statistics reports based on calendar years and others on their own fiscal years. Studies have reported somewhat similar national prevalence rates or numerical estimates of victims. Shakeshaft (2004) extrapolated from her sources approximately a 6–10% prevalence rate for teacher sexual abuse. Based on a sample of 4,023 adolescents from 12 to 17 across all race and ethnic lines, Snyder (2000) reported a prevalence rate of 8.1%. Perhaps the most widely discussed report was the five-year study (2001–2005) by the AP, which found 2,570 cases “in which teachers were punished or removed from the classroom for sexual misconduct. The allegations ranged from fondling to rape” (Irvine & Tanner, 2007). A possibly optimistic finding came from Finkelhor and Jones (2004), who relied on data from the National Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) to report a 40% decline in overall cases of child sexual abuse between 1992 and 2000. They cautioned that the decline could be the result of decades of aggressive response to the problem but also that the statistic could be inaccurate and that there might have been no real decline but simply changes in data collection. Although there are sharp differences of opinion about the validity and extent of the decrease, Finkelhor and Jones nevertheless maintained that at least some decline had occurred. None of these studies focused exclusively on educator perpetrators, and so it is difficult to reconcile the reported decrease with the ever heightened outcry over unsafe schools. For the present, prevalence rates and theories about increases and decreases are at best speculative. Data from 1992–2000 and 2001–2010 might eventually prove similar or different. In the meantime, there are few research projects that document the problem at acceptable levels of reliability and validity because studies are so expensive and difficult to carry out. They must rely on questionable data because of underreporting; and when studies are done, they are likely to use small and dissimilar samples and methodologies. Equally problematic, of course, is the reluctance or refusal of school districts and teachers’ unions to allow information about educator offenses in the public domain. To understand the dynamics of sex abuse requires at least basic knowledge of its targets. Publications describing development of early adolescents (approximately 12 to 14 years of age) and those in the middle stage (approximately 15 to 18 years) are too numerous to count, but even a cursory examination of teens’ characteristics reveals the immense psychological vulnerability that the poet Theodore Roethke recognized when he said, “So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.”

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Adolescence is that agonizing period in which the struggle for identity and a sense of self-worth occurs. Tremendously egocentric, teenagers fluctuate wildly between overconfidence and self-deprecation as they strive to cope with relationships, gender roles, and their emerging sexuality. What psychologist David Elkind (1967) defined as the concept of personal fable often leads to their conviction that they are somehow unique and impervious to life’s dangers and challenges. Great risk takers, they exhibit poor and even dangerous judgment at times. Many invite conflict and can be seriously aggressive and resistant to authority. Others who are conflict-avoidant enclose themselves within protective shells to shut out discordant emotions and relationships. Ironically, at this time when the young desperately need adult guidance and support, they are most likely to distance themselves from family as they seek peer approval, independence, and autonomy. Popular books often capture everyday reality more directly than academic works, as Anthony Wolfe (2002) demonstrated when he described the fragility of adolescence in Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall. The hallmark of adolescence . . . is a psychological change. . . . A new and powerful voice rises inside of children. They must obey this voice and in doing so, their lives change forever. . . . A new force within dictates that teenagers must now experience themselves as independent and able to exist on their own. No more can they feel close to or dependent on their parents. . . . This mandate eliminates the wonderful security of childhood. Day-today living takes on a quality of desperation. Life is no longer a game. . . . In this new world adolescents feel much more exposed and therefore more vulnerable than ever before. Things can get scary, even terrifying, and perhaps overwhelming. (pp. 14–15)

There are many explanations for the origins of this “new and powerful voice” that disrupts security, creates feelings of alienation, and contributes to events and behaviors that can become “scary.” Most of the theories can be subsumed under familiar “nature-nurture” or “heredity-environment” terminology, and almost all possess some degree of credence. Biologists, for instance, have long stressed the importance of hormones in explaining teen behavior, and anthropologists emphasized the effects of culture on human development. Undoubtedly, adolescents are affected by these and any number of factors—parenting, early childhood experiences, education, nutrition, and peers—as well as biology and culture.

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Even though the human brain has been of interest to civilizations as far back as the Egyptians, the expanding field of neuroscience has begun to shed the clearest light on the stage we call “adolescence.” The complexity of brain studies makes it impossible here to explain in detail how the adolescent brain functions, yet a few basic points are worth noting. Prior to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the latter 20th century, scientists could study with accuracy only the brains of dead humans, a circumstance that for years led to the belief that the human brain was fully formed by age five. But with their capacity to examine detailed pictures of living brains, MRIs produced a shocking discovery: There is enormous plasticity and capacity for change occurring in the brain throughout adolescence, and this change is not completed until the third decade of life. Probably the most important area of the brain that demands comment at this point is the prefrontal cortex, which is the center of most life skills— impulse control, empathy, organization, strategizing, prioritizing, decision making, behavior determination, insight, and sensitivity to feedback and repercussions of behavior (Weingberger, Elvevag, & Giedd, 2005). As an individual matures, connections are made within the prefrontal cortex that result from reinforcement of socially appropriate behaviors, but this is a very gradual process influenced by external factors such as parenting, education, and ethical training. Until the process is complete, the primitive part of the brain, the limbic system, exercises significant control so that during adolescence decisions and actions are frequently based on primitive instincts and desires. Summarizing their discussion in “The Adolescent Brain: A Work in Progress,” Weingberger and colleagues (2005) concluded: Research on the neurological development of teens confirms a long held, common sense view: teenagers are not the same as adults in a variety of key areas such as ability to make sound judgments when confronted by complex situations, the capacity to control impulses, and the ability to plan effectively. . . . Teens are full of promise, often energetic and caring, capable of making many contributions to their communities, and able to make remarkable spurts in intellectual development and learning. But neurologically, they are not adults. (p. 19)

Knowledgeable as the authors’ remarks are, psychologist Michael J. Bradley’s (2003) use of humor to portray adolescence is perhaps more compelling. In his award-winning popular book Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid without Losing Your Mind, Bradley portrayed adolescence

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from both parents’ and teens’ perspectives. Having explained advancements in neuroscience that led to the realization that the brain is not completely developed in adolescence, he continued: The result is that the teen is trapped between the two worlds of childhood and adulthood. . . . Like a science fiction character he finds himself existing in two separate dimensions at the same time, with two completely different sets of rules, expectations, needs, and fears. Learning how to verbally approach adolescents today is the same rigorous baptism-by-fire known to rookie cops and new workers at mental hospitals. You can’t just say what you think because many of the people you work with are mentally ill and cannot handle normal conversation. . . . Adolescence, at times, is a kind of mental illness. That raging child you love, who seems to be delighting in her torment of you, is often in just that kind of terrible pain. She is fighting for her soul, and she can’t let anyone know, least of all her Uncle Louie, who loves to constantly tell her: “These are the best years of your life, kiddo. It’s all downhill from here.” (pp. 15–16)

The almost overwhelming challenge sexual abuse poses is that educatoroffenders are far more likely than average citizens to understand the outrage and the pain of adolescence and to possess the trained verbal and emotional discipline necessary to capitalize on teens’ feelings of entrapment “between the two worlds of childhood and adulthood.” Perhaps the greatest mistake targets and their parents make is assuming not only that all educators are trustworthy and responsible but also that those who do not fit this ideal model are easily recognizable. Shakeshaft and Cohan (1994) reported that at the elementary school level, teachers who were sexually abusing children were often considered outstanding educators, just as Dziech and Weiner (1984) contended that a similar pattern occurred on the collegiate level. Parents at the Sidwell Friends school, for instance, were shocked to hear of the charges against Peterson. One said that her son “adored him” and another that he was “a wonderful teacher” (Birnbaum & Morse, 2010). Another difficulty is that perpetrators are often veteran educators whose offenses might not be detected for years. Whatever their lengths of service and reputations, abusive educators are unlikely to wear labels declaring their identities. What distinguishes them from their peers is less their personal characteristics and teaching effectiveness than the process by which they approach teens during the most vulnerable developmental period of their lives. Sex is all around teenagers in contemporary society, but they know far less than they and many adults assume. “Trapped between the two worlds of childhood and adulthood”

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(Bradley, 2003, p. 15), forced to obey “a new and powerful voice” (Wolfe, 2002, p. 14) that threatens to rob them of all security, adolescents are perfect targets for what is known as “grooming.” It is a subtle process by which an offender slowly but surely establishes a connection with a young person in order to build a bond of trust so that feelings of insecurity, alienation, self-deprecation, and even sexual confusion will be alleviated and the teen will lower his or her inhibitions and become open to the possibility of a physical relationship. This may have been the case with 16-year-old Jess Anderson, who left home in 2008 to live with 49-year-old Clive Richardson, a religious education teacher in the United Kingdom. The story attracted attention because three days after Richardson’s third wife left with the younger of their two sons, he moved the teenager in, where she became stepmother to his 14-year-old son, Benjamin. Benjamin, who wanted to remain in his home, traveled to school on the same bus with Anderson and told his mother, “It’s not right, Mummy, Jess goes to the same school as me” (Clarke, 2008b). Richardson had a similar relationship with another 16-year-old student in 2006, and sources indicated the school was aware of rumors about his behavior with Anderson but did not act because it maintained it had no evidence. Subsequently, Richardson was granted a leave for depression, and his contract was not renewed. He and Anderson were able to remain in the house he and his wife rented because the wife worked and he declared he was incapacitated. Richardson and the girl announced they planned to marry when she was legally of age. Meanwhile she e-mailed her family: I understand that what I am about to tell you will be upsetting and a shock. I was aware in early October that I was falling deeply in love with Clive. We first acknowledged feelings for each other in October 2007; he stopped being my teacher in April 2007, thus not breaking any rules. Like any couple we found we enjoyed one another’s company and got along very well; he did not set out to seduce me or capture me or whatever else you or anyone else may think. I know you will be thinking that I have been brainwashed or “groomed” as the common phrase is these days, but I definitely have not had any one of these things done to me. (Clarke, 2008a)

Naomi Clarke, the reporter covering the story, noted that the girl wrote “she had taken advice from a solicitor, and reminded her mother—several times—that ‘it is important you realise legally we have done nothing wrong’â•›” (Clarke, 2008a).

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The grooming procedure to which Anderson referred usually involves premeditated behavior that begins with the perpetrator’s establishing a “special” relationship with the teen in order to gain trust and lower his or her inhibitions. It is a form of psychological manipulation in which the adult demonstrates singular interest in the young person and then tests his or her response through a gradual process that might involve creating opportunities for togetherness without others present, encouraging disclosure of personal information, providing the target with gifts or tokens of support, introducing discussion of inappropriate topics like sex, and normalizing physical contact by “accidental” and increasingly direct touching or hugging. The grooming process has never been better depicted than in Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout’s 1998 novel, Amy and Isabelle. A single mother, Isabelle appears with her daughter in Shirley Falls when Amy is only an infant. Over time Isabelle builds a quiet and respectable but lonely life for herself and her child, who is 16 as the novel opens. No one, especially shy and insecure Amy, suspects the secret that is the key to Isabelle’s extreme overprotectiveness. Years before when she was a teenager, Isabelle was seduced and became pregnant by her father’s best friend, a married man with three children. “Thinking it is good to know she has a nice girl like Amy” (p. 134), Isabelle at the beginning of the novel has no reason to suspect that her naïve but beautiful daughter will change their lives forever when she succumbs to the sexual overtures of a teacher. Thomas Robertson, the year-long replacement for an ailing math teacher, is the prototypic abuser from the moment he enters the classroom. He focuses almost immediately on Amy, telling her in front of her classmates, “You have a glorious head of hair. . . . But you hide behind it. We hardly ever get to see your face. . . . You’re like a turtle, Amy. . . . So come on out, Amy Goodrow. Everyone’s been asking about you” (p. 30). Unaccustomed to the attention, she hates him while his popularity increases with other students. After ignoring her for a few days, he compliments her on a dress she is wearing; and when she seems embarrassed, he sits down in the empty desk next to her and tells her softly, “A woman should learn to take a compliment gracefully” (p. 48). To be called “a woman” by a popular teacher is, of course, a heady experience for a lonely teenager. The relationship unfolds gradually from that point until it finally spirals out of control. Robertson draws Amy toward him, then plays with her emotions by ignoring her. He impresses her with his knowledge and sensitivity. “It was like he was a mind reader” (p.€74), she thinks. They often stay after school to talk until finally he begins

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driving her home. Whereas before she had felt invisible in the alienation of adolescence, now she knows she is “not invisible to him. . . . No one, it seemed, had ever been this happy to see her” (pp. 92–93). Then Robertson gives her a copy of Yeats’s poem “To a Young Girl.” “Before she had been drawn to him as though he were a large, dark magnet pulling the nail of herself slowly across a vast room. But here she was, with a soft, imperceptible click; nowhere further to be drawn to. She had arrived, and now she loved him” (p. 93). At the end of each ride home, Robertson covers new territory. He “accidentally” touches her knee, soon they are kissing lightly, and then he French kisses her. Amy wonders, “So did it mean he loved her? The kiss had not seemed loving. It had seemed, in a way, to have very little to do with her. But that was stupid, because you would only kiss someone that way if you liked them a great deal. Still, sitting [alone in her] quiet living room, she felt uneasy, almost sad” (p. 118). By the time spring approaches, they are parking in a secluded area every day, and she is doing whatever he asks. He tells her, “You’re every man’s dream. A horny girl. . . . I want you even hornier” (p. 142). Then one day as her mother’s boss is driving home, he notices the empty car, leaves his own to discover whose it is, and finds instead Amy and the math teacher having sex in the woods. When Isabelle is told of the incident, she confronts Robertson and tells him he must leave town. His response is that of a practiced offender: “Sure . . . I have no reason to stay” (p. 166), and Isabelle hears “in his remark the disposability of her daughter” (p. 167). She asks, “Have you any idea . . . how you have injured my child? . . . You have taken a very, very innocent girl and put you handprint on her forever” (p. 167). His answer is, “I’m afraid you’ve been a tad naïve about the nature of your passionate and unusually attractive daughter” (p. 167). Against all evidence, Amy believes he will come back for her because “it was indescribably private what they had done. When people did that kind of thing . . . well, they loved each other incredibly. You had to be together after that” (p. 171). Isabelle’s relationship with her sanctimonious boss is ruined by what he witnessed in the woods; to him, Amy is a “Nasty girl. Filthy thing” (p. 155). Amy and Isabelle suffer through a blistering, rainless summer of anger and estrangement. Refusing to believe her mother’s contention that “that kind of man . . . says he cares for you because he wants what he wants” (p. 161), Amy wanders the streets compulsively in hopes that Robertson will return. Finally, she begins calling phone numbers of all the “Thomas Robertsons” in neighboring towns. After several disappointments, she reaches a woman who silently hands over the phone to a man whose voice is that of her teacher.

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The phone picked up: “Hello?” “Oh, Mr. Robertson. It’s me. It’s Amy Goodrow.” A pause. “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Robertson in his lovely deep voice, “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.” “No, I don’t. It’s me, it’s Amy. In Shirley Falls. You know.” “I’m afraid not,” Mr. Robertson said slowly. “You have the wrong number. . . . I don’t know who you are. And there is no need for you to call me here again” (p. 269). Teacher-student relationships are doomed for all the reasons depicted in this conversation. Mr. Robertson is always “Mr. Robertson,” never “Thomas,” to Amy, even though he has explored the most intimate parts of her body. To her, he is first and foremost “a grownup [who will] know what to do” (p. 171) when her angry mother confronts him. Like a fairy tale princess waiting to be rescued, she believes he will eventually return for her. But because she is luckier than some of the real-life victims who never recover from educators’ invasions into their lives, by the end of the summer she acquires “the half-formed knowledge that Mr. Robertson might be [in fact was] ultimately replaceable” (p. 304). He is replaceable because she never really knows him. Disparities of power and age, as well as his sexual desire that has “very little to do with her” (p. 118), make genuine knowing impossible. For all its cruelty, Robertson’s “I don’t know who you are” (p. 269) is one of his few candid statements. He knows who he is and what he wants, he knows how to groom girls he targets because he understands adolescents, but he cannot finally know the individual Amy Goodrow since she does not and cannot at 16 know herself. These inabilities to penetrate beyond surface appearances are what make “consensual” relationships between teachers and students impossible—these and one final thought from Isabelle: “What we do matters” (p. 297). Amy exhibits many characteristics emanating from the “sexual harassment syndrome” (see Paludi & Barickman, 1991). The most comprehensive analysis of effects on targets, the syndrome contains five categories: emotional reactions; physical reactions; changes in self-perception; social, interpersonal, and sexual effects; and career effects. Because offenders, targets, and behaviors vary so widely, the authors list several outcomes in each category. For example, Amy’s reactions to her situation are complex and shifting, depending on what Robertson does or does not say and do and on her mother’s behaviors. From the beginning of the teacher’s onslaught, Amy’s emotions run the gamut through self-consciousness, confusion, insecurity, embarrassment, anxiety, frustration, fear, isolation, powerlessness, and betrayal. There are

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days in the beginning when her self-perception is heightened because of the relationship and others, especially once she is deserted, when she recognizes the hopelessness and powerlessness of her plight. Her preoccupation with Robertson causes her to become uncharacteristically distracted and disobedient at school. Once he is gone, she blames her mother and withdraws from her at the time both are in greatest need of each other. Amy is, of course, a fictional character, but she is also emblematic of all adolescents who consent to sexual overtures from educators and end up “watching [themselves] out of control, reacting to things [they] know aren’t real, yet somehow are real” (Bradley, 2003, p. 16). The loss they ultimately experience is irretrievable, as Robertson’s first statement to Amy’s class predicts: “You are young adults now. . . . There isn’t anyone in this room . . . who needs to think of himself as a child again” (p. 26). Fortunately, the majority of teens reject sexual advances by teachers. Unfortunately, few report educator misbehavior to appropriate authorities and even to their families or friends. Using data from Snyder’s (2000) representative sample of 4,023 teenagers, research found that those who told someone, especially their mothers, within a month were less likely to experience major depressive episodes or to exhibit delinquent behaviors. Nevertheless, studies using representative samples estimated that approximately one in three targets never disclose sexual abuse and at least two in three never report it to social service or law enforcement agencies (Weingberger et al., 2005). The reasoning for not doing so has been well documented during the decades that sexual harassment has attracted public attention. Even more than adult targets in the workplace, adolescents live in a world of “them versus us,” and so they are reluctant and usually unlikely to report offenses. They recognize that offenders have far more power and status than they, and they know that perpetrators’ relationships to others in power are often strong. Experience teaches teenagers that adults often assume they exaggerate or misperceive behaviors, and so targets doubt they will be believed. The media frenzy over teacher sexual abuse increases their anxiety about becoming known to others and embarrassing themselves and their families. They worry about losing friends and relationships, and most of all, they are concerned that they are somehow responsible for what has happened or that others will think they invited the educator’s attention. While these motivations doubtlessly affect nonreporting, another almost contradictory and perhaps original explanation might explain teens’ silence. Those who believe themselves to be unique and special, heroes or heroines within their own personal fables, might well assume that they can manage on their own, that they do not need help from parents or school

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personnel. After all, the silence and protective covering that surrounds most educator sexual abuse is so profound that targets might reasonably assume their situations are singular. So they manage. They cope in the only ways they know, never recognizing the additional burden they might be inflicting on themselves. They avoid offenders, cut classes, stay away from school altogether, and sometimes even seek to change schools, all the while not realizing that their grades can be affected, that they are alienating themselves from peers and school activities, and that they are missing opportunities that will not come again. Nor do they consider that their silence endangers students yet to be targeted. Although there is no data to prove this theory, it is worth noting that it, along with standard explanations for nonreporting, may explain the especially perilous responses of young males, who are far less likely to come forward when sexual offenses occur. The standard explanations for male students’ silence are well-known and widely disseminated. Males are stereotyped as more sexual than females, and even with the escalation of hookup culture, a double standard still applies so that youthful sexual activity for boys remains far more acceptable than for girls and has become almost a rite of passage. Therefore, when a female teacher approaches a teenage boy, he might consider himself fortunate, or if he is uncomfortable, he might assume he is abnormal. Easily sexually aroused, adolescent males can also be manipulated into believing they “wanted” and even initiated sex. If an approach comes from a male educator, a heterosexual adolescent might fear he himself has recognizable homosexual characteristics. Any of these scenarios could act as deterrents to reporting, but the personal fable motivation can also combine with upbringing and cultural stereotyping of males to discourage them from seeking help. The asymmetrical, adversarial worldview (in which males are inculcated) takes perhaps its greatest toll in the realm of feelings. From childhood, boys learn that the route to center stage lies in winning, exhibiting physical prowess, telling jokes well, and eventually in making sexual conquests. There are few rewards, even today, for expressions of vulnerability or emotion; males discover very early that seeking help from others or admitting to self-limitations negates their quest for independence and status (Dziech & Hawkins, 1998, p. 90). Ironically, the asymmetrical worldview that discourages male targets from admitting to victimization is often indirectly cited in attempted typologies of male perpetrators, who comprise the vast majority of sexual abusers. Male Perpetrators of Child Maltreatment: Findings from NCANDS (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, 2002) was based on a

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2002 analysis of characteristics of 202,376 perpetrators in 18 states; two of their categories of victims were 12- to 15-year-olds and 16 years old and older. Out of all types of maltreatment, 26% of sex abuse cases were associated with males and only 2% with females. Findings by other researchers (e.g., Finkelhor, 1984) substantiate the gender disparity. The motivations and characteristics of males who abuse are so diverse and complex that they may never be understood, but the challenge has not kept people from trying. In early research on male offenders, Groth and Birnbaum (1978) divided them into two categories: fixated and regressed. Fixated offenders focus exclusively on young children as opposed to those in the 12–18 age group and are thus not relevant in discussing adolescents. Eventually, the FBI expanded on the NCANDS’s typologies to describe categories of “situational offenders” and their characteristics. Regressed: Offenders have poor coping skills, target victims who are easily accessible, abuse children as a substitute for adult relationships; Morally Indiscriminate: Offenders do not prefer children over adults and tend to use children (or anyone accessible) for their own interests (sexual and otherwise); Sexually Indiscriminate: Offenders are mainly interested in sexual experimentation and abuse children out of boredom; Inadequate: Offenders are social misfits who are insecure, have low self-esteem, and see relationships with children as their only sexual outlet. (Terry and Tallon, 2004, p. 26)

Given widespread underreporting, heterogeneity of perpetrators, and the complexity of human beings, identification of causal factors for sexually abusive behavior can often appear speculative. One example is Bradford and Fedoroff’s (2009) discussion of risk factors such as cognitive impairments from head injuries, maternal and paternal alcohol abuse, first birth order, and maternal advanced age at the time of the perpetrator’s birth. In the aggregate, the research is both helpful and daunting because of the sheer number of theories, which may or may not prove valid and may or may not be applicable in school settings. Noting that it is unlikely that any single theory can explain sexual abuse, they identified and classified those that have been proposed by various researchers. For example, Biological Theory asserts that physiological factors can lead to abnormal sexual behaviors, and Psychodynamic Theory maintains that sexual deviance is an expression of unresolved problems experienced during developmental stages. Behavioral Theory proposes that sexual deviance is a learned condition similar to the mechanisms

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by which conventional sexuality is learned, whereas Attachment Theory holds that humans have a propensity to develop strong emotional ties with others and that when they are deprived of these they act out because of stress and loneliness. Cognitive-Behavioral Theory focuses on offenders’ tendency to diminish guilt and shame with justifications and excuses for their actions. For decades most of the research on sex abusers concentrated on males. Then along came Mary Kay Letourneau. Although she conceived children with a student, Letourneau was not the first teacher to engage in outlandish behavior, but the twists and turns of her story would be extremely hard to duplicate. Vandiver and Kercher (2004) identified six categories of female offenders (heterosexual nurturers, noncriminal homosexuals, female sexual predators, young adult sexual exploiters, homosexual criminals, and aggressive homosexual women), but the teacher/lover category remains most characteristic of Letourneau. According to the researchers, women in this category frequently suffer from stressful relationships and can be extremely manipulative and controlling but nevertheless perceive their seduction of the young to be noncriminal because they convince themselves they are in genuinely romantic or mentoring situations. Letourneau clearly fits this type. She first met Vili Fualaau, a poor but artistically gifted child, when he was a student in her second-grade class. The mother of four was reportedly unhappily married by the time she became Fualaau’s sixth-grade teacher and the affair began. She was 34, and he was 13. He later claimed they had sex 300 or 400 times. At some point, she became pregnant and accused her husband of abusing her when he discovered the relationship. Either he or his cousin contacted authorities; Letourneau was arrested, pled guilty, and was convicted of child rape. During the trial, she was diagnosed as manic depressive and issued a tearful, almost hysterical apology in which she claimed to know that what she had done was legally and morally wrong. She was ordered to spend six months in jail and three years in treatment, on the condition that she avoid contact with Fualaau for the rest of her life. Less than a month after she was released from jail, she and the high school freshman were found having sex in her car, and she was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, where she gave birth to her second child by the teenager. The boy’s mother was awarded custody of his two little girls. While Letoureau was in prison, his family brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against the school district, charging it with emotional suffering and requesting costs for raising the children. By the time of her 2004 release at age 42, Letourneau was well-known internationally; and even though the 21-year-old Fualaau had by then denied his previous affection for her, the two reunited after he won a court

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request to lift the no-contact order. They were married in a lavish wedding financed by the television show Entertainment Tonight, which also paid for exclusive access to their story. They are said to be living primarily off that money, and they have hosted “Hot for Teacher Night” promotions at a Seattle night club, where Fualaau has served as the disc jockey. In an Internet interview, he has acknowledged that he feels tensions with Letourneau’s children from her previous marriage. His mother retains custody of their daughters. Letourneau has changed her name to Mary Kay Fualaau, and he prefers to be called D. J. Headline. D. J. Headline was arrested for extreme intoxication in late 2005. The Letoureau case ignited an explosion of interest in sexually abusive educators, and the next to become a celebrity of sorts was a 23-year-old Florida reading teacher, Debra Lafave, who seduced a 14-year-old boy in 2004. When his mother notified authorities, Lafave admitted to having intercourse and oral sex with him at school, in her home, and in the back of her car while his cousin drove her and the student. Because the incidents occurred in two different counties, Lafave was arrested in both on separate sets of charges for lewd and lascivious behavior. With his client facing a 30-year prison sentence, her attorney argued that her actions resulted from bipolar disease that caused radical mood swings and hypersexuality. While Lafave and her lawyer made the rounds of television stations, the boy reportedly suffered severe anxiety because of the media frenzy and fear his identity would become known. The final straw occurred when his mother discovered Court TV planned to cover the trial. She accepted a plea agreement. She later told reporter Rita Cosby (2006), “I couldn’t imagine sitting there and looking at my son and then looking at him surrounded by the whole courtroom as well as looking at Lafave talking about things that shouldn’t have happened to him. . . . It would come out and be written about again and again and again in all of the media. At what point would he have had a normal life in high school, much less be tagged with it the rest of his life?” The agreement kept Lafave out of prison if she confessed to two counts of lewd and lascivious battery. Her sentence of only three years of house arrest and seven years of probation enraged both the public and the media. Charges were still standing in the second county, where the judge refused to accept a similar plea agreement because of the seriousness of the offenses; but without testimony from the victim, the case could not go forward, and Lafave was essentially free. She continued media interviews, telling television’s Matt Lauer (2006) that her “emotionally absent” father had affected her attitude toward men. In spite of the magazine photographs and her relationship with the boy,

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she claimed to be “the most modest person even today.” Lafave conjectured that the basis for her actions was unresolved issues from having been traumatized as a 13-year-old when a teacher saw one of her boyfriends raping her in a closet and did nothing. She noted that a part of her desire to teach was that she “wanted to educate kids on issues like rape.” Contrary to her penitent behavior during and immediately after the trial, she accused the 14-year-old of being the aggressor and said she thought he would experience guilt for “ratting her out.” This was too much for his mother, who had previously remained silent. She noted that “some of the prosecutors [she had] spoken with said [Lafave’s story about being raped by an old boyfriend] was news to them, they hadn’t heard that before.” She listed additional untruths she believed Lafave had told and added, “She has never been remorseful. And that’s been very clear from day one. . . . She was absolutely the aggressor from the very initial moment.” When Cosby (2006) asked, “What do you think of Debra Lafave—you know, when you hear (her) comments, what kind of a person do you think Debra Lafave is, still to this day?” the mother replied, “She is calculated, she is manipulative, she is unremorseful and she is a sex offender.” Lafave’s case did not seem unusual compared to the bizarre details of the Letourneau affair until reporters saw her. Once that happened, she gained the dubious distinction of holding second place only to Letourneau on the Internet site called “The 50 Most Infamous Female Teacher Sex Scandals.” Attractive teacher offenders are not necessarily unique, but Lafave was pretty enough to have sought a modeling career before moving on to college, and so it took little time for the press to discover provocative images of the former teacher in Makes and Models, a motorcycle magazine. The photographs quickly flooded the Internet, and her attorney was accused of attempting to influence her sentence by arguing that to incarcerate her in “a Florida state women’s penitentiary, to place an attractive young woman in that kind of hell hole, is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions” (Goldenberg, 2006). The Letourneau saga was too strange to be taken seriously, but Lafave’s slap-on-the-wrist sentence raised crucial and controversial issues. Critics argued that the defendant’s appearance exerted undue influence on the court’s decision to impose such a light sentence, and that belief continues to generate discussion. Probably it should not do so since a large body of research, anecdotal evidence, and common sense clearly establishes that physically attractive people enjoy privileges throughout life (Etcoff, 1999; Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986; Wolf, 1991). The courts are not exceptions (Efran, 1974; Jacobson, 1981; Kulka & Kessler, 1978; Mazzela &

What We Do Matters

Feingold, 1994); and while Lafave escaped jail time, she will probably never be able to convince most people that her appearance had no bearing on her punishment. Far more controversial and inconclusive was the argument that gender bias in the legal system contributes to lighter sentences for females, especially in cases involving caretakers and educators. Research on female offenders is so recent and limited that the claim could be made either way. Compared to the volumes of studies on male offenders, far less exists about females, and attempts to develop typologies and scrutinize offender treatment demand greater analysis. Many contend that Lafave’s case was an aberration, that female teachers do not routinely escape harsh sentences. They argue that lately female offenders receive greater public condemnation, as demonstrated by tabloid Web sites like “Jail BETA,” “Bad Bad Teacher,” or “The Big List,” which chronicles the “sexpidemic” in the nation’s schools. Although research on female perpetrators is limited, there is credence in the argument that conviction and sentencing of males are justifiably affected by variables differentiating them and their crimes from females and their offenses. Research indisputably proves that males commit the most serious sexual offenses, tend to have more victims over time, are more likely to abuse children as well as adolescents, and more often use violence or threats. They are also different from female perpetrators in that they tend to deny offenses and are less likely to express remorse (Becker, Hall, & Stinson, 2002; Denov, 2001; Hislop, 2001, 2007). Nevertheless, another assertion is that society’s double standard affects judges and juries so that the sheer numbers of known male perpetrators becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy leading to more findings of guilt and harsher sentences for male defendants (Becker et al., 2002; Denov, 2001). Proponents of this gender bias theory argue that people are likely to stereotype females as more passive and submissive than males, less capable of sexual arousal, less aggressive, less inclined to coerce or threaten, and more nurturing and caretaking. These assumptions, they say, lead to underreporting of female offenses, to significant differences in treatments of male and female defendants, and to overly sympathetic portrayals of female offenders as victims of childhood maltreatment, sexual victimization, and/or mental, stress, and relationship problems (Hislop, 2007). Disputes over the legal system’s treatment of male and female educators are doubtless worth considering, but they are far less urgent than discovering ways to protect the nation’s schoolchildren from sexual abuse. In discussing sexual misconduct in general, the AP report (Irvine & Tanner, 2007) summarized this point.

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There are three million public school teachers nationwide, most devoted to their work. Yet the number of abusive educators—nearly three for every school day—speaks to a much larger problem in a system that is stacked against victims. Most of the abuse never gets reported. Those cases reported end up with no action. Cases investigated sometimes can’t be proven, and many abusers have several victims. And no one—not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments—has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms. A classic example of the frequent revictimization of targets by school employees and districts, as well as the legal system, comes not from the United States but from Ontario, Canada, where Ken DeLuca, a veteran teacher who had served for years in different schools, was charged with 41 offenses involving 21 complainants, all but one of whom were former students ranging from ages 10 to 18. In 1999, Sydney L. Robins, a former judge of the Court of Appeals for Ontario, was appointed to review the handling of DeLuca’s case that began in 1994 when DeLuca was sentenced to 40 months in prison for sexual misconduct with students in the Sault Ste. Marie School Board area. Robins’s report was an attempt at damage control, an effort to provide information to an outraged community that had not been given details about unpublished criminal and civil proceedings in the teacher’s case. The abuse reported by DeLuca’s survivors included kissing students, inserting his tongue into students’ mouths, rubbing his body against the students, touching or rubbing students’ breasts, having a student hold his penis while class was in session, lying on top of students and rubbing his body against theirs, touching students’ genitals, rubbing his pelvis against students, biting a student’s chest and vagina through her clothes, and intercourse. Although complaints to teachers, administrators, and school board members continued over a period of 20 years, nothing was done, and DeLuca “easily moved from school to school, leaving behind emotionally wounded victims, with a fresh opportunity to victimize others” (Robins, 2000, Chapter 2). Outrageous as they sound, the reabuses Robins identified in this case are not unusual. There are school systems across the United States where they happen every year. Some, but not all, states have made efforts to curtail educator abuse by requiring fingerprinting and background checks on new hires, but veteran teachers usually have no such obligations. Abusive teachers may move about from school to school and state to state with no records of bad behavior following them because it is easier to let them retire or resign than to terminate them and risk legal action. The AP report contended, “It’s a dynamic so common it has its own nicknames—‘passing the trash’ or ‘the mobile molester’â•›” (Irvine & Tanner, 2007).

What We Do Matters

Out of inefficiency or deliberate intent, schools frequently fail to maintain records of complaints, fail to receive and investigate complaints appropriately, fail to provide support for complaining students, deny or minimize complaints, blame victims, and intimidate and even threaten complaining students. Robins determined that “the buck stopped” with the school board: Inadequacies in the Board’s reaction to complaints against DeLuca may have represented some misguided notion by some officials of their powers and responsibilities. On the other hand, another inference is available on the evidence. . . . Board officials or employees may have . . . suspected DeLuca’s abuse and refrained from making further inquiries out of loyalty for a colleague or concern for the reputation of their school system. . . . What cannot be disputed . . . is that the best interests of the complainants were not given paramount consideration (and) . . . little thought was given to the ongoing risk to other students. (Robins, 2000, Chapter 2)

In the United States, as in Ontario, adolescents, like children, pay an exorbitant price for parental, public, educator, union, and politician priorities. Some suffer because parents choose not to believe them. Other parents suspect the truth but are reluctant to act on their suspicions, fearing they will be disbelieved and that their children will be further damaged. They reason that other students will shun them and that the offender and his associates will find ways to punish them. To many, the wiser course seems to remain silent and ensure the adolescent avoids the offender or even, when possible, to move the teen to another school. As for the public, ignorance is too often bliss. To face the realities of what is happening in schools would entail anxiety and action, neither of which are pleasant or convenient prospects. But parents and the public may not be the primary culprits in the educator sexual abuse crisis. Aside from offenders themselves, the greatest responsibility for making schools safe lies with teachers, their unions, administrators, and politicians. The AP reported: Legal loopholes, fear of lawsuits and inattention all have weakened the safeguards that are supposed to protect children in schools. The system fails hundreds of kids each year. . . . State efforts to strengthen laws against sex abuse by teachers have run into opposition from school boards and teachers unions. In Congress, a measure that would train investigators and create a national registry of offenders hasn’t even gotten a hearing. Few leaders recognize—let alone attack—a national shame. [We] found efforts to stop individual offenders

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but, overall, a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse. It starts in school hallways, where fellow teachers look away or feel powerless to help. School administrators make behind-the-scenes deals to avoid lawsuits and other trouble. And in state capitals and Congress, lawmakers shy (away) from tough state punishments or any cohesive national policy for fear of disparaging a vital profession. (Irvine & Tanner, 2007)

Only a fool would dispute the fact that too many teachers “look away.” Some choose not to see at all. Others recognize the signs and justify their silence out of fear they will be accused of rumor mongering and damaging the profession. When a teacher or administrator suspects a peer of sexual abuse, there are never acceptable reasons for silence and inaction. If educators console themselves by believing they are powerless or vulnerable in reporting suspicions, they need to remember what it feels like to be 15 years old, to be confused and afraid with no one to help. They need to recognize that the scars of sexual abuse don’t end with adolescence but last a lifetime. Some school districts make serious attempts to combat the problem with courses that enable employees to recognize the signs of sex abuse and characteristics of abusers, but no amount of training can make a difference if individual educators lack the morality and professionalism to act on what they know or suspect. Educators’ unions and professional organizations also need to be realistic and honest about the problem. One union official quoted in the AP report called concerns about educator abuse “a witch hunt” (Irvine & Tanner, 2007). His statement represents the views of others in the profession, and while no one disputes teachers’ apprehensions about false accusations, there is no reliable body of research to prove the validity of such concerns. Everson and Boat (1989) examined a large sampling of Child Protective Services cases and found doubt about children’s and adolescents’ veracity in only 4.7–7.6% of unsubstantiated cases. Oates and colleagues (2000) reported a 2.5% rate of false reporting, and Jones and McGraw (1987) found a rate of 1%. Significantly, these percentages apply to false reporting in all types of cases, and the majority occur in instances of parental separation or divorce. Data from higher education replicates findings like these. A study by Robertson, Dyer, and Campbell (1988) reported false complaints to be approximately less than 1% of the annual total. They described this as a “maximum estimate” (p. 800), since some complaints that administrators listed as false might have been genuine given their definition. Administrators and school boards are, in many cases, the greatest culprits when serious complaints occur; and as the Robins (2000) report

What We Do Matters

indicated, they have numerous “tricks” at their disposal. They can pretend to take complaints seriously and then disregard them. They can fail to keep records or conveniently lose or misplace them. They can minimize abusive behavior. They can claim students lack sufficient evidence and intimidate and even threaten those who complain. And they usually have pat excuses for inappropriate handling of charges: They were trying to protect the accused or the student complainant or the school or all three. Sometimes the latter is true. Schools do find themselves in complicated positions when weighing the need to protect themselves against possible legal actions by complainants’ parents or accused educators. But “possible” is the operative term here. Evidence from even the most abused is difficult to acquire, and perpetrators often confess and agree to leave quietly, so resolutions frequently occur without the public disclosure that school boards dread. Fear of publicity and legal action are the forces that drive administrative and board reactions to sexual abuse. A quarter century of Supreme Court rulings on civil rights and sex discrimination have made them acutely aware of the large sums of money at risk if they are found responsible in abuse litigation. Public perception is that a young person has only to prove sexual abuse, and the school district will be held liable. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes it is not. Regardless of proven facts in a case, school districts often fight to protect their finances and may or may not prevail. One of the most publicized examples was reported by the AP (Irvine & Tanner, 2007). Troy Mansfield, a popular coach and teacher in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, began grooming Heather Kline when she was in his thirdgrade class. By the time she was 12, he was sending her e-mails, poems, and cards, hugging her, complimenting her on her appearance, and declaring his love for her. She lost her virginity to him in the seventh grade. When his arrest was announced, friends abandoned her and spread rumors, and even teachers criticized her. Kline suffered from depression and panic attacks and ran away from home at 16 without finishing school. At last report in 2007, the 18-year-old was working as a grocery store cashier and hoping to get a GED. Mansfield’s fainting and eventual plea of guilty when he heard some of his “love” letters to her being read in court might have provided closure (Oglesby, 2008). If so, it may be her only satisfaction because a federal judge dismissed her family’s civil suit against Mansfield and Hamburg School District, finding that even though it “might have been negligent in failing to recognize a high risk of harm . . . there is no record evidence that prior to Mansfield’s eventual arrest, [the administration] knew or should have known that Mansfield ever sexually

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abused Kline. The school’s actions, therefore, do not amount to deliberate indifference to Kline’s constitutional rights” (Kline v. Mansfield, Hamburg Area School District, Padasak). Finally, there are the politicians. The AP report did find an increase in the numbers of teachers removed from classrooms during the period it surveyed, but the need for the states and federal government to coordinate reporting remains urgent. Shakeshaft’s (2004) report has gathered dust for nearly a decade; research with all of its complexities and contradictions continues; the public notices sexual abuse by teachers infrequently in unusual cases; and in January 2009, Congressman Adam Putnam introduced H.R. 781, the Student Protection Act of 2009. The Student Protection Act of 2009 requires that by fiscal year 2012, states have in effect laws and policies that require disciplining of any school, state, or local educational agency employee who, having reason to believe another employee has committed an act of sexual misconduct against a student, fails to report such act in the same manner the state requires the reporting of child abuse and neglect or, in the absence of such a requirement, as quickly as practicable. It requires each state to have a single, statewide commission for receiving and documenting such reports that: (a) establishes policies for investigating and reporting such allegations; and (b) has a toll-free number that can be used anonymously to report such allegations. It directs states to report to the Secretary of Education whenever an employee is terminated or punished on the basis of an act of sexual misconduct toward a student, including the reason such action was taken and the identification and last known address of such individual. It authorizes the secretary to penalize noncompliant states by reducing their funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by up to 5%. It directs the secretary to maintain a national database that contains, at a minimum, the details this act requires each state to report. In 2009, H.R. 781 was referred to the House Committee on Education and Labor, where it awaits action. Meanwhile, “someone has to be responsible” (Sarton, 1994, p. 377) for safety in the nation’s schools. “Someone has to care” (Sarton, 1994, p. 377) about the young. They must be taught to take responsibility for their actions and to seek support when they need help, but these are hard lessons, and the truth is that adolescents are not emotionally equipped or influential enough within school systems to control out-of-control sexual offenders. Families and friends usually bear the burden of making shelter and picking up the pieces when abuse occurs, yet too often these are preventable tasks, duties that belong ultimately to those in power.

What We Do Matters

References Becker, J., Hall, S., & Stinson, J. (2002). Female sexual offenders: Clinical, legal, and policy issues. Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice, 1, 31–53. Birnbaum, M., & Morse, D. (2010, January 22). Scope of teacher’s alleged inappropriate contact probed. Washington Post. Retrieved on November 1, 2010, from www.washingtonpost.com/Education/District. Bradford, J., & Fedoroff, J. (2009). The neurobiology of sexual behavior and the paraphilias. In F. Saleh, A. Grudzinskas, J. Bradford, & D. Brodsky (Eds.), Sex offenders: Identification, risk assessment, treatment, and legal issues (pp. 36–49). New York: Oxford University Press. Bradley, M. (2003). Yes, your teen is crazy! Loving your kid without losing your mind. Gig Harbor, WA: Harbor Press. Clarke, N. (2008a). The day I learned my 16-year-old daughter was having an affair with her RE teacher . . . from his wife. Mail Online. Retrieved on November 6, 2010, from www.dailymail.co.uk/.../The-day-I-learned-16-year-old-daughterhaving-affair-RE-teacher-wife. Clarke, N. (2008b). My husband the predator, by the wife of the 49-year-old RE teacher who’s moved in with a 16-year-old deputy head girl. Mail Online. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-513204/my-husband-predator-wife49-year-old-R-E-teacher-whos-moved-16-year-old-deputy-head-girl.html. Cosby, R. (2006). Victim’s mom: LaFave interview “disturbing.” MSNBC. Retrieved on November 5, 2010, from www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14840035/. Denov, M. (2001). A culture of denial: Exploring professional perspectives on female sex offending. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 43(3), 303–329. Dougherty, J. (2004, April 5). Sex abuse by teachers said worse than Catholic church. Newsmax. Retrieved on November 10, 2010, from archive.newsmax .com/archives/articles/2004/4/.../01552.shtml. Dziech, B. W., & Hawkins, M. (1998). Sexual harassment in higher education: Reflection and new perspectives. New York: Garland Publishing. Dziech, B. W., & Weiner, L. (1984). The lecherous professor. Boston: Beacon. Efran, M. (1974). The effect of physical appearance on the judgment of guilt, interpersonal attraction, and severity of recommended punishment in a simulated jury task. Journal of Research in Personality, 8, 45–54. Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38, 1025–1034. Etcoff, N. (1999). Survival of the prettiest: The science of beauty. New York: Anchor Books. Everson, M., & Boat, B. (1989). False allegations of sexual abuse by children and adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 28, 230–235. Finkelhor, D. (1984). Child sexual abuse: New theory and research. New York: Free Press. Finkelhor, D., & Jones, L. (2004). Explanations for the decline in child sex abuse cases. Juvenile Justice Bulletin, pp. 1–11. Retrieved on November 5, 2010, from www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/199298.pdf.

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Goldenberg, S. (2006). Too pretty for prison. The Guardian. Retrieved on November 1, 2010, from www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/24/usa.gender. Groth, A. N., & Birnbaum, H. J. (1978). Adult sexual orientation and attraction to underage persons. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 7, 175–181. Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1986). Mirror, mirror: The importance of looks in everyday life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hislop, J. (2001). Female sex offenders: What therapists, law enforcement and child protective services need to know. Enumclaw, WA: Issues Press. Hislop, J. (2007). Female sex offenders. Center for Sex Offender Management/ Department of Justice. Retrieved on October 30, 2010, from www.csom.org/ pubs/female_sex_offenders_brief.pdf. Irvine, M., & Tanner, R. (2007). Sexual misconduct plagues U.S. schools. Washington Post, October 21–22. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-syn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100144.html. Jacobson, M. (1981). Effects of victim’s and defendant’s physical attractiveness on subjects’ judgments in a rape case. Sex Roles, 7, 247–255. Jones, D., & McGraw, J. (1987). Reliable and fictitious accounts of sexual abuse to children. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2, 27–45. Kulka, R., & Kessler, J. (1978). Is justice really blind? The influence of litigant physical attractiveness on juridical judgment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 8, 366–381. Lauer, M. (Interviewer). (2006). Debra Lafave: Crossing the line. Dateline. Retrieved on November 12, 2010, from www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14499056/. Mazzella, R., & Feingold, A. (1994). The effects of physical attractiveness, race, socioeconomic status, and gender of defendants and victims on judgments of mock jurors: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24, 1315–1338. National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (2002). Male perpetrators of child maltreatment: Findings from NCANDS. Retrieved on December 23, 2010, from http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/05/child-maltreat/report.pdf. Oates, R., Jones, D., Denson, D., Sirotnak, A., Gary, N., Krugman, R. (2000). Erroneous concerns about child sexual abuse. Child Abuse and Neglect, 24, 149–157. Oglesby, C. (2008). Cells, texting give predators secret path to kids. CNN. Retrieved on September 20, 2010, from articles.cnn.com/2008-01-11/justice/ teachers...1_cell.../3?_.... Paludi, M., & Barickman, R. (1991). Academic and workplace sexual harassment. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Robertson, C., Dyer, E., & Campbell, D. (1988). Campus harassment: Sexual harassment policies and procedures at institutions of higher learning. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13, 792–812. Robins, S. (2000). The Robins Report: Protecting our students. Retrieved on July 14, 2011, from http://www.theinquiry.ca/Robins.hide.php. Sarton, M. (1994). Kinds of love. New York: Norton.

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Shakeshaft, C. (2004). Educator sexual misconduct: A synthesis of existing literature. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Shakeshaft, C., & Cohan, A. (1994). In loco parentis: Sexual abuse of students in schools, what administrators should know. Report to the U.S. Department of Education, Field Initiated Grants. Snyder, H. (2000). Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: Victims, incidence, and offender characteristics. Washington, DC: National Center for Juvenile Justice. Strout, E. (1998). Amy and Isabelle: A novel. New York: Vintage. Terry, K., & Tallon, J. (2004). Child sexual abuse: A review of the literature. In John Jay College Research Team (Eds.), The nature and scope of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States, 1950–2002. Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Turque, B., & Morse, D. (2010, January 21). Sidwell Friends fires teacher, Robert A. “Pete” Peterson, accused of sex abuse. Washington Post. Retrieved on September 10, 2010, from www.washingtonpost.com/Education/District. Vandiver, D., & Kercher, G. (2004). Offender and victim characteristics of registered female sexual offenders in Texas: A proposed typology of female sexual offenders. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 16, 121–137. Weingberger, D., Elvevag, B., & Giedd, J. (2005). The adolescent brain: A work in progress. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Washington, DC. Retrieved on October 10, 2010, from www.thenationalcampaign.org/ resources/pdf/BRAIN.pdf. Wolf, N. (1991). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: William Morrow. Wolfe, A. (2002). Get out of my life, but first could you drive me and Cheryl to the mall. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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PART III

Community Responses to Teen V↜iolence

CHAPTER NINE

Community Interventions: Providing Suppor↜t for Adolescent V↜ictims of V↜iolence Roseanne L. Flores

Today, although violence among teenagers has declined from its height in the late 1990s, it continues to be a public health problem (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010a). According to the Centers for Disease Control (2010b), violence among youths can be defined as “harmful behavior that begins in adolescence and continues into early adulthood.” It can take on many forms, from bullying to emotional and physical abuse to assault with or without a deadly weapon (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010a). Moreover, violence does not discriminate. It affects all adolescents across race, class, and gender. Over the last decade, violence among teenagers has continued to become a public health problem because of an increase in the number of reported deaths, an increase in the use of medical facilities to take care of injuries caused by wounds from stabbings and shootings, as well an increase in health care costs within the community. These problems have escalated because of the risks that young people have been exposed to in their communities. Recent research has shown that when youths are exposed to multiple risk factors at the individual, familial, or community level, they are in greater danger for becoming a perpetrator or victim of violence (Loeber, Farrington,

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& Petechuk, 2003) as opposed to those exposed to fewer risks. Factors that have been associated with becoming victims of violence at the individual level are having a history of violence in the family or community, abusing alcohol or drugs, and having already been a victim of violence. At the familial level, it has been shown that adolescents who have parents who are not consistently involved, have a harsh parenting style, do not provide supervision, and engage in substance abuse are often in danger of experiencing violence in their lives. And finally, it has been demonstrated that association with gangs, delinquent peers, school failure, lack of involvement in positive outside activities, and living in high poverty and high crime neighborhoods all place youths at risk for becoming victims of violence. The following scenarios describe situations that are similar to the ones faced by many youths on a daily basis across the United States. If the obstacles faced by youths are not addressed by the communities in which they live, over time the youths will be unable to become healthy, competent, and selfconfident adults. This lack of intervention will in turn only exacerbate the already existing public health dilemma within the United States for years to come. The challenge then is to provide supports and re sources for individuals, families, and communities that will not only help to buffer them against exposure to violence but also lead to the strengthening of their communities.

Experiences of Teenage Victims of Violence Markus Markus is a 14-year-old African American male in high school. He has taken on a part-time job after school to help pay for his clothing and music lessons. Markus wants to be a musician when he grows up and has been playing the violin since he was 7. Markus lives in a neighborhood where gang members rule the streets. He often tries to get home before dark, when the streets are somewhat crowded, because he is afraid that someone might rob him and take his violin. He was once openly made fun of by his peers but avoided the conflict because one of his neighbors passed by and walked him home. One day, however, the store owner asks Markus to stay later because another worker has not shown up for his shift. Markus is afraid he might lose his job if he says no, so he reluctantly stays. At 8:00 p.m., the other worker finally shows up and Markus leaves the store. As he walks home, he tries to walk down streets that are well lit and not desolate. However, in order for him to get home, he must walk through a deserted parking lot. He crosses the street and attempts to walk as quickly as he can,

Community Interventions

but he is not alone. He hears some rustling and begins to run. Three young boys jump out from behind a car and begin to chase him. They finally catch him and push him to the ground. They grab his violin and kick him in the stomach. Markus screams, “Give me back my violin.” The boys kick him again and one pulls a gun. “If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll kill you.” Markus lays silent and the boys run away. He sobs not knowing what to do. At that point, an older man comes out of a building and says, “Come inside. I saw the whole thing. Don’t you know you can’t walk around here at night by yourself? You’re lucky those boys didn’t kill you. They killed my son last year for his coat!”

Katerina Katerina is a 16-year-old girl of recent immigrants who goes to a private all-girls school. Katerina is not wealthy, but her parents have sacrificed to send her to this school because they were not happy with their local school and wanted their little girl to have the best. Since she was 13 years old, she has always wanted a leather jacket with a fur collar. All the girls in her local community have had this jacket since they were 14, but her mother felt that it was meant to be worn by an older girl and so did not buy it for her. However, Katerina’s mother promises that when she turns 16 she will buy her the jacket, and true to her word, she gives Katerina the jacket on her 16th birthday. Katerina is thrilled and asks if she can wear the jacket to school. Although her mother is a little reluctant, she gives in because she wants to make her daughter happy. Katerina spends an enormous amount of time that morning getting ready for school because she wants to look extra special. In part, she wants to impress the girls in her school because they always have such nice clothes, some which are very expensive. As Katerina gets off the school bus, she hears the popular girls whispering. At first, she thinks they are admiring her new coat and she is quite pleased because now she thinks she has a good chance of fitting in with the crowd. However, as she gets closer, she realizes that they are not admiring her coat but mocking her! She hears one girl say, “Did you see that coat? I’m sure she must have gotten it at a secondhand shop. Look at that fur. It looks like a rat’s tail.” Katerina begins to cry and tries to pass by as quickly as she can. She takes off her coat and puts it in her locker and goes off to class. That afternoon, when she goes to her locker to gather her things, she finds that her jacket has been ripped and the fur collar has been cut into pieces. She finds a note tacked on her coat that says, “No one likes someone who pretends to be better than she is! Why don’t you go back to your own neighborhood?” When Katerina arrives home that day, her mother asks about her day. Katerina tells her everything

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is fine, because she doesn’t want her mother to worry, but deep down inside she worries about what she will face tomorrow. She decides she will tell her mother she is sick and not go to school in the morning.

David David is a 15-year-old White male. Two years ago, David’s parents divorced and David and his mother moved in with his grandparents to save money. David’s mother felt her parents would provide David with a stable environment while she was at work. David’s mother is a nurse and needs to work nights in order to support the family. Although David’s grandparents are attentive, they are in their seventies and don’t have as much energy as they did in the past. They worry because they often do not know where David goes after school. David’s father is an engineer and has recently remarried. His wife is expecting a baby and so he has not been able to spend as much time with David as he once did. David has become very angry and has begun to isolate himself from his family. He feels he is all alone. Although he was once a very good student, his grades have begun to drop. One afternoon as he is returning from school, he meets a group of boys from his new school. “Hey dude, you’re new aren’t you?” David looks up and says, “Yes, I just moved here from New York.” “Cool—I heard they have some good ganja in New York.” David has never used drugs but wants to fit in, and so he says, “Yeah, me and my posse used to get some good stuff on the streets.” The boys say, “You wanna try some of this?” David reaches over, says, “Why not?” and takes a puff. He spends the rest of the afternoon getting high. He has found a new set of friends! That night when David gets home his grandfather says, “David where have you been? Your grandmother and I have been worried sick. Don’t you ever do this again!” David shoves his grandfather and knocks him to the floor, saying, “Shut up, old man, you can’t tell me what do. You’re not my father,” and storms off. His grandparents begin to cry. Each year, thousands of adolescents like Markus, Katerina, and David become victims of violence (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010a). Some, like Markus, will be physically assaulted; some, like Katerina, will be bullied; and some, like David, will become perpetrators of violence against others. Many will end up dead; others will end up in the juvenile justice system; and some will end up on the streets. So what can be done to help stop this spread of violence in families and communities? It has been suggested that although exposure to multiple risk factors can place adolescents in danger of becoming victims of violence, protective factors can help to offset the risks.

Community Interventions

Protective Factors That Insulate Teens from Violence Previous research has demonstrated that there are many things that can insulate adolescents from the negative effects of violence (Hilkene & Resnick, 2006; Thorton, Craft, Dahlberg, Lynch, & Baer, 2002). It has been suggested that parents’ intolerance of delinquent behavior, a grounding in religious practices, doing well in school, parental attitudes and beliefs about doing well in school, open communication with parents, involvement in outside activities with one’s family, positive community involvement, and the presence of a parent in the home can help to counteract some of the risks that youths are exposed to on a daily basis (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010b). According to Hilkene and Resnick (2006), protective factors can be innate, such as one’s personality, or external, such as neighborhood poverty. Moreover, they can occur at the individual level, the family level, or the community level. In addition, it has been shown that protective factors have a tendency to co-occur within individuals and that they do not always express themselves uniformly across gender, race, and class. For example, whereas performing community service after school for 15 hours a week may be a protective factor for one group of teens, keeping them positively involved in the community, the same factor may pose a risk for another for another group, not giving them enough time to study so that they perform poorly in school. In short, although there are a number of factors that can place youths at risk for becoming victims of violence, there are also many protective factors that can safeguard them against the deleterious consequences that exposure to violence in their homes and communities can have on their lives. Given what we know from the literature, one way of ensuring that young people are protected and insulated from the effects of violence is to work closely with communities, providing them with the best available research-based interventions that have been shown to work. By doing this, we will be able to produce physical and social environments where teens will thrive and become successful adults. Establishing community interventions can have positive effects on the lives of teenagers, their families, and the communities as a whole.

Community Interventions and Youth Violence Previous research has shown that when adolescents are exposed to chronic poverty and violence, there is a tendency for them to express rage, distrust, and hopelessness (Greene, 1993). In order to counteract these emotions, which often lead to negative behaviors, it has been suggested that programmatic interventions be established to protect and provide

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adolescents with safe and supportive environments so that they can become successful adults. Several suggestions have been made to engage communities to partner with families and adolescents to create safe spaces. Because previous research has shown that there is a tendency for adolescents who lack exposure to positive role models to engage in delinquent behavior (Greene, 1993; Mendel, 2000), it has been proposed that houses of worship, after-school programs, and other youth services work closely with the juvenile justice system to intervene in the lives of these youths and their families to address some of the issues they are facing before they have to enter the system. Moreover, it has been suggested that adults in the community work as mentors to provide youths with positive role models. One such example is the One Hundred Black Men of America, Inc. (2010), whose primary goal is to mentor young people so that they can maximize their potential. The purpose of this organization and others like it is to help balance the negative stereotypes that teenagers are exposed to on a continuous basis. Another intervention that has been widely acclaimed over the last 15 years is the Strengthening Families model. This approach was originally developed to be used to lower the number of risk factors that were associated with the children of substance abusers; however, it has been used with families who do not engage in substance abuse (Kumpfer & Alavarado, 1998). The goals of this approach are: to be comprehensive, to focus on family (as opposed to focusing on only the child or only the parent), to provide long-term involvement instead of a short-term fix, to be culturally relevant, and to take a developmental approach when addressing the needs of the family (Kumpfer & Alavarado, 1998). Although this approach is not new, its potential has never been fully realized within the community. In support of this approach, recent research has demonstrated that working with families during the early years is a critical factor in preventing later forms of delinquent behavior (Loeber et al., 2003). More recently, the American Psychological Association (2010), in an effort to prevent and protect children from violence, established a program called Adults and Children Together Against Violence (ACT). The purpose of this program is to work with families and communities to promote safe and healthy spaces that will help insolate children from violence. As part of the program, parents are provided information on child development in order to improve their parenting skills and reduce the possibility of abuse. This intervention provides a comprehensive approach in that it provides a network for children, families, and communities to work together to decrease children’s exposure and experiences of violence. With respect to developing safe physical spaces, it has been suggested that businesses and other community organizations work together to create

Community Interventions

clean and safe spaces where youths can feel free to play and socialize with their friends without being harassed. One such project that has been proposed is the creation of partnerships between the members of local communities to sponsor the cleanup of their local park. Here the community would gather at an appointed time to clean up and beautify their space. Such an opportunity would not only provide the neighborhood with a clean space but also serve as a model for young people of what can happen when adults in the community cooperate and work together. And finally, because it has been shown that having a high grade-point average is a protective factor against violence, it is important to ensure that all youths are provided with opportunities to succeed academically. Those opportunities should not be the sole responsibility of the school, which is often underresourced, but should involve the use of other spaces, such libraries and youth centers, that can provide quiet places where teenagers can study. Many teens live in environments that are noisy and overcrowded and not conducive to studying, which is one reason why they might not do well academically, and so it is important that the community support them in their efforts to succeed academically. One outcome of such involvement would be youths who feel respected and valued as opposed to angry, isolated, and alone. Furthermore, although academic success is critical to becoming productive adults, having appropriate social skills is also necessary in establishing relationships with one’s peers. Again, communities should work together to provide after-school programs and youth centers that will allow teens to socialize in safe and organized spaces with adult supervision and role modeling so as to development the emotional intelligence they will need as they become young adults who are capable of solving conflicts without becoming violent. In short, although youth violence has decreased over the last decade, it continues to be a public health problem that needs to be addressed before it becomes a crisis. Although we have many programs that currently support adolescent victims of violence, few are research based, and of those that are, many often work in isolation of other programs in the community. Moreover, many of these programs often serve the same families and end up duplicating services. Therefore, it is important going forward that programs in communities begin to pool their resources and develop partnerships that will best serve the needs of adolescents and their families. Taking this approach will not only strengthen families but also help to strengthen the community. And strong families living in strong communities will become the foundation for a strong country and not one at risk.

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References American Psychological Association. (2010) Adults and Children Together Against Violence. Retrieved on November 14, 2010, from http://actagainstviolence .apa.org/. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2010a). Understanding youth violence: Fact sheet. Atlanta, GA: Author. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2010b). Youth violence: Facts at a glance. Atlanta, GA: Author. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. (2010). America’s children in brief: Key national indicators of well-being. Washington, DC: Author. Greene, M. B. (1993). Chronic exposure to violence and poverty: Interventions that work for youth. Crime and Delinquency, 39(1) 106–124. Hilkene, B., & Resnick, M. (2006). Healthy youth development: Science and strategies. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 12, S10–S16. Kumpfer, K. L., & Alavarado, R. (1998). Effective family strengthening interventions. Juvenile Justice Bulletin, 4, 1–15. Loeber, R., Farrington, D. P., Petechuk, D. (2003). Child delinquency: Early intervention and prevention. Child Delinquency, May, 1–18. Mendel, R. A. (2000). Less hype, more help: Reducing juvenile crime, what works— and what doesn’t. Washington, DC: American Youth Policy Forum. One Hundred Black Men of America, Inc. (2010). Retrieved on November 16, 2010, from http://www.100blackmen.org/home.aspx. Thorton, T. N., Craft, C. A., Dahlberg, L. L., Lynch, B. S., Baer, K. (2002). Best â•›practices of youth violence prevention: A sourcebook for community action (Rev. ed.). Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2001). Youth violence: A report of the surgeon general. Washington, DC: Author.

CHAPTER TEN

Adolescents and Firearms Deanna L. Wilkinson, Ashley Hicks, and Shelly Bloom

Safety and human security are basic needs that promote the healthy development of children and adults alike. There are a number of factors that shape people’s negative perceptions of personal safety including: direct victimization, vicarious victimization, mass media attention to violent victimization, moral panics that follow high-profile events, information networks, and individual personality traits. Urban youths residing in high-violence neighborhoods are particularly at heightened risk for violence-related outcomes. Perceptions of rising and high rates of violence on school property driven by the relatively rare but highly publicized multiple victim shootings in schools have resulted in an overemphasis on rare events, which takes resources away from efforts to prevent and reduce the more common types of violence that interrupt education efforts. This chapter examines the trends and patterns in firearm violence and suicide, including data on youth access to guns and carrying and use behaviors. The chapter is organized in two major parts—part 1 consists of a review of the latest research on adolescent firearm violence, and part 2 focuses on the problem of adolescent firearm suicide. Finally, in light of the trends, patterns, and accumulation of knowledge about the risk and protective factors associated with adolescent firearm violence and suicide, we discuss recommendations for a comprehensive approach to reducing adolescent firearm violence. Gun violence has been part of the collective psyche of Americans for the past several decades, with the impact being felt most severely among

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African American urban youths. Homicide has been the leading cause of death for African Americans ages 15–24 since 1981 and is either the leading or second-leading cause of death for African Americans ages 25–34 from 1981–2005 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009b). Whether in urban centers or, more recently, in the nation’s rural heartlands, guns have been central to the character of youth violence for nearly 30 years (Wilkinson & Fagan, 2001; Zimring, 1999). Firearm suicide among youths is also a very significant public health problem that is bound up and associated with issues related to access and availability of firearms. Guns have played a significant role in shaping the developmental trajectories and behaviors of many inner-city youths, and through the extended reach of media reports, youths in suburban and rural areas have also grown up affected by images of and direct experiences with gun violence. Although violence has been a recurrent theme for decades in contributing to urban delinquency, youth gun violence became more prevalent and concentrated spatially and socially during the 1980s and 1990s (Cook & Laub, 1998; Fagan & Wilkinson, 1988a). Despite the declines in youth gun violence that occurred in the last decade, rates of gun death remain unacceptably high in the United States. In this chapter, we review the lessons from nearly three decades of research on the adolescent firearms violence problem in the United States. First, we examine the trends and patterns in violence and gun-related attitudes and behaviors in the community and school contexts. To provide a comprehensive review, this includes studies drawn from nationally representative samples of youths, selected samples of urban youths, and target samples of criminal justice–involved youths. Second, we summarize several recent studies on the trends in youth violence specifically related to firearms violence and firearms suicide. Next, we address the issue of adolescent firearm use in suicide by examining the patterns, correlates, risk, and protective factors. Finally, in light of the trends and patterns in youth gun attitudes and behaviors, we discuss the need for comprehensive, community-based gun violence–reduction strategies. The intent of this chapter is to provide a general review of what we currently know about adolescents and guns by bringing together various research findings from social science and public health to provide an overall picture of youth gun violence–related behaviors across contexts.

The Epidemic of Adolescent Gun Violence The epidemic of youth gun violence should be viewed in both historical and contemporary eras. Cook and Laub (1998) show that nearly all the volatility in adolescent gun homicide rates for the past 30 years

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was the result of rising and falling gun homicide rates among males ages 15–34 years old. There were three distinct epochs of gun violence, with peaks in 1972–1974, 1980, and 1993. The most recent peak was far higher than the previous peak, but its decline through 1994 was also more pronounced than either of the two earlier epidemics. Cook and Laub (2002) explain that “guns accounted for all of the youth homicide increase. . . . [T]he result is that the gun percentage in youth killings was almost as high in 1998 as in 1993, and much higher than in 1985” (p. 3). The widening gap between gun and nongun homicides was more pronounced for older adolescents. The growth rates for gun homicides by adolescents of all age categories were similar but rose more sharply for adolescents ages 18–24, compared with younger teens ages 13–17. Throughout this time, nongun homicides remained nearly constant for both age groups. Moreover, the rise in the percentage of adolescent homicides by guns was pronounced for most types of nonfamily victimoffender relationships: gang-related homicides, robberies and other felonies, brawls and disputes, and other known and unknown circumstances (Cook and Laub, 1998, Table 6, p. 56). As shown in Figure 10.1, the trends in firearm homicide since 1981 were most alarming for African American youths. Over the 25-year period

Figure 10.1â•… Trends in firearm homicide among 10- to 24-year-olds by race/ethnicity, 1981–2007. Source: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortratje9.html

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of available data, Black youths aged 10–24 had a firearm homicide rate that peaked at 56.8 per 100,000 persons in 1993 and averaged 33.2 homicides over the series. In contrast, firearm homicide victimization rates peaked among White youths ages 10–24 at 5.95 per 100,000 in 1992 and with a 25-year average of 3.67 per 100,000 population. Ethnicity data became available beginning in 1990. Firearm homicide rates for Hispanic youths ages 10–24 peaked at 22.42 in 1992 and had a 15-year average of 15.38 per 100,000 population. Elevated rates of shooting deaths among African American youths were a constant for nearly two decades with the rates exceeding the mean rate of 33.2 per 100,000 from 1988 to 1997. Analyses of the FBI Supplemental Homicide Reports suggests that adolescent gun homicides were a depressingly regular feature of the urban setting, with no temporal discontinuities within or across years (Cook & Laub, 1998). For more detailed information on the trends and patterns in juvenile gun homicide and violent crime, readers should consult Cook and Laub (1998), Cook and Ludwig (2004), Fagan and Wilkinson (1988a), Wilkinson and Fagan (1996), and Wilkinson and Fagan (2001). Following the alarmingly high rates of gun violence in the early 1990s, many researchers began asking youths about their experiences with weapons and violence. The clearest indication from the available data is that there were unmeasured but obvious increases in access to handguns among urban youths that in some ways caught scholars, police, school officials, and policy makers by surprise. In general, the early survey-based studies revealed that urban male youths were involved in gun possession, gun carrying, and gun use at unprecedented rates, compared to earlier eras in American history. The picture that emerges from the survey data, which captures gun behaviors and nonlethal injury/perpetration of violence, parallels the trends in homicide data. Indeed, we see higher rates of reported fighting behaviors, weapon carrying, and victimization in the early 1990s with steady declines in subsequent years. Surveys conducted in urban schools or among high-risk samples tend to document the geographic, spatial, and demographic concentration of the problems. The most current data shows some recent declines in weapon carrying, victimization experiences, and violent behavior. Trends in improvements to school security and tightening disciplinary practices are also evident. It is impossible from existing data to make a causal link between increased security measures and reductions in violence-related risk factors. It is also difficult to determine what unexpected negative outcomes may come with zero-tolerance policies, school police officer presence, dress codes, surveillance technologies, and the like.

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Beyond the Trend Data: What Survey Studies Tell Us about Youth Violence and Firearms We have argued elsewhere that the most recent epidemic of juvenile gun violence led to adaptations in the everyday lives of inner-city adolescents, particularly African American and Latino youths (Fagan & Wilkinson, 1988a, 1988b, 1997; Wilkinson & Carr, 2008; Wilkinson & Fagan 1996, 2001). The most directly measured impact of the heightened firearm homicide rate was increased exposure to serious violence particularly in urban areas (Fagan, Wilkinson, & Davies, 2007). Increased exposure is thought to have resulted in increased fear of victimization, greater desire for selfprotection, increased youth acquisition of firearms, and an increased perceived need to carry guns for personal safety. Relatively inexpensive handgun availability and diffusion to urban adolescents has also been linked to the increased rates of gun homicide and other gun violence. Estimates of gun carrying in school ranged from .1% to 15% (Harris, 1993) during the highest gun homicide peak years (1988–1997). Since 2000, the national surveillance surveys have either found school gun carrying rates below .1% or asked students about knowing someone who carried guns to schools in an effort to improve measurement accuracy. These rates of gun carrying are much higher among: (a) youths residing in inner-city neighborhoods, ranging from 6% of 11th graders in a Seattle study done by Callahan and Rivara (1992) to 25% in a Baltimore study completed by Webster, Gainer, and Champion (1993), and (b) youths already involved in the criminal justice system, ranging from 22% in a study of 856 juvenile arrestees from 11 U.S. cities published by Decker, Pennell, and Caldwell (1995) to 80.4% in a study of active violent youth offenders in New York completed by Wilkinson and Fagan (2001). In this section, we summarize the results of existing national-level data sources for information on trends and patterns in violence among young people in the United States. For details about the methodology of these data sources, readers are directed to consult the original sources.

V↜iolence-Related Risk Behaviors: Results of the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 1991–2009 In 1990, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated the National Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, known commonly as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, to provide national-level estimates of the prevalence of risk-related behaviors among U.S. youths. The survey has been conducted biennially since then, providing information on trends and patterns of risk behaviors for the past 15 years (Centers for Disease

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Control and Prevention, 1991; Eaton et al., 2006; Eaton et al., 2010; Grunbaum et al., 2002; Grunbaum et al., 2004; Kann et al., 1995; Kann et al., 1996; Kann et al., 1998; Kann et al., 2000). We summarize the key trend data related to weapons carrying and gun carrying during the 30 days prior to the survey and involvement and injury in a physical fight in the past 12 months. As shown in Figure 10.2, the percentage of students who reported being involved in a physical fight peaked at 42.5% in 1991 and declined consistently over time through 2009 to a low of 31.5%, and there was a slight increase in 2005 to 35.9%. Weapon-carrying behaviors followed the same pattern with a peak rate of 26.1% in 1991 followed by a steady decline to 17.1% in 2003; there was a minor uptick in 2005 of 18.5% followed by a decline to 18.0% in 2007 and to 17.5% in 2009. Gun-carrying data were available starting in 1993, with 7.9% of students reporting carrying a gun within the 30-day time period that year. Reported gun carrying declined to 4.9% in 1999 and rose to 5.9% in the 2009 survey. Reported injuries in physical fights started at 4.4% and changed little over time. In addition, we examine the trends for students’ weapon carrying on school property, avoidance and fear of unsafe school environments, victimization on school property, and involvement in physical fights

Figure 10.2â•… Weapon carrying and physical fights reported among students, 1991–2009.

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Figure 10.3â•… Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Trends in violence-related indicators on school property, 1991–2009. Note: Data synthesized from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1991; Eaton et al., 2006; Eaton et al., 2010; Grunbaum et al., 2002; Grunbaum et al., 2004; Kann et€al., 1995; Kann et al., 1996; Kann et al., 1998; Kann et al., 2000.

on school property. As shown in Figure 10.3, the school-specific data followed a similar trend as the general violence data. Specifically, involvement in physical fighting peaked in 1993 with a rate of 16.2% of students reporting involvement in one or more fights in the 12-month period; the rate decreased steadily to 12.5% in 2001 and increased slightly to a rate of 13.6% in 2005, though it reached the record low in 2009 at 11.1%. Weapon carrying on school property was highest in 1993 (first year available) with 11.9% of students carrying a weapon one or more times in the 30 days preceding the survey. The rate drops to 6.1% in 2003 and increases slightly in 2005 to 6.5% but is at the record low of 5.6% in 2009. In 1993, 4.4% of students did not go to school out of fear and by 2005 approximately 6% of students had avoided school for safety concerns. Despite that earlier increase, only 5% of students surveyed avoided school because of safety concerns in 2009. The rate of being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property ranged from 7.3% in 1993 to 9.2% in 2003, but the changes were not statistically significant. These percentages have steadily decreased since 2003 to only 7.7% in 2009.

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Overall Patter↜ns in Gun Availability and Carrying We located over 100 studies published since 1990 on patterns of gun availability, carrying, or use among school-age youths. These studies vary widely in terms of their samples, measurement, study period, methodology, and study purpose. We summarize some of the findings here. As mentioned above, youth access to guns is difficult to measure accurately. Braga and Kennedy (2001) found juveniles and youths obtained the majority of their guns through retail outlets and thefts. The gun trace on over 1,500 guns revealed that straw purchases accounted for 571 of the transactions. Using a mail survey of 731 10th- and 11th-grade boys, Sheley and Wright (1998) found that 50% felt that they could easily obtain a gun and 29% had carried a gun in the past year. Similarly, other research that used interview data from 615 Rochester males found that 22% of students acknowledged ever carrying a gun (Lizotte, Howard, Krohn, & Thornberry, 1996; Lizotte, Tesoriero, Thornberry, & Krohn, 1994). Callahan and Rivara (1992) surveyed 970 11th graders in Seattle and found that 34% had easy access to handguns and 6% admitted to carrying a gun to school, while the Slovak (2002) study of 171 rural students found 57% had access to a gun in the past year and 48% said they knew of someone else who had accessed a gun. Miller and Hemenway (2004) used phone calls to interview 5,801 California adolescents and found 33% had handled a gun. Using the same data, Vittes (2004) reported that less than 1% of respondents carried a handgun, 17.3% felt they could get one immediately, and 5.8% felt they could get one within 2 days. Using the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males, Cook and Ludwig (2004), however, found that 1 in 10 adolescents reported carrying a gun at least once a month; rural males reported the highest gun carrying prevalence at 14.7%. Cook and Ludwig (2004) attempted to disentangle the effects of gun availability at the county level with gun-carrying patterns among adolescent males in the National Survey of Adolescent Males. They found that gun carrying was significantly higher among males residing in gun ownership–prevalent counties. They concluded that: The nature of that causal influence is not identified by the statistical results, but it seems plausible that the mechanism is gun availability. Where guns are prevalent, adolescents will find it easier to borrow or steal or buy them from family members or other people. An alternative interpretation is that in counties where guns are more common, teens tend to be more experienced, knowledgeable or comfortable with guns. Both explanations grant a direct causal role to gun prevalence, whether it operates through availability (as in the first explanation) or learning (the second). In either case,

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adolescent behavior is closely linked to gun prevalence among adults, and would be modified in response to a change in that context. (Cook and Ludwig, 2004, p. 49)

Gun Availability and Carrying in Disadvantaged Urban Neighborhoods Focusing on availability of guns in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods, youths’ reported access to available guns increases. Schubiner, Scott, and Tzelelpis (1993) conducted a study of 246 African American youths in an inner-city neighborhood and reported that 30% of the respondents could get a gun within one hour and another 30% reported easy access to a gun within one week, while Inciardi, Horowitz, and Pottieger (1993) surveyed 611 youths in Miami’s inner-city neighborhoods and found that 48% of inner-city youths they interviewed carried a gun in the previous year. In addition, Schubiner and colleagues (1993) found that 42% of their innercity sample had seen someone shot or knifed and 22% had seen someone killed through gun violence. Kahn, Kazimi, and Mulvihill (2001) interviewed students in both inner-city and non–inner-city high schools in New York and 57% of those surveyed reported that they, or someone close to them, had been injured by a gun; in a survey by Sheley, Wright, and Smith (1993) of 1,591 inner-city high school adolescents, 23% reported that it would be easy to get a gun, 80% reported that other students carried weapons to school, 20% had been threatened with a gun, and 12% had been shot at. Further, 80% of this sample reported that other students carried weapons to school. Using the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) data, which was not school based, Molnar, Miller, Azrael, and Buka (2004) found that lifetime estimations for concealed firearm carrying were at 4.9% for males and 1.1% for females. Approximately 3% of participants indicated they have carried a concealed firearm at one time or another. They found that youths are less likely to carry concealed weapons in neighborhoods with lower violence rates and higher perceived safety. Other studies of inner-city adolescents find similarly high gun and other weapon prevalence rates. Sheley and Wright (1993) surveyed 758 male high school students and found that 45% of respondents reported being threatened with a gun or shot at en route to or from school. More recently Ding, Nelsen, and Lassonde (2002) sampled junior high school students in New York, where they found that males who had more experience with guns reported reacting more violently to frustration and participating in a greater number of violent acts than those with less gun experience.

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Suburban and Rural Patter↜ns of Gun Availability and Carrying Rountree (2000) studied the rural-urban continuum in school-related weapons carrying by sampling students from three counties in Kentucky including an urban, suburban, and rural county. With a sample of over 18,000 6th- to 12th-grade students surveyed during the spring of 1996, the investigator drew a smaller random sample of just over 4,000. Rountree (2000) found that between 4% and 5% of students reported bringing a weapon to school. Urban students reported the lowest levels of weapon carrying at 4%. Most of the weapon carrying involved some type of weapon other than a firearm—less than 2% reported the weapon was a gun. Students from the urban county appeared to have fewer risks factors compared to the other counties, including self-ownership, peer carrying, and parental gun ownership. Wilcox and Clayton (2001) conducted a multilevel analysis to disentangle contextual effects on weapon possession in school using more than 6,000 students nested in 21 schools. At the school level, they found that weapon carrying varies widely by school; however, individual-level variables account for much of this variance. Controlling for the school-level variation, Wilcox and Clayton (2001) found that weapon carriers were male, older, non-White, and from lower SES households. In addition, victimization, problem behavior, gun ownership, and peer weapon carrying increased the likelihood of reported weapon carrying. Carlson (2006) conducted a survey of 477 predominantly White youths, ages 11–19 in rural southwest Ohio during the 2000–2001 school year. Study youths experienced direct and vicarious gun violence victimization. Specifically, nearly 10% reported that they had a gun pointed at them at least sometime; 13% saw someone else have a gun pointed at them; about 7% had been shot or shot at; and 9% saw someone else shot or shot at. Carlson (2006) found that the majority of firearms that students obtained were from their homes, friends, or relatives. Males in the study reported higher levels of exposure to violence, and younger students reported more violence exposure than older students. School and neighborhood is where most exposure to violence reportedly took place; however, students were more likely to be beaten at home. Marsh and Evans (2007) examined the correlates of carrying a weapon to school among rural and urban youths recruited for school-based surveys in Arizona, California, Wyoming, and Nevada. The sample included 1,619 8th and 10th graders who completed the survey between 1998 and 2001. Marsh and Evans (2007) found that rural males were more likely to carry weapons than urban males. Overall, 17.4% of males reported carrying a weapon to school and 7.4% of females reported carrying a weapon to school in the past 30 days. Only about 1% of the sample reported carrying guns to school (no sex differences were found). Sixty-six percent of

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students reported concern about violence at school, while about 44% reported concerns about violence after school on the way home.

Reasons for Weapon Carrying Rountree (2000) summarized the literature on the etiological factors of weapon carrying. She categorizes six main explanatory factors: sociodemographic patterns, fear and loathing, criminal lifestyle, proweapon socialization, social (dis)attachment, and contextual effects. In terms of sociodemographic patterns of weapon carrying, male gender, age (grades 9 and 10), and low SES are consistently found to be significantly associated with carrying behavior. In terms of fear as a motivator for weapon carrying, numerous studies find that students carry a weapon for protection from exposure to violence at school or in the neighborhood (Carlson, 2006; Kahn et al., 2001; Lizotte & Sheppard, 2001; Mateu-Gelabert, 2002; Webster et al., 1993). The convenience sample of inner-city junior high school students by Webster and colleagues (1993) revealed that 25% of males carried a gun for protection and 16% of these individuals carried a gun for protection on an everyday basis. In their study, the respondents stated they carried a gun for protection from both being threatened and being exposed to more violence and fighting where attitudes in their neighborhood seemed supportive of using a gun to shoot someone. Using the Rochester Youth Survey data, Lizotte and Sheppard (2001) found that 6% of the boys in their study owned a gun for protection during gang involvement, drug activity, and from general gun crime in their everyday lives. The LH Research survey found that 42% of the study feared that guns would shorten their lives (Harris, 1993). Involvement in criminal, delinquent, and other problem behavior is also considered an important factor in weapon carrying, especially gun carrying (Huff, 1998; Rountree, 2000; Sheley & Wright, 1995; Wilkinson & Fagan, 2001). Detachment from school is also thought to be a contributing factor to student weapon carrying. Jenkins (1997) conducted a study of school problem behavior and found that weak attachment to school explained a variety of delinquent acts at school, including weapon carrying.

Guns and the Peer Context While the above studies have considered youths’ access and attitudes toward guns, some researchers have also begun to investigate peers and gun use. As described above, Rountree (2000) summarized the prior literature on proweapon socialization. She found that particularly for adolescents, the proweapon socialization happens in the youth peer group with family socialization influencing sporting behaviors rather than weapon carrying

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in other contexts. Rountree notes that “perceptions of others’ carrying guns to school significantly affect the likelihood of students’ carrying weapons to school themselves” (2000, p. 297). Sheley and Wright (1998) reported that 14% of the study participants’ peers carried a gun. Bjerregaard and Lizotte (1995) found that 33% of the respondents’ peers carried a gun, and Sheley, McGee, and Wright (1992) found that 35% of respondents reported that their peers carried a gun outside the home. Finally, Williams, Mulhall, Ris,€and€DeVille (2002) reported 57% of participants stated that at least one of their friends carried a gun during the past year. For delinquent samples, we would expect higher reports of peer involvement in gun possession and carrying. The fact that nearly two-thirds of youth violence can be classified as co-offending situations increases the relevance of understanding the diffusion of guns within peer networks (Wilkinson, 2003). These findings are especially important because research shows that adolescents increasingly turn to their peers for socialization and adaptation during their teenage years (Mateu-Gelabert, 2002; Wilkinson, McBryde, et al., 2009). Further, previous research has also found that respondents’ having peers who carried a gun increased the chances that the respondent themselves carried a gun or were involved in violence (Lizotte et al., 1994, 1996; Luster & Oh, 2001; Zimmerman et al., 2004). Thus, peers have a major contributing factor in gun carrying and, we argue, in the construction of violent events involving gun use as well. Yet, while studies question respondents about their peers’ access to guns, very few studies focus on respondents’ perceptions of peers’ actual use of guns or the influence peers have on respondents’ use of guns. In sum, across a wide range of sampling and measurement conditions, subgroups of adolescents consistently reported that guns are easily obtained, that they are frequently carried and readily used, that they are necessary for self-defense and survival, and that they influence the ways that teenagers view routine social interactions. Our review shows that youths residing in high contexts (i.e., a culture in which the youth has internalized meaning and information, and consequently little is stated explicitly in spoken or written messages) continue to have their developmental trajectories altered by exposure to firearm violence even after a nearly decade-long decline in youth gun violence.

Beyond the Trend Data: Findings from a Qualitative Study of Adolescents and Firearms The New York City Youth Violence Study (NYCYVS) is perhaps the most detailed with regard to examining the experiences of youth perpetrators and victims of gun violence. The NYCYVS has shaped our understanding

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of the problem of youth violence by documenting how youth violence is heterogeneous; that is, there are multiple types with multiple explanations (Wilkinson, 2003; Wilkinson & Carr, 2008; Wilkinson & Fagan, 1996). Using ethnographic life history interviews with 416 16- to 24-year-old males from East New York, Brooklyn, and Mott Haven, Bronx, during the mid-1990s, the researchers were able to describe the social worlds of young African American and Latino males involved in violent behavior. The first publication from the study described recurrent themes in the situational contexts and scripts of gun violence among urban adolescents living in high crime areas (Wilkinson & Fagan, 1996). Fagan and Wilkinson (1988b) analyzed the functional aspects of violence for urban adolescents and described five goals important to adolescents that may result in violent acts: achieving and maintaining social status, acquisition of material goods, harnessing power, street justice and self-help, and defiance of authority. Fagan and Wilkinson concluded that “violence has become an important part of the discourse of social interactions, with both functional (status and identity), material, and symbolic meaning (power and control), as well as strategic importance in navigating everyday social dangers” (1988b, p. 88). Further, Wilkinson (2001) described the adaptive role of violence in building a tough identity to avoid stigma and future victimization. She described a social hierarchy of violent identities that operate in dangerous neighborhoods and listed three ideal types of social identities that are related to violent performance: the crazy killer/wild identity, the holdingyour-own identity, and the punk or herb identity. Wilkinson (2001) demonstrated that early victimization experiences shape youths’ decisions to develop fighting skills, participate in violent encounters, align with tough (violent) peers, and acquire guns for self-protection. The presence and use of firearms, the involvement of younger adolescents in street-level drug sales, and the intensity of a violent normative code have effectively short-circuited established status hierarchies of the street. Her work has highlighted the importance of gun violence as a resource that adolescents use to cope with their dangerous social worlds. The process of finding a niche and forming a “safe” identity typically includes engaging in violent behavior. The link between victimization and perpetration of violence is becoming better understood. The interplay between individual, group, cultural, situational, and macrostructural factors are critically important for understanding the experiences of urban adolescents who are at greatest risk for gun violence. The NYCYVS shows how ecological context shapes behavior. The dynamics of violence among minority male youths cannot be fully understood without exploring the contextual processes shaping the

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development of those dynamics, including violent youths’ family situations, perceptions of their neighborhood environment, and experiences with mainstream institutions such as schools, community agencies, and employers. The composite that emerges from their experiences includes family dysfunction, repeated exposure to violence, institutional failure, limited achievement in school, and continued marginality as young adults (see Wilkinson, 2003). In the peer domain, the NYCYVS illuminates how peer social networks promote and facilitate youths’ gunrelated and other criminal behaviors (Fagan, Wilkinson, & Davies, 2007; Wilkinson, McBryde, et al., 2009). NYCYVS perceived a need to have guns for protection and they reported that most of their friends or associates also acquired, possessed, carried, and used guns for selfprotection. Many of them also used guns in committing crime. In the community domain, the NYCYVS data shows how the breakdown in informal social control, resulting from fear, which drives adult withdrawal from youths, further fosters an environment in which violence can cycle (Wilkinson, 2007). Exposure to violence in the community negatively influences healthy adolescent development through negative modeling and curtailed opportunities for seeing alternatives to violent behavior (Wilkinson & Carr, 2008). Wilkinson and colleagues have documented the ways in which formal social control processes have limited efficacy to address the youth violence problem, resulting from serious mistrust of the police and the criminal justice system born partly from abuse, harassment, and cultural insensitivity (Wilkinson, Beaty, & Lurry, 2009).

Adolescents and Firearm Suicide Prevalence Adolescent suicide has become an issue of great concern within the United States. In 2007, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in the United States and the 3rd leading cause in individuals ages 15–24. Over 4,000 youths (ages 15–24) died as result of suicide that year (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010). From 1999 to 2007, 38,988 youths ages 10–24 died as a result of suicide (5.03 rate) with over half of those suicides, 19,539, being committed with a firearm (3.53 rate).1 Multiple studies show that firearms are the most common and most lethal method of suicide among adolescents (Lubell, Kegler, Crosby, & Karch, 2007; Miller, Hemenway, & Azrael, 2004; Romero & Wintemute, 2002; Shenassa, Catlin, & Bulka, 2003; Shields, Hunsaker, & Hunsaker, 2006; Webster, Vernick, Zeoli, & Manganello, 2004).

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Figure 10.4â•… Trends in firearm suicide among 10- to 24-year-olds by race/ethnicity, 1981–2007.

Trends Romero and Wintemute (2002) studied the epidemiology of suicide during the years 1980 to 1998 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics Mortality files. They found that during these two decades, rates of firearm suicide changed very little. Firearm suicide was the leading method of suicide within the nation and consistently exceeded the rate of firearm homicide. In 1998, youths ages 15–24 had an annual rate of 6.7 firearm suicides per 100,000 people, with suicide being the third-leading cause of death among adolescents. Lubell and colleagues (2007) analyzed suicide trends for adolescents during the years 1990–2004. This study found that from 1990 to 2003, the combined suicide rate for youths ages 10–24 declined 28.5%. However, from 2003–2004, the suicide rate for this same age group increased by 8%. Regarding firearm suicide, an increasing downward trend in the rate of firearm suicide for females was discovered (Lubell et al., 2007). An even more recent study by Bridge and colleagues (2010) noted that both the overall suicide rate and the firearm suicide rate for adolescents ages 10–24 has declined each year from 1992 to 2006 except for a sharp increase in 2004. Over this 14-year period, the overall suicide rate declined 23% and firearm suicide declined 45% from a rate of 5.93 in 1992 to 3.25 in 2006. These temporal patterns track the trend of a decline in youth firearm homicide as well. Nevertheless, firearm suicide still holds its position as the most common method of suicide among adolescents (Bridge et al., 2010; Lubell et al., 2007). Figure 10.4 shows the trends of firearm suicide in the U.S. from 1981 to 2007.

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Who Is at Risk? In terms of discussing risk factors for adolescent firearm suicide, there are three different types of factors that are most relevant. The first is fixed factors. Two examples of these include race/ethnicity and gender. Second is social or environmental factors, such as geographic location and availability of firearms. The third set is personal factors, such as depression, severe anger, and other mental health issues (Shain, 2007). This section briefly discusses some of the risk factors associated with adolescent firearm suicide.

Fixed Factors Gender↜.╇ Studies continue to show that adolescent males have higher rates of suicide, including firearm suicide, than their female counterparts (Bridge et al., 2010; Greydanus, Bacopoulou, & Tsalamanios, 2009; Romero & Wintemute, 2002). The World Health Organization (2009) found that from 1950 to 2005, males have consistently had higher suicide rates than females, and in 2005, males ages 15–24 had nearly five times the number of suicides than females. Studies report that 77–89% of all youth firearm suicides are committed by males, making males disproportionately the victims of this method of suicide (Azrael, Hemenway, Miller, Barber, & Shackner, 2004; Bridge et al., 2010; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009a; Joe & Kaplan, 2002; Shields et al., 2006; Wright, Wintemate, & Claire, 2008). Race.╇ Research has found that White adolescents (particularly White males) are more likely than adolescents who are Black or from other racial and ethnic groups to commit firearm suicide (Kubrin & Wadsworth, 2009; Romero & Wintemute, 2002); however, American Indian/Alaskan native males have the highest suicide rate (Shain, 2007). African American females have the lowest suicide rate, although their numbers are increasing in recent years (Shain, 2007). Although African American males still have lower rates of suicide than Caucasian males, the gap between them is narrowing. Joe and Kaplan (2002) found that between 1979 and 1997, the African American male firearm suicide rates increased by 133% and 24% for 15- to 19- and 20- to 24-year-olds, respectively. Other fixed risk factors include family history of suicide or suicide attempts, parental mental health problems, gay or bisexual orientation, a history of physical or sexual abuse, and a previous suicide attempt (Shain, 2007).

Social/Environmental Factors Geographic location (rural v. urban).╇ A very recent study (Nance, Carr, Kallan, Branas, & Wiebe, 2010) examined firearm mortality rates among

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youths ages 10–19 across U.S. counties using a rural-urban continuum. Results indicate that more rural counties experience higher rates of child and adolescent firearm homicide in the time period 1999–2006. Most rural counties had a firearm suicide rate that was 2.01 times higher than that of the most urban counties. Age comparisons within this study found that rates of suicide among 10- to 14-year-olds was similar to that of those 15–19; however, youths in both age groups who lived in the most rural counties had significantly higher rates of suicide than those who lived in the most urban counties (Nance et al., 2010). Socioeconomic status (concentrated disadvantage).╇ Kubrin and Wadsworth (2009) address the issue of concentrated disadvantage on young White and Black males. Using data from three sources (Mortality Multiple Causes of Death Records [MMCD], 1999–2001; Supplemental Homicide Reports; and 2000 Census), the authors used regression to examine the effects of structural characteristics (disadvantage) on young male suicide. Disadvantage was measured using the median family income, high school graduation, percentage of joblessness, and the percentage of female-headed households in the region. Findings indicate that cities with higher levels of joblessness and female-headed households and lower levels of income and high school graduation had higher levels of suicide for both young Black and White males. Further analysis showed that disadvantage was a statistically significant factor in both White and Black firearm suicides. Firearm availability.╇A plethora of studies report that adolescent accessibility to firearms greatly increases the risk of adolescent suicide by firearms (Birckmayer & Hemenway, 2001; Grossman et al., 2005; Hardy, 2006; Joe & Kaplan, 2002; Webster et al., 2004). Birckmayer and Hemenway (2001) found that levels of firearm ownership are highly correlated with firearm suicides. Authors report that if this relationship is causal, then a 10% decrease in firearm ownership would result in an 8.2% decrease in firearm suicides. From 1981 to 2002, Miller and collegues (2006) found that declines in household firearm prevalence were significantly associated with declines in firearm suicide. This association was most prominent with households with children (ages 0–19). For every 10% decline in the number of households with children and firearms, the rate of firearm suicide for children 0–19 declined by 8.3%. Shields and collegues (2006) found that, specific to region, in a 10-year study of suicide cases for 11- to 24-year-olds in Kentucky (1993–2002), a gun was noted to be accessible (in the medical examiner’s narrative) to the decedent in over half (61%) of firearm suicide cases. Similarly, Miller and colleagues (2004) found that in the northeast United States firearm prevalence was positively related to the rate of firearm suicide (and firearm suicide attempts) for all age groups including those age 15–24.

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Additional socioenvironmental risk factors include impaired childparent relationship, living outside of the home, the presence of a stressful life event, difficulties in school, social isolation, neither working nor in school, and an argument with a parent (Shain, 2007).

Personal Factors Mental health problems.╇ Shain (2007) states that mental health problems such as depression, severe anger, substance abuse, and bipolar disorder predispose and heighten an adolescent’s risk of suicide; 90% of adolescent suicide victims meet the criteria for diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder (Shain, 2007). The National Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) found that in 2009, 26.1% of youths in grades 9 through 12 reported feeling sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks. Additionally, the YRBSS reported that in 2009, 6.9% of high school age youths attempted suicide one or more times within the previous year (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). See Figure 10.5 for the trends in high school youths attempted suicide over time. Life experiences.╇ Azrael and colleagues (2004) suggest that youths’ life experiences greatly affect whether they use a firearm. These researchers investigated how the demographic, behavioral, and experiential characteristics relate to whether youths use a firearm to commit suicide. The results

Figure 10.5â•… Attempted suicide one or more times in the past 12 months (years 1991–2009) by race. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010.

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from this study suggest that, specifically, youths who have not experienced a life crisis or had previously expressed suicidal thoughts were more likely to use a firearm for suicide. The research thus implies that because these youths do not necessarily have the skills to resolve their life crises, they impulsively decide to use a gun. The study by Azrael and colleagues (2004) may suggest that with primary prevention tactics, youths can learn skills to resolve a conflict so that they do not make rash decisions in the heat of the moment.

Prevention As discussed in the previous section, a wide variety of factors are important when understanding an adolescent’s risk for suicide. One factor that has received much attention in the arena of adolescent suicide prevention is the availability of firearms. Research suggests that as rates of gun availability increase in particular regions, so do youth firearm suicide rates (Kubrin & Wadsworth, 2009; Miller et al., 2006). In their case control study, Grossman and colleagues (2005) found that case firearms (those used in an incident where a youth under age 20 accessed a gun and shot him- or herself intentionally or unintentionally) were less likely to be stored locked, unloaded, separate from ammunition, or with locked ammunition than control firearms. These four safe storage procedures were said to have a protective affect on suicide attempts among adolescents and children, yet case firearms (those that youths had used to cause injury) were less likely to be stored safely. Webster and colleagues (2004) examined the effects of federal and state laws mandating a minimum age for the purchase and/or possession of a handgun and state Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws requiring safe storage of a firearm on the firearm suicide rates of youths age 14–20 from 1976 to 2001. They found that minimum purchase/possession laws did not significantly affect the suicide rates of youths in this age group. However, they did find that CAP laws did result in a modest decrease in the rate of firearm suicide for youths ages 14–17. In addition, Wright and colleagues (2008) found that the majority of guns used for suicide by adolescents in California during 1997–1999 were owned by someone within the adolescent’s household. Kubrin and Wadsworth (2009) also found that for young Black males, the accessibility of firearms within their community diminished the significance of disadvantage’s effect on firearm suicide rates; this suggests that the presence of firearms apart from socioeconomic disadvantage is what heightens the risk for young Black male suicide. All of these findings emphasize the need for the safe

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storage of and limiting youths’ access to firearms as important mechanisms to reducing the prevalence of adolescent firearm suicide. Scholars have offered a variety of prevention approaches that warrant attention. Bridge and colleagues (2010) argues that the identification of modifiable risk factors (social, psychiatric, psychological, and circumstantial) would allow for the development of targeted public health interventions that holistically address adolescent suicide. Similarly, Shain (2007) acknowledges adolescent suicide as a public health issue and argues that identification of risk factors by pediatricians would help for the treatment and prevention of adolescent suicide. This argument stresses that the interventions must be targeted to the particular adolescent. Hardy (2006) addresses the multiple facets of adolescent firearm suicide prevention by acknowledging both the legislative reform put forth by the CAP laws and community-based, parent, and child education programming. Despite the apparent promise of educational programs, efficacy studies are needed to advance our understanding of how such programs lead to behavioral change. Birckmayer and Hemenway (2001) noted that many prevention programs targeted to youth suicide are too narrow; many youth suicide victims are “healthy,” thus programs that address mental illness, suicide ideation, etc., may not address the needs of all youths. Instead, prevention programs should be more holistic.

Conclusions Adolescence is a period of development in which attitudes and behaviors are shaped and molded through social interactions with others. Youths’ opinions about and behaviors related to firearms and firearm violence are greatly shaped by the community context of development. Despite the widely publicized suburban and rural school shootings during the past two decades, gun violence is spatially concentrated in distressed urban areas. Researchers have consistently shown that youths who grow up in disadvantaged neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty, single female–headed households, residential mobility, low collective efficacy, and high crime rates are more likely than advantaged youths to experience a wide range of negative outcomes. These include depression, victimization, involvement in delinquency, associating with delinquent peers, gang involvement, school failure and dropout, teen parenthood, suicide, gun carrying, violent offending, and other serious problems (Gorman-Smith, Henry, & Tolan, 2004; Sampson, Morenoff, & Earls, 1999; Wilkinson & Carr, 2008). In the aggregate, there is less youth firearm violence today then there was at the height of the youth gun violence epidemic, yet the rates remain unacceptably high for subpopulations of youths who live in dangerous environments.

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Firearms impact the lives of adolescence differentially. Urban minority youths living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to the negative consequences of exposure to community violence, direct victimizations, and learning violence scripts from their peers. Efforts to respond to and contain the youth gun violence epidemic of the early 1990s can be largely characterized as embracing the “nothing works” myth and focusing resources on selective incapacitation and punishment rather than on prevention and rehabilitation. Violence is now recognized as a public health problem that is preventable, yet few resources are allocated toward effective prevention through comprehensive strategies that recognize the complex interaction between individual, group, situational, and structural determinants. Violence is also recognized as a problem that needs to be addressed across multiple contexts and systems, such as education, health, human services, criminal and juvenile justice, and grassroots organizations. Collaborative partnerships built on trust and mutual respect between community stakeholders and researchers have proven to be advantageous in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of comprehensive community health promotion and crime prevention initiatives (Skogan, Hartnett, Bump, & Dubois, 2005). Comprehensive community-based prevention efforts to address youth gun violence must also include efforts to address other comorbid problem behaviors, including suicide. Reducing youth access to firearms would certainly be a positive step in reducing firearm violence and suicide among adolescents. Recent research has identified numerous prevention and intervention strategies that are effective (Kennedy, 2009; Papachristos, Meares, & Fagan, 2007; Ransford et al., 2010; Skogan et al., 2005; Webster, Vernick, & Mendel, 2009).

Note We acknowledge the financial support from the Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology and the OSU Office of Outreach and Engagement that made this work possible. The opinions are solely those of the authors. 1. Retrieved on October 8, 2010, from WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999–2007, http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html.

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Kahn, D., Kazimi, M., & Mulvihill, M. (2001). Attitudes of New York City high school students regarding firearm violence. Pediatrics, 107, 1125. Kann, L., Kinchen, S., Williams, B., Ross, J., Lowry, R., Grunbaum, J., & Kolbe, L. (2000). Youth risk behavior surveillance: United States, 1999. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 49, 1–96. Kann, L., Kinchen, S., Williams, B., Ross, J., Lowry, R., Hill, C., Grunbaum, J., et al. (1998). Youth risk behavior surveillance: United States, 1997. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 47, 1–63. Kann, L., Warren, C., Harris, W., Collins, J., Douglas, K., Collins, M., Williams, B., et al. (1995). Youth risk behavior surveillance: United States, 1993. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 44, 1–56. Kann, L., Warren, C., Harris, W., Collins, J., Williams, B., Ross, J., & Kolbe, L., et al. (1996). Youth risk behavior surveillance: United States, 1995. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 45, 1–63. Kennedy, D. (2009). Deterrence and crime prevention: Reconsidering the prospect of sanction. New York: Routledge. Kubrin, C., & Wadsworth, T. (2009). Explaining suicide among Blacks and Whites: How socioeconomic factors and gun availability affect race-specific suicide rates. Social Science Quarterly, 90, 1203–1227. Lizotte, A., Howard, G., Krohn, M., & Thornberry, T. (1996). Patterns of illegal gun carrying among young urban males. Valparaiso University Law Review 31, 375–393. Lizotte, A., & Sheppard, D. (2001). Gun use by male juveniles: Research and prevention (Juvenile Justice Bulletin NCJ 188992). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Lizotte, A., Tesoriero, J., Thornberry, T., & Krohn, M. (1994). Patterns of adolescent firearms ownership and use. Justice Quarterly, 11, 51–73. Lubell, K. M., Kegler, S., Crosby, A., & Karch, D. (2007). Suicide trends among youths and young adults aged 10–24 years—United States, 1990–2004. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 56, 905–908. Luster, T., & Oh, S. (2001). Correlates of male adolescents carrying handguns among their peers. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63, 714–726. Marsh, S., & Evans, W. (2007). Carrying a weapon to school: The influence of youth assets at home and school. Journal of School Violence, 6, 131–147. Mateu-Gelabert, P. (2002). Dreams, gangs, and guns: The interplay between adolescent violence and immigration in a New York City neighborhood. New York: Vera Institute of Justice, National Development Research Institute. Miller, M., Azrael, D., Hepburn, L., Hemenway, D., & Lippmann, S. (2006). The association between changes in household firearm ownership and rates of suicide in the United States, 1981–2002. Injury Prevention, 12, 178–182. Miller, M., & Hemenway, D. (2004). Unsupervised firearm handling by California adolescents. Injury Prevention, 10, 163–168. Miller, M., Hemenway, D., & Azrael, D. (2004). Firearms and suicide in the northeast. Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection, and Critical Care, 57, 626–632.

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Molnar, B., Miller, M., Azrael, D., & Buka, S. (2004). Neighborhood predictors of concealed firearm carrying among children and adolescents: Results from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 158, 657–664. Nance, M., Carr, B., Kallan, M., Branas, C., & Wiebe, D. (2010). Variation in pediatric and adolescent firearm mortality rates in rural and urban U.S. counties. Pediatrics, 25, 1112–1118. Papachristos, A., Meares, T., & Fagan, J. (2007). Attention felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhood in Chicago. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 4, 223–272. Ransford, C., Kane, C., Metzger, T., Quintana, E., & Slutkin, G. (2010). An examination of the role of CeaseFire, the Chicago Police, Project Safe Neighborhoods, and displacement in the reduction in homicide in Chicago in 2004. In R. Chaskin (Ed.), Youth gangs and community intervention: Research, practice, and evidence (pp. 76–108). New York: Columbia University Press. Romero, M., & Wintemute, G. (2002). The epidemiology of firearm suicide in the United States. Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 79, 39–48. Rountree, P. (2000). Weapons at school: Are the predictors generalizable across context? Sociological Spectrum, 20, 291–324. Sampson, R., Morenoff, J., & Earls, F. (1999). Beyond social capital: Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children. American Sociological Review, 64, 633–660. Schubiner, H., Scott, R., & Tzelepis, A. (1993). Exposure to violence among inner-city youth. Journal of Adolescent Health, 14, 214–219. Shain, B. (2007). Suicide and suicide attempts in adolescents. Pediatrics, 120, 669–676. Sheley, J., McGee, Z., & Wright, J. (1992). Gun violence in and around inner-city schools. American Journal of Diseases of Children, 146, 677–682. Sheley, F., & Wright, J. (1993) Gun acquisition and possession in selected juvenile samples. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Sheley, J., & Wright, J. (1995). In the line of fire: Youth, guns, and violence in urban America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Sheley, J., & Wright, J. (1998). High school youths, weapons, and violence: A national survey. Washington, DC: Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. Sheley, J., Wright, J., & Smith, M. (1993). Firearms, violence and inner-city youth: A report of research findings. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. Shenassa, E. D., Catlin, S., & Bulka, S. (2003). Lethality of firearms relative to other suicide methods: A population based study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 57, 120–124. Shields, L., Hunsaker, D., & Hunsaker, J. (2006). Adolescent and young adult suicide: A 10-year retrospective review of Kentucky medical examiner cases. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 51, 874–879.

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Skogan, W., Hartnett, S., Bump, N., & Dubois, J. (2005). Evaluation of ceasefire-Chicago (Grant Number 2005-MU-MU-003. National Institute of Justice). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. Slovak, K. (2002). Gun violence and children: Factors related to exposure and trauma. Health and Social Work, 27, 104–112. United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1995). National Crime Victimization Survey: School Crime Supplement. doi:10.3886 /ICPSR06739 Vittes, K. (2004, November). Risk-taking behavior among adolescents who say they can get a handgun: Comparison with those who say they cannot and those who have a handgun. Poster session presented at the 132nd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, Washington, DC. Webster, D. W., Gainer, P., & Champion, H. (1993). Weapon carrying among inner-city junior high school students: Defensive behavior vs. aggressive delinquency. American Journal of Public Health, 83, 1604–1608. Webster, D. W., Vernick, J., & Mendel, J. (2009). Interim evaluation of Baltimore’s Safe Streets Program. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. Webster, D., Vernick, J., Zeoli, A., & Manganello, J. (2004). Association between youth-focused firearm laws and youth suicides. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 292, 594–601. Wilcox, P., & Clayton, R. (2001). A multilevel analysis of school-based weapon possession. Justice Quarterly, 18, 509–541. Wilkinson, D. (2001). Violent events and social identity: Specifying the relationship between respect and masculinity in inner city youth violence. In D. Kinney (Ed.), Sociological studies of children and youth (Vol. 8, pp. 231–265). Stamford, CT: Elsevier Science. Wilkinson, D. (2003). Guns, violence, and identity among African-American and Latino youth. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. Wilkinson, D. (2007). Local social ties and willingness to intervene: Textured views among violent urban youth of neighborhood social control dynamics and situations. Justice Quarterly, 24, 185–220. Wilkinson, D., Beaty, C., & Lurry, R. (2009). Youth violence-crime or self-help? Marginalized urban males’ perspectives on the limited efficacy of criminal justice system to stop youth violence. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623, 25–38. Wilkinson, D., & Carr, P. (2008). Violent youths’ responses to high levels of exposure to community violence: What violent events reveal about youth violence. Journal of Community Psychology, 36, 1026–1051. Wilkinson, D., & Fagan, J. (1996). The role of firearms in violence ‘scripts’: The dynamics of gun events among adolescent males. Law and Contemporary Problems, 59, 55–90. Wilkinson, D., & Fagan, J. (2001). What we know about gun use among adolescents. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 4, 109–132.

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Wilkinson, D., McBryde, M., Williams, B., Bloom, S., & Bell, K. (2009). Peers and gun use among urban adolescent males: An examination of social embeddedness. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 25, 20–44. Williams, S., Mulhall, P., Ris, J., & DeVille, J. (2002). Adolescents carrying handguns and taking them to school: Psychosocial correlates among public school students in Illinois. Journal of Adolescence, 25, 551–567. World Health Organization (2009). Suicide rates (per 100,000) by gender, USA, 1950–2005. Retrieved on October 10, 2010, from http://www.who.int/mental_ health/media/unitstates.pdf. Wright, M., Wintemute, G., & Claire, B. (2008). Gun suicide by young people in California: Descriptive epidemiology and gun ownership. Journal of Adolescent Health, 43, 619–622. Xu, J., Kochanek, K., Murphy, S., & Tejada-Vera, B. (2010). Deaths: Final data for 2007. National Vital Statistics Reports, 58(19). Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. Zimmerman, M., Morrel-Samuels, S., Wong, N., Tarver, D. Rabiah, D., & White, S. (2004). Guns, gangs, and gossip. Journal of Early Adolescence, 24, 385–411. Zimring, F. (1999). American youth violence. New York: Oxford.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Delinquency and V↜iolent Behavior in Girls: Prominent Risks and Promising Interventions Ann Booker Loper, Emily B. Nichols, and Caitlin M. Novero

A time-honored nursery rhyme tells us that girls should be made of “sugar and spice and all things nice.” It is unsurprising that we are curious and often shocked by girls who violate this dictum and instead act in ways that are delinquent, violent, or otherwise “not nice.” The easy stereotypes for this group of girls have familiar but very different slants: These girls must be morally deficient, perhaps sexually promiscuous. Or, these girls must be overly masculine and emulating boy behavior. Emerging data reveal that neither of these easy generalizations encompasses what is happening with delinquent girls today. To better understand these young women, we need to ask: What are the trends in female delinquent offending? What are the stressors and risk factors that characterize the girls who offend? What can be done to intervene in the lives of these girls at risk?

Current Trends in Female Juvenile Offending As is the case with adult offenders, most juvenile offenders—both violent and nonviolent—are male. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tracks arrests each year and delineates patterns by gender and other

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demographic indices. In a summary of arrests during 2008 (FBI, 2009), boys accounted for 70% of juvenile arrests, 93% of the arrests for homicide, 83% of violent offenses in general, and 64% of major property offenses. This discrepancy is consistent with patterns found in adult offenders. The typical juvenile delinquent is not a girl, and patterns of offending by girls are different from those of boys. However, girls are becoming a greater portion of the growing juvenile delinquency population. Although some recent arrest trends suggest a slowdown, there has been a sharp increase in the number of U.S. youths involved in criminal activity during the last 20 years. In general, where indices of criminal offending have increased, the incline has been sharper for girls, and where rates have decreased, the decline has been less for girls. The net result is that there is a greater proportion of girls involved in the justice system today than 20 years ago. For example, in contrast to an approximate 19% decrease in arrests of boys during years 1999–2000, rates of arrests of girls decreased by approximately 8% (FBI, 2009). The proportionate shift is likewise evident in juvenile court records. For example, between 1985 and 2007, the number of delinquency cases brought to juvenile courts involving girls approximately doubled, in contrast to a 30% increase among boys (Puzzanchera, Adams, & Sickmund, 2010). While girls represented approximately 19% of juvenile court cases in 1985, they accounted for nearly 28% of such cases in 2005 (Puzzanchera & Kang, 2008). In particular there has been a notable incline between 1985 and the late 1990s (see Figure 11.1). The rise in the number of young female offenders raises the inevitable question: Are girls getting more violent today? The answer, it seems, is that it depends on how you measure it. Recent arrest data show that during the past 10 years, major violent offending by girls has declined 10% (FBI, 2009). The proportion of violent offenses in comparison to the total number of arrests of girls has remained stable: In 1999, approximately 2.7% of female arrests were for major violent offenses, in comparison to 2.6% in 2008. However, there has been a remarkable 12% increase (in contrast to an approximately 6% decline among boys) in the number of arrests for “simple” assaults and an 18% increase (in contrast to a 5% decline among boys) in minor “disorderly conduct” arrests. The increases in violent offending seem to be within the realm of lesser violent acts, suggesting that in many cases the female juvenile arrestee is not engaging in “hard crime” but is increasingly arrested for fractious and aggressive interpersonal interchanges. Rather than focusing on whether girls are becoming more violent, a better question may be to try to understand what violent behavior by girls

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Figure 11.1â•… Female delinquency cases handled by juvenile courts in the United States, 1985–2007. Source: Puzzanchera, C., and Kang, W. (2010). “Easy Access to Juvenile Court Statistics: 1985–2007.” http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/ezajcs/

looks like. Homicide stands as arguably the most violent offense. National records of homicides are available from the FBI Supplementary Homicide Report, which gives details regarding each homicide incident. Several investigations converge on the conclusion that homicides committed by girls have a strong relational context that differs substantially from that of boys. Loper and Cornell (1996) examined FBI homicide records and found that proportionately more homicides committed by girls reflected types of domestic distress. Girls were proportionately more likely than boys to target members of their own family. They were less likely than boys to commit homicide in conjunction with another criminal activity (e.g., robbery). The girls were much less likely than boys to use firearms and instead often seemed to use a weapon of convenience, such as a nearby knife. Most strikingly, nearly one-fourth of the homicides by girls involved the death of a child under three years old, seeming to reflect the stress of teenage parenthood. Other studies have likewise documented contextual differences between the homicides of boys and girls that highlight domestic issues (Roe-Sepowitz, 2009; Snyder, Sickmund, & Poe-Yamagata, 1996). Consistent with the importance of the domestic context for girls’ Â�offending, delinquent girls may frequently find themselves facing Â�domestic violence charges. Herrera and McCloskey (2001) examined the arrest

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records and context for violent offending committed by 42 boys and 33 girls living in a midsize U.S. city. They found that although boys and girls had a similar percentage of domestic violence arrests, the contexts differed. While such charges were usually accompanied by a variety of other violent offenses committed outside of the home for boys, domestic charges accounted for nearly all (89%) of the violent offending among the girls. Domestic difficulties among girls are likewise reflected in recent national arrest data, which indicate that approximately 10% of the arrests of girls in 2008 were for running away from home (FBI, 2009). A thorough understanding of juvenile delinquency and violence among girls involves understanding the role of interpersonal relationships with family and intimates and the pathways by which disruptions in such relationships can lead to delinquent and violent behaviors.

Roots of the Trouble: Risk Factors for Juvenile Female Offending and Violent Behavior Several scholars have argued that the development of healthy interpersonal relationships with family, peers, and intimates is essential in the lives of developing girls (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Chesney-Lind, 1997). Consistent with this theme, girls who engage in criminal or violent behavior collectively represent a group with remarkable interpersonal and relational stressors. Problematic family relationships, a history of abuse and victimization, and mental illness appear to be prominent among female offenders and are more salient predictors of delinquent and violent behavior in girls. High levels of substance abuse and involvement with asocial groups further complicate troubled histories and can lead to problematic behaviors.

Sexual and Physical Victimization As is the case among adult criminal offenders, girl delinquents frequently evidence a history of physical and sexual victimization, typically at higher levels than delinquent boys. For example, Belknap and Holsinger (2006) reported differences in self-reported abuse histories among 163 girls and 281 boys who were housed in Ohio youth correctional institutions and found proportionately more girls reported verbal, physical, and sexual abuse than did the boys. The differences were particularly striking in terms of sexual abuse. Approximately 59% of the girls in contrast to 19% of the boys reported having unwanted sexual contact. Moreover, among boys and girls who experienced such adverse events, girls were more likely to have endured multiple occasions of abuse. These results are consistent with numerous other studies that concur on the conclusion that delinquent girls

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experience levels of abuse that are beyond that of delinquent boys and that a history of abuse is linked to delinquent behavior in girls (Daigle, Cullen, & Wright, 2007). Not surprisingly, a history of abuse is associated with an increased likelihood for emotional disregulation and turmoil that can lead to numerous behavioral problems, including aggressive and violent behavior. Odgers and colleagues (2007) sought to understand variations among the female delinquency population and how subtypes of girl delinquents may experience different stressors and risks. Using latent class analysis, they observed that the girls who were serving sentences in state juvenile correctional facilities could be classified into three distinct groups: girls with a high propensity for committing violent and delinquent actions, those likely to engage only in delinquent actions, and those with a lesser likelihood of committing either type of offenses. They then examined differences between these classification types in terms of the girls’ histories of abuse and mental illness. The results showed clear differences between groups with higher levels of problems among the violent delinquent group. When compared to the delinquency only class, those who had a high propensity for violent and delinquent offending were 7.5 times more likely to have experienced sexual abuse. These striking results imply that sexual abuse may serve as a tipping point between a nonviolent and violent female offender.

Troubled Family Life The high levels of physical and sexual abuse among delinquent girls reflect, in part, dysfunctional and troubled family contexts. Among juvenile offenders who have a history of abuse, the majority are abused by a caregiver (Synder & Sickmund, 2006). In an examination into the lives of 444 incarcerated youths, Belknap and Holsinger (2006) found that 74.8% and 22.7% of incarcerated girls were victims of physical and sexual assault, respectively, by family members. As a result of the abuse, some girls attempt to escape by running away. The National Center of Juvenile Justice (Synder & Sickmund, 2006) reports that almost a quarter of youths charged with running away from home indicate doing so to avoid physical or sexual abuse at home. This fact is of particular salience as females make up the majority (61%) of youths who run away from home (Synder & Sickmund, 2006). Consistent with this notion of a linkage between abuse and running away, Belknap and Holsinger (2006) observed that 14% of their sample of delinquent girls stated that they would rather remain in prison than return home, leading the authors

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to speculate that, in some cases, girls might commit offenses to escape traumatic home environments. Exposure to violence within the home setting appears to be a particularly prominent risk for delinquency in girls. Herrera and McCloskey (2001) examined the impact of family violence on boys and girls by examining the impact of witnessing or experiencing home abuse. Two types of cohorts of mothers, those with and without a history of domestic abuse, were interviewed and given self-report measures concerning home levels of child abuse, marital violence, and other demographic features. One child of each of the mothers was queried regarding abuse experiences within the family. Herrera and McCloskey then examined the juvenile court records for the children of these mothers five years after the interviews in order to assess the impact of the previous home environments, as described in interviews, on juvenile offending. Results underscored the importance of early exposure to family violence. For both boys and girls, witnessing marital violence increased the likelihood of violent offending. But for girls, the experience of being abused also predicted future violent offending. Moreover, as previously noted, most of the violent offending by these girls was within the context of domestic violence directed toward family members. The study provides a picture of violent offending among girls that is both predicted and manifested by violence within the home and family. The mother-daughter relationship may be of particular importance in understanding female delinquency and violence. In a study of exposure to parental violence, Moretti, Obsuth, Odgers, and Reebye (2006) found that girls who observed their mothers acting aggressively toward intimate partners were themselves more aggressive in relationships with friends and romantic partners. Along similar lines, Lahey and colleagues (2006) found evidence that self-reported maternal delinquency, defined broadly to include violence perpetration, intentional property damage, and dealing drugs, was associated with heightened conduct problems among their daughters. Giordano and Mohler Rockwell (2001) suggest that mothers of delinquent girls, as well as other women who are involved in their upbringing, may socialize their daughters to stand-up for themselves through violence. The authors interviewed 109 women who were previously incarcerated as juveniles and asked them to reflect on factors that contributed to the development of delinquent behavior and criminality. Several of the women highlighted the impact of their mother’s own criminality and drug use and the lessons learned from female family members who explicitly taught the importance of violence as a problem solution: “I was not a fighter. . . . I got chased home from school . . . and finally my grandmother told me

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that she wasn’t going to let me in the house until I learned to fight my way out of it” (Giordano & Mohler Rockwell, 2001, p. 15). In concert, studies by Moretti and colleagues (2006), Lahey and colleagues (2006), and Giordano and Mohler Rockwell (2001) converge on the notion that girls can learn to use violence both indirectly, by witnessing their mothers’ experiences as a violence victim or perpetrator, or directly, through mothers or mother figures teaching them to use violence as a defense. In consideration of the high rates of physical and sexual abuse among female criminals in general, it is likely that criminal mothers share similar victimization histories as their juvenile daughters. It is not surprising that these women, with extensive histories of being the victim, feel their lessons are warranted and perhaps vital to the survival of their daughters. Historically, girls have often been seen as needing more protection and monitoring than boys. Consistent with this notion, studies have suggested that careful parental monitoring of a girl’s social and academic activities reduces the likelihood of female delinquency (Wong, Slotboom, & Bijleveld, 2010). In a recent study of differences in predictors of assaultive behavior between boys and girls (Park, Morash, & Stevens, 2010), a lack of parental monitoring emerged as a risk factor for girls but not for boys. The authors reviewed the self-reports of over 2,500 youths surveyed as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. They specifically examined the information about delinquency risk factors present when the youths were 12–13 years old and then followed up with information regarding assaultive behavior accounts when the youths were in late adolescence. They found that for both girls and boys, early evidence of hopelessness, school dropouts, and gang association predicted future assaultive behavior. However, two unique predictors of later assaultive behavior in girls reflected home variables. For girls, but not boys, poor parental monitoring and running away before 13 years old were solid predictors of future trouble.

Mental Illness and Emotional Distress Compared to both delinquent males and the general population, females have higher levels of mental health problems. Both women and girl offenders exhibit high rates of conduct disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and PTSD and typically suffer from more than one such disorder (Blackburn, Mullings, Marquart, & Trulson, 2007; Cauffman, Feldman, Waterman, & Steiner, 1998; Cauffman, Lexcen, Goldweber, Shulman, & Grisso, 2007; Dixon, Howie, & Starling, 2004; James & Glaze, 2006; Lederman, Dakof, Larrea, & Li, 2004; McCabe, Lansing, Garland, & Hough, 2002; Teplin, Abram, McClelland, Dulcan, & Mericle, 2002).

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Fazel, Doll, and Langstrom (2008) statistically summarized multiple separate studies of mental illness among incarcerated adolescents and observed that girls had high rates of major depression (29.2%), ADHD (18.5%), and conduct disorder (52.8%). Consistent with the high rates of depression, higher rates of self-harm and attempted suicide are found among delinquent girls. In an investigation of mental illness among a sample of 100 females in juvenile detention, Dixon and colleagues (2004) found that over half (57%) had attempted suicide on multiple occasions. Finally, in line with the previously summarized high levels of physical and sexual abuse, delinquent girls more frequently suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in comparison to delinquent boys and community populations (Abram et al., 2004; Ariga et al., 2008; Cauffman et al., 1998). The high level of mental distress and poor emotional regulation observed among delinquent girls is an importance consideration when viewing violent behavior among female adolescents. Hamerlynck, Doreleijers, Vermeiren, Jansen, and Cohen-Kettenis (2008) gathered information regarding mental pathology correlates of aggressive behavior among a sample of detained adolescent girls. Girls were classified as having no, mild, or high levels of aggression based on frequency of self-report of violent theft, weapon usage, physical violence, sexual assault, or animal cruelty during the previous year. The groups were then compared to each other in terms of clinical diagnoses for various mental conditions, as well as in terms of parent-reported conduct problems. Consistent with other studies of mental illness, there were high levels of emotional and behavioral distress in the sample as a whole. However, levels of pathology varied in line with the levels of aggression. Not surprisingly, the high aggressive group was more likely to receive diagnoses for disruptive behavior disorders. However, high aggressive girls also collectively showed higher levels of suicidality and post-traumatic stress symptoms than did the lower aggression groups. Girls in the high aggressive group fell within the clinically significant range for post-traumatic symptoms at approximately three times the rates for those in the nonaggressive group (39.5% versus 12.9%). Girls in the high aggressive group more frequently reported at least one symptom on a measure of suicidality than did those in the nonaggressive group (59.1% versus 36.4%). Other studies have uncovered a similar linkage between depression and aggressive behavior in delinquent girls (Blackburn et al., 2007; Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2005). The high levels of family disruption as well as high levels of trauma and abuse may be prominent factors that contribute to mental illness among female delinquents. Ariga and colleagues (2008) found that 54.7%

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of female delinquent detainees who met criteria for PTSD reported past trauma sexual abuse, while 45.3% reported being a victim of violence, and 32.8% reported childhood maltreatment. Similarly, Blackburn and colleagues (2007) found sexual maltreatment to be significantly related to levels of depression. There is also evidence of a higher rate of familial mental health among females compared to males, potentially adding to the milieu of mental health problems through biological and environmental influences (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Moffitt & Caspi, 2001). Individual factors such as impulsivity, emotion regulation, and personality play a part in the development of violent behavior. However, it is likely that a portion of these young women are externalizing feelings associated with traumatic personal histories of victimization and tough family environments.

Substance Abuse One plausible mechanism for linking prior victimization, difficult family circumstances, and high mental illness with violent behavior in delinquent girls is substance abuse. Arguably, the escape provided by drugs serves to assuage feelings of pain associated with troubled histories while leading girls to greater criminal involvement. There is strong evidence that substance usage by female delinquents is linked to aggressive and violent behavior. A recent national probability survey of 33,091 female adolescents (SAMHSA, 2009) queried girls about their engagements in individual fights, groups fights, or intentional attacks on others, as well as their use of alcohol and illicit drugs during the previous year. Results, depicted in Figure 11.2, indicated that fighting and substance use were related: Girls who engaged in violent delinquent behaviors were significantly more likely to report binge drinking (15.1% vs. 6.9%), marijuana use (11.4% vs. 4.1%), and use of other illicit drugs (9.2% vs. 3.2%) than were girls who reported no violent activity. Moreover, a greater variety of violent behaviors was associated with increased likelihood of substance usage. Over one-fourth of the girls who reported three or more types of violent behaviors engaged in binge drinking, in contrast to approximately 6% of the girls who did not engage in violent actions. Similar trends are found in incarcerated female juvenile populations. Hamerlynck and colleagues (2008) interviewed 216 Dutch incarcerated adolescent females regarding aggressive activities (e.g., cruelty to animals, fighting) and evaluated the girls for mental health disorders including substance abuse and dependence. Similar to the SAMHSA (2009) findings, the mildly and severely aggressive girls also had higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse and dependence than those reporting no aggressive activity.

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Figure 11.2â•… Past month substance use among females ages 12 to 17, by number of types of violent behaviors,* 2006 to 2008. * Violent behavior is defined as getting into a serious fight at school or work, participating in a group-against-group fight, or attacking others with the intent to seriously hurt them. ** Binge alcohol use is defined as drinking five or more drinks on the same occasion (i.e., at the same time or within a couple of hours of each other) on at least 1 day in the past 30 days. *** Includes cocaine (including crack), inhalants, hallucinogens, heroin, or prescriptiontype drugs used nonmedically. Source: 2006 to 2008 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (SAMHSA, 2009).

These results echo those reported by the study by Dixon and colleagues (2004) of female juvenile offenders, of whom over 70% were detained for violent crimes. Nearly all of the girls in the sample of offenders (85%) met criteria for a current substance abuse disorder. Given this evidence of concomitant high levels of substance usage and delinquency in girls, the question arises whether girls’ all-too-frequent poor family functioning and mental health problems lead to substance abuse. Gavazzi, Lim, Yarcheck, Bostic, & Scheer (2008) investigated the relationship between mental health, family functioning, and substance usage in a survey of 2,646 court-involved youths (1,009 females) using an online data collection instrument. Mental health was measured using self-reports

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of internalizing (e.g., Do you ever feel sad, moody, or depressed?) and externalizing items (e.g., Do you ever have difficulty controlling your anger?). Other self-report items queried usage of substances as well as impressions of family conflict. The study specifically sought to untangle the relationship among risk variables for substance usage: For delinquent youths, does family disruption lead to mental illness that, in turn, leads to substance problems, or does family disruption simultaneously lead to both substance problems and mental distress? The authors found support for the latter notion. For both boys and girls, disrupted family processes were associated with higher levels of both mental health problems and substance disorders. In a similar study, Lennings, Kenny, Howard, Arcuri, and Mackdacy (2007) summarized data from seven studies of female Australian juvenile delinquent populations and sought to determine likely causal directions between family dysfunction, mental illness, and substance abuse. In contrast to the Gavazzi and colleagues (2008) study, they found that while severity of mental illness predicted levels of substance abuse, impaired family functioning was related to substance abuse indirectly through the mediating influence of associated poor mental health. The different findings in these two studies underscore the difficulty of untangling the direction of effects among the many adversities experienced by delinquent girls. Nonetheless, both studies converge on the conclusion that family dysfunction and poor mental health relate, either directly or indirectly, to elevated levels of substance usage. The role of previous victimization is plausibly another factor that may connect substance abuse and offending among delinquent girls. Neff and Waite (2007) examined risk factors, including victimization by a family member or an outsider, for substance abuse in a population of 5,000 incarcerated juveniles (11% females) who were admitted to the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice between 1997 and 2003. Both boys and girls reported high levels of drug use, but females reported significantly more frequent usage of alcohol, cocaine, crack, stimulants, and hallucinogen. Females also reported starting to use alcohol and marijuana, as well as harder drugs such as crack and cocaine, at an earlier age than did the boys. Neff and Waite examined various predictors of substance abuse to determine whether there were gender differences in patterns of predicting abuse from risk factors. Generally, they found similar profiles between the boys and girls in terms of the ways in which risk factors were associated with varying types of substance abuse. However, previous victimization served as a significant predictor of early drug use in female, but not male, offenders, implying that girls who experience victimization may be

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particularly vulnerable to early experiences of substance problems. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that victimized girls may early on seek relief through mind- and mood-altering substances.

Promising Intervention for Violent and Aggressive Girls Delinquent girls who engage in aggressive or violent behavior are a relatively small portion of the larger body of youths involved in delinquent activity. However, the adversities and challenges associated with this group are substantial. Gender-specific intervention has been highlighted by a number of scholars (Chesney-Lind, 1997; Covington & Bloom, 2006; Sorbello, Eccleston, Ward, & Jones, 2002) who argue against an assumption that effective treatment and prevention programs designed for boys automatically transfer to girls. Intervention with girls, therefore, requires attention to the contexts, communication patterns, and risk factors that are prevalent among delinquent and violent girls. Accordingly, gendersensitive programs use a treatment lens that includes skills and support for dealing with victimization, poor family functioning, emotional distress, and substance usage, among other risk factors. We highlight two programs that address such features and have undergone scientific inquiry regarding effectiveness. The first program is a preventive intervention designed to be conducted in a community setting with young at-risk girls, while the second addresses needs of older girls after they have become seriously involved in criminal activity.

SNAP-Girls Connection The SNAP-Girls Connection program (SNAP-GC; Pepler et al., 2010), formerly the Earlscourt Girls Connection (Pepler, Walsh, & Levene, 2004; Walsh, Pepler, & Levene, 2002) is a community-based program designed to treat aggressive and antisocial young girls under the age of 12. The program is structured to aid at-risk youths and families to “Stop Now and Plan.” The program draws from an earlier cognitive-behavioral program that was found to be effective for boys (Augimeri, Farrington, Koegl, & Day, 2007), and places emphasis on the role of individual, familial, and community risk factors in shaping a girl’s development. The SNAPGC program evolved based on clinical observations that the program as designed for boys was not sufficiently meeting the needs of young at-risk girls. Therefore, as a gender-sensitive adaptation of the program, SNAPGC focused on enhancing health, family, and peer relationships (Pepler et al., 2010).

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The SNAP-GC program is composed of three components intended for girls ages 6–12. The first component is a 12-session after-school group, during which the girls are taught cognitive behavioral strategies, for managing impulsivity and anger, and social problem-solving skills. The second component is a concurrent 12-session parenting group to provide personal support, strategies for anger management, and skills in dealing with problem behaviors of their daughters. During the final component, entitled GGUH (Girls Growing Up Healthy), the mothers and daughters join in an 8-week group (Pepler et al., 2004). The GGUH group begins once the mothers and daughters complete their separate programs. Thereby, the groups become a place where the pairs can practice the previously learned skills and develop stronger relationships. The SNAP-GC activities are based on cognitive-behavioral theory and designed to help the girls develop accurate interpretations of and appropriate responses to social interactions (Walsh et al., 2002). During the girls’ group component, the participants are taught strategies such as finding another person to interact with or asking for help. Girls are also taught to use specific positive self-statements when they find themselves in the face of a stressor, or a “trigger.” Levene, Walsh, Augimeri, and Pepler (2004) reported that the most common type of trigger among this population tends to concern the girls’ appearance (e.g., being called ugly). In a specific session designed to deal with these triggers, the girls are taught to recognize the thoughts and feelings that precede aggression through the use of a cartoon depicting a group of girls whispering with empty thought bubbles above their heads. The girls are directed to imagine themselves being left out of the group, which the authors report stirs up and reveals the negative distortions that lead to the girls’ aggressive behavior. Similarly, as a way to capture the pattern of the girls’ distortions or triggers and responses to them, the girls are asked to keep a record of any problems (i.e., aggressive interactions) they encounter in a “Hassle Log.” Within the group, the girls take turns reviewing problems from the Hassel Log that arose since the previous session. The group brainstorms ideas for solving each individual girl’s problems. Each girl decides which idea would work best and then practices the new solution through a role-play with another girl. An early evaluation of the first four years of the program concluded that the intervention was effective in reducing problem behaviors while promoting prosocial behaviors (Walsh et al., 2002; Pepler et al., 2004). The characteristics of girls in the study resonate with many of the previously described adversities among typical female juvenile offenders. A substantial portion of mothers reported that their daughters had clinically significant mental health problems. Specifically, almost half (42%)

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of parents reported their daughters to be in the clinical range for depression and anxiety problems. A majority of parents (59%) also reported that their daughters had clinically significant social problems. Several parents also reported their children experienced significant environmental adversities: 7% of girls had stayed overnight in foster care or group home and 16% of parents had been charged or arrested for a crime (Pepler et al., 2004). Finally, some parents reported that their daughters were victims of physical (10%) and sexual abuse (8%) (Walsh et al., 2002). Though these percentages of victimization are lower than what would be expected given the high proportions of these issues observed in studies with similar populations, it is possible that parents underreported such incidents or were not aware of them at the time of questioning. This combination of risk factors in a sample of young girls under 12 years old makes them likely candidates for future problems and a good target for intervention. Data was collected through parent reports of their daughters’ behavior at three time points: prior to the intervention (n 5 98), at 6 months (n 5 72), and 12 months (n 5 58). Results indicated significant decreases in parent-reported cruelty, bullying, and physical attacks on people, with a moderate effect (d 5 .42)1 evident at 6 months on an overall externalizing behavior score. A reduction of symptoms of conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder was reported at both follow-up time points. The girls’ social relationships also were enhanced. Peer and adult relations were strengthened over time with large effects apparent at 6 months (d 5 .72) and moderate effects at 12 months (d 5 .51). In a secondary report of the data, Pepler and colleagues (2004) presented information showing that the girls demonstrated less angry and resentful behavior, temper tantrums, and crankiness at follow-up assessments. These encouraging results were followed by a study of the first two components of SNAP-GC, the girls’ group and the parents’ group. Pepler and colleagues (2010) built on the previous research by adding a wait-list control group and measures from the participating girls and their teachers. The sample was comprised of 80 girls (ages 5–11) who were referred due to problematic behaviors and admitted into the program during an 18-month period. Participants were randomly assigned to treatment (n 5 45) and wait-list (n 5 35) groups after the sample had been stratified to ensure similar age and severity of behavior. Behavior change was assessed through both parent and teacher reports at three time points. A well-standardized parent report of child behavior (Child Behavior Check List; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) assessed changes in internalizing symptoms (e.g., anxiety, depression, physical complaints), externalizing symptoms (e.g., rule breaking, aggression, inattention), and social problems, as well as the

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girls’ likely diagnosis of either conduct disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An alternate version of the measure that is designed for teacher report (Achenbach, 1991) assessed similar constructs within the school context. Additionally, the authors collected information regarding the changes in parenting effectiveness, as assessed by both the parent and participating girl. Parent reports indicated that after treatment the girls demonstrated lower levels of internalizing symptoms, externalizing behavior, social problems, and clinical diagnoses compared to the wait-list group, while controlling for levels observed at the initial assessment. These differences were maintained six months after treatment. However, teachers did not report observing significant differences between groups. The authors suggested that teachers may not be as sensitive to behavior change as parents and that their perceptions of aggressive girls may take more time to change. Further, girls may have a harder time generalizing their behavior change from the clinical and family setting to the school setting. Changes in parenting skills were assessed by the parent report of their own effectiveness coupled with the daughter report of the parents’ nurturance, monitoring, and rejection. Most parents in the intervention perceived that they became more effective over the course of the intervention; however, these perceived improvements, with one exception, did not substantially differ from perceived changes of the parents in the waiting list. A clearer pattern of difference emerged with the report from the girls themselves. In comparison to wait-list participants, the girls who received the SNAP-GC intervention were less likely to rate their mothers as being angry, yelling, or threatening physical violence. Although the authors did not evaluate the mediating effects of these changes in parenting skills, it is plausible that they served to support the observed positive behavioral changes.

Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care SNAP-GC is geared toward prevention of delinquency in girls by early intervention. However, for girls who continue on a path of delinquency and become involved in the juvenile justice system, more intensive intervention is needed. A recent exemplary intervention for justice-involved youths is the Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) program (Chamberlain & Reid, 1998; Eddy & Chamberlain, 2000). Although the intervention was originally validated with boys, a recent gender-specific adaptation of the program has been shown to be highly effective with seriously delinquent girls (Chamberlain, 2003; Chamberlain, Leve, &

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DeGarmo, 2007; Leve, Chamberlain, & Reid, 2005; Leve, Fisher, & Chamberlain, 2009). The adaptation retains elements of the original version for boys but adds a gender-sensitive focus on the impact of abuse and trauma, poor emotional regulation, and social aggression. The program is geared to court-referred girls who temporarily live in the home of a trained foster parent as an alternative to residential intervention that would remove her from home and community. MTFC specifically addresses delinquent girls’ history of abuse and poorly functioning families by intervening with the family while the girls receive individual therapy in their foster home. MTFC aims to create “supports and opportunities for children and adolescents so they can have a successful community living experience” (Chamberlain, 2003, p. 303) and to work with the girls’ families to improve the parenting and home environment once they leave MTFC. The intervention consists of an average six-month stay in a certified and supervised therapeutic foster home. Case supervisors have daily phone conferences with foster parents to check on the girls’ progress and the foster parents’ stress level. Supervisors also monitor the girls’ school attendance, performance, and homework completion. Foster parents implement a behavioral program to reinforce the girls’ strengths and to set clear boundaries and consequences for problem behavior, such as aggression. Foster parents also attend a weekly foster parent training, supervision, and general support group. In order to assure continuity after girls leave their foster home, biological parents or previous guardians participate in family therapy with their daughters. In a presentation of the benefits of MTFC, Saldana and Buchanan (2010) described the case of a young girl, Olivia, who initially asserted that she was interested only in smoking marijuana and that she enjoyed the risk of hiding her use from her caregivers. After six months of therapy, however, Olivia realized that she wasn’t able to meet her goals because of her drug use. She wanted to change her identity from being a “pothead” to an aspiring architect. Having made such a decision, Olivia needed real skills for implementing change. Accordingly, she and her therapist videotaped role plays of risky drug scenarios and practiced how to problem solve in those situations. Her skills coach helped Olivia to come up with replacement behaviors as alternatives to smoking pot and to increase involvement in prosocial activities. As her skills coach was working with Olivia to realistically plan for her future as an architect, the family therapist worked with Olivia’s parents on how to reinforce prosocial activities, increase Olivia’s supervision, and set consequences for using drugs. Between 1997 and 2002, the Oregon juvenile court system teamed with researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center to implement

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a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of MTFC in female juvenile populations (Leve et al., 2005). Judges referred 103 girls, ages 15–19, to out-of-home care. These girls were then randomly assigned to either MTFC (n 5 37) or a community-based group home program (n 5 44). The community group home intervention received by the control group was the typical services offered for girls referred by presiding judges for out-of-home care. The referred girls had substantial justice involvement, with a lifetime average of nearly 12 criminal referrals; nearly three-fourths of the girls had at least one prior felony. Based on data collected in an earlier study that included a large portion of the Leve and colleagues (2005) sample (Chamberlain, 2003), several risk factors among the girls resonate with risks previously described in this chapter. Nearly three-fourths of the girls had at least one parent convicted of a crime, and approximately 66% and 72%, respectively, had records of documented physical or sexual abuse. Consistent with this picture of likely problematic family functioning, over 90% of the girls had previously run away from home at least once. Over 80% were characterized as heavy drug or alcohol users. Notably, for each of these risk factors, girls evidenced higher levels of adversity than did the justice-referred boys. Twelve months after program entry, the girls placed in MTFC had significantly lower caregiver reports of delinquent acts and problem behavior than did those who were placed in the usual alternative home care (Leve et al., 2005). Of central importance to this population, intervention girls spent fewer days in a locked setting than did those from the control condition (22 versus 56 days) and had fewer parent-reported delinquent behaviors. While there was a trend for criminal referrals to decline over the period, differences were not significant. Differences were not apparent regarding the girls’ self-reported delinquent acts. In a subsequent follow-up of the girls in the Leve and colleagues (2005) study, Chamberlain and colleagues (2007) found that effects were well maintained two years after intervention. The follow-up study used a statistical modeling analysis that enabled detection of changes for individual trajectories over the course of the two-year period. Results indicated that girls in the MTFC program had greater reductions in delinquency over the two-year period, as indicated by fewer days in locked settings, fewer criminal referrals, and the self-reports of delinquent activities (d 5 .65) The authors were also able to model the differences in the rates of change in delinquency for both groups. Results indicated that while both groups over time showed a decline in delinquent activities, the rate of the reduction for the girls in the MTFC intervention was significantly sharper. Thus, the treated girls showed both a greater amount of change in delinquency as well as a faster pace of improvement.

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Conclusion A closer look at girls involved in justice systems reveals that as a group, they experience numerous adversities and roadblocks on the way to adulthood. The frequently fractured family relationships mean that these girls may not receive sufficient warmth and affection or thoughtful parental supervision. Indeed, in many cases, the girls may experience victimization from trusted family members or friends that leads to disenfranchisement and a mistrust of relationships. Numerous mental health problems are common. These adversities work in tandem, either as a cause or correlate of delinquency, and many such girls seek the escape and comfort provided by unhealthy substance usage, which compounds the existing problems. However, the growing body of strong scholarship regarding delinquent girls is promising and offers a roadmap for innovative and effective treatments. Like the two programs described in this chapter, such treatment specifically attends to possible historical victimization, recognizes and treats difficulties with interpersonal relationships, provides opportunities to form healthy family relationships, and enables skills for desisting from excessive alcohol and drug usage. While such treatment does not, and maybe should not, lead to young women becoming “sugar and spice,” it can lead to a life for girls, their family, and the community that holds promise for “all things nice.”

Note 1. The symbol d represents the standardized mean difference between two measures.

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Belknap, J., & Holsinger, K. (2006). The gendered nature of risk factors for delinquency. Feminist Criminology, 1, 48–71. Blackburn, A. G., Mullings, J. L., Marquart, J. W., & Trulson, C. R. (2007). The next generation of prisoners: Toward an understanding of violent institutionalized delinquents. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 5, 35–56. Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cauffman, E., Feldman, S. S., Waterman, J., & Steiner, H. (1998). Posttraumatic stress disorder among female juvenile offenders. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 37, 1209–1216. Cauffman, E., Lexcen, F. J., Goldweber, A., Shulman, E. P., & Grisso, T. (2007). Gender differences in mental health symptoms among delinquent and community youth. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 5, 287–307. Chamberlain, P. (2003). The Oregon multidimensional treatment foster care model: Features, outcomes, and progress in dissemination. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 10, 303–312. Chamberlain, P., Leve, L. D., & DeGarmo, D. S. (2007). Multidimensional treatment foster care for girls in the juvenile justice system: Two-year follow-up of a randomized clinical trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 75, 187–193. Chamberlain, P., & Reid, J. (1998). Comparison of two community alternatives to incarceration for chronic juvenile offenders. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 624–633. Chesney-Lind, M. (1997). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Covington, S., & Bloom, B. (2006). Gender responsive treatment and services in correctional settings. Women and Therapy, 29, 9–33. Daigle, L. E., Cullen, F. T., & Wright, J. P. (2007). Gender differences in the predictors of juvenile delinquency: Assessing the generality-specificity debate. Journal of Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 5, 254–286. Dixon, A., Howie, P., & Starling, J. (2004). Psychopathology in female juvenile offenders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45, 1150–1158. Donnellan, M. B., Trzesniewski, K. H., Robins, R. W., Moffitt, T. E., & Caspi, A. (2005). Low self-esteem is related to aggression, antisocial behavior, and delinquency. Psychological Science, 16, 328–335. Eddy, J. M., & Chamberlain, P. (2000). Family management and deviant peer association as mediators: Impact of treatment condition on youth antisocial behaviors. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 68, 857–863. Fazel, S., Doll, H., & Langstrom, N. (2008). Mental disorders among adolescents in juvenile detention and correctional facilities: A systematic review and metaregression analysis of 25 surveys. Journal of the American Academy of Adolescent Child Psychiatry, 47, 1010–1019.

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Moffitt, T. E., & Caspi, A. (2001). Childhood predictors differentiate life-course persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial pathways among males and females. Development and Psychopathology, 13, 355–375. Moretti, M. M., Obsuth, I., Odgers, C. L., & Reebye, P. (2006). Exposure to maternal vs. paternal violence, PTSD, and agression in adolescent girls and boys. Agressive Behavior, 32, 385–395. Neff, J., & Waite, D. (2007). Male versus female substance abuse patterns among incarcerated juvenile offenders: Comparing strain and social learning variables. Justice Quarterly, 24, 106–132. Odgers, C. L., Moretti, M. M., Burnette, M. L., Chauhan, P., Waite, D., & Reppucci, N. D. (2007). A latent variable modeling approach to identifying subtypes of serious and violent female juvenile offenders. Agressive Behavior, 33, 1–14. Park, S., Morash, M., & Stevens, T. (2010). Gender differences in predictors of assaultive behavior in late adolescence. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 8, 314–331. Pepler, D. J., Walsh, M. M., and Levene, K. S. (2004). Intervention for aggressive girls: Tailoring and measuring the fit. In M. M. Moretti, C. L. Odgers, & M. A. Jackson (Eds.), Girls and aggression: Contributing factors and intervention principles (pp. 131–145). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Pepler, D. J., Walsh, M., Yuile, A., Levene, K., Jiang, D., Vaughan, A., & Webber, J. (2010). Bridging the gender gap: Interventions with aggressive girls and their parents. Prevention Science, 11, 229–238. Puzzanchera, C., Adams, B., & Sickmund, M. (2010). Juvenile court statistics 2006–2007. Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice. Retrieved on October 15, 2010, from http://www.ncjjservehttp.org/ncjjwebsite/pdf /jcsreports/jcs2007.pdf. Puzzanchera, C., & Kang, W. (2008). Juvenile Court Statistics Databook. Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice. Retrieved on October 15, 2010, from http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/jcsdb/asp/demo.asp. Roe-Sepowitz, D. E. (2009). Comparing male and female juveniles charged with homicide: Child maltreatment, substance abuse, and crime details. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 24, 601–617. Saldana, L., & Buchanan, R. (2010, April). Multidimensional treatment foster care: What’s new in MTFC? Symposium conducted in Boulder, CO. Snyder, H. N., & Sickmund, M. (2006). Juvenile offenders and victims: 2006 National Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Retrieved on October 15, 2010, from http://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/nr2006/. Snyder H. N., Sickmund, M., & Poe-Yamagata, E. (1996). Juvenile offenders and victims: 1996 update on violence. Pittsburg, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice. Retrieved on October 15, 2010, from http://www.ncjrs.gov /pdffiles/90995.pdf. Sorbello, L., Eccleston, L., Ward, T., & Jones, R. (2002). Treatment needs of female offenders: A review. Australian Psychologist, 37, 198–205.

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Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). (2009). The NSDUH report: Violent behaviors among adolescent females. Rockville, MD: Office of Applied Studies. Retrieved on October 25, 2010, from http://www .oas.samhsa.gov/2k9/171/171FemaleViolence.htm. Teplin, L. A., Abram, K. M., McClelland, G. M., Dulcan, M. K., & Mericle, A. A. (2002). Psychiatric disorders in youth in juvenile detention. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 1133–1143. Walsh, M. M., Pepler, D. J., and Levene, K. S. (2002). A model intervention for girls with disruptive behavior problems: The Earlscourt Girls Connection. Canadian Journal of Counseling, 36, 297–311. Wong, T. M. L., Slotboom, A., Bijleveld, C. J. H. (2010). Risk factors for delinquency in adolescent and young adult females: A European review. European Journal of Criminology, 7, 266–284.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Broadening the Frame of V↜iolence Prevention through the Promotion of Youth Community Engagement Jessica J. Collura, Brian D. Christens, and Shepherd Zeldin

Youth violence surged to unprecedented levels during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since the mid-1990s, there have been promising signs that it is declining, with national arrest records, victimization data, and hospital emergency room records all showing downward trends (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). Despite this, youth violence remains a pressing issue in the United States. As of 2007, homicide was still the second-leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 10 and 24 and the leading cause of death among African American youths (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). Youths ages 15–24 are still at the greatest risk of being both a victim and perpetrator of homicide. In addition, 19.9% of all high school students have reported being bullied on school property in the past 12 months (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). In this chapter, we argue that the policy and programmatic responses aimed at youth violence reduction should be broadened to include a focus on youth agency and transactional interventions. We begin by Â�examining common misperceptions about youths and youth violence that often underlie inadequate responses. Next, we provide a conceptual rubric

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for thinking about youth violence reduction strategies. This rubric has two primary dimensions: (a) orientations to youth violence prevention and (b) ecological levels of intervention. Orientations to youth violence prevention can be conceptualized as a spectrum from control to prevention to agency approaches. The second dimension, ecological levels of intervention, can be understood according to the following categories: individual-level interventions, environment or setting-level interventions, and transactional interventions. We conclude with examples of program models that illustrate our central argument: Youth violence reduction strategies need to be broadened to include more transactional and agencyoriented approaches. The common factor between these approaches is youth community engagement.

Misconceptions of Youth and Violence There are several prevalent misconceptions about young people and violence. These fallacious beliefs not only distance youths from opportunities to engage meaningfully in their communities but also lead to misguided policies and programs. Public misunderstandings of youths and violence often fuel punitive responses to crime. An example of this is the implementation of policies that permit young people to be tried and prosecuted as adults, in spite of substantial evidence demonstrating that youths prosecuted in adult courts have higher recidivism rates than those prosecuted in juvenile courts (Bishop, 2006; Soler, 2001). Acknowledging the discrepancies between public beliefs and the evidence on youths and violence is key to creating appropriate interventions designed to reduce youth violence. The general public perceives adolescence as a tumultuous and dangerous developmental stage. This notion originated in G. Stanley Hall’s seminal work, which characterized adolescence as a period of “storm and stress” (Lerner, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003). Although this view is largely unsupported by contemporary research, negative stereotypes about adolescents continue to permeate American society. To illustrate, one recent study found that only 16% of a nationwide sample of adults believed that young people under the age of 30 share most of their moral or ethical values (Bostrom, 2000). There are also widespread beliefs that youths are uninterested in and incapable of contributing to their communities. Scales and colleagues (2001) found that when adults assess the importance of 19 possible actions that can be taken on behalf of youths, 2 of the least frequent responses were to “seek young people’s opinions when making decisions that affect them” and to

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“give young people lots of opportunities to make their communities better places.” Even in youth-serving organizations, adults are ambivalent about young people’s abilities to participate in decision making and action (Costello, Toles, Spielberger, & Wynn, 2000). These public assumptions are not supported by research. For example, almost two-thirds of a national sample of youths reported that it is very important to give back to their communities (Peter Hart Research Associates, 1998). Further, youths have the competency to contribute. Many young people have a high level of decision-making competence by the age of 15 and are capable of contributing (Zeldin, 2004). This growing body of research suggests that youths are meaningfully contributing to their communities (Christens & Zeldin, in press), from participating on boards with elected officials (Zeldin, Petrokubi, & MacNeil, 2007) to organizing efforts for community change (Christens & Dolan, in press; Kirshner, 2009). In addition to the misconceptions about youths, research also suggests that adults tend to overestimate or exaggerate the rate of youth violence (Gilliam & Bales, 2001). For example, many parents view America’s schools as dangerous and unsafe, but these fears are inconsistent with the facts regarding school violence. Youths are actually safer in schools compared to most other settings where they spend time (Cornell, 2006; Goldstein & Conoley, 2004), and recent statistics demonstrate that school violence has actually been on the decline (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). Studies indicate that the public also often equates youth crime with race, perceiving young African American and Hispanic men as being less law abiding and more apt to commit violent crimes (Gilliam, 1998; Males, 1999). However, when considered in isolation from other demographics, racial and ethnic characteristics are not indicative of an adolescent’s propensity for engaging in violence (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). Another common misconception is that violence is a premeditated act directed toward innocent bystanders, when in fact research has long demonstrated the opposite is true; the majority of violent crimes occur between friends and acquaintances or within families (Basile, Chen, Black, & Saltzman, 2007; Hepburn, 1973; Prothrow-Stith, 1987).

Orientations to Youth Violence Reduction Orientations that underlie public responses to youth violence reduction can be thought of as a spectrum from control to prevention to agency (Figure 12.1). The first orientation is control, the belief that the public should reduce youth violence through measures such as surveillance,

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Figure 12.1╅ Broadening the frame: Moving from individual-level and controlling strategies to transactional and agency-oriented strategies for reducing€youth violence.

detainment, and punishment. The underlying assumption is that by controlling young people, society can reduce their participation in Â�undesirable activities. A second orientation to youth violence is prevention, which focuses on implementing interventions before significant problems occur. Prevention strategies range from public education campaigns to targeted, intensive therapy for youths who repeatedly engage in delinquent behavior. The third orientation, and we argue the most frequently overlooked, is that of youth agency. Youth agency Â�recognizes that all youths are capable of contributing to their environments in positive ways and, therefore, emphasizes approaches that promote community engagement. Control. The United States relies primarily on the juvenile justice system—including police and courts—to control young people through both the threat and enactment of punishment. This system attempts to deter youths from participating in illegal activities through the use of punitive measures, including surveillance and incarceration. Given the prevalent view of youth as a developmental period of storm and stress and youth violence as an inevitable societal problem, it is not surprising that the dominant policy response has been the adoption of such punitive measures. It is significant to note that the juvenile justice system attempts to implement evidence-based initiatives, such as community-based alternatives to secure confinements. However, these practices are not consistently evident because the justice system is responsible for administering the

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harsh crime policies adopted in legislatures (Zeldin, 2004). Indeed, in the past 30 years, state legislatures have instituted multiple reforms that seek to punish and control young offenders (Bishop, 2006). Examples of such reforms include: the expansion of courts’ sentencing authority in order to permit certain sentences to extend into the adult years, the amendment of juvenile codes to endorse the goals of punishment and protection of public safety, and the removal of confidential protections of juvenile court records (Bishop, 2006; Soler, 2001). Equally concerning is the fact that the juvenile justice system seems to have adopted the public’s belief that the primary perpetrators of youth violence are African American and Hispanic men (Gilliam & Bales, 2001). Although there is no racial difference in young people’s self-reported rates of violent behavior, the arrest rates by race differ greatly (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). This lack of consistency and fairness toward youths of color is a contributing factor to repeated mistreatment in the system. Prevent. Public health professionals, along with social workers and community development professionals, have long advocated for, and advanced, prevention strategies as a means to reduce youth violence. Prevention strategies are classified into three categories: primary, secondary, and tertiary (Turnock, 2001). Primary prevention seeks to identify the risk factors associated with violence and to educate the general population on practical solutions. An example of primary prevention to reduce youth violence is a public information campaign that raises awareness about the dangers associated with keeping firearms in the home. Secondary prevention focuses on individuals who are at risk or are beginning to engage in delinquent behavior. Programs for secondary prevention of delinquent behavior often seek to inoculate youths against social problems through training sessions in decision making, impulse control, and anger management (Botvin, Griffin, & Nichols, 2006). Finally, tertiary prevention targets individuals who are engaged in a cycle of violent or delinquent behavior. Strategies for the reduction of youth violence range from intensive individual and family counseling to enrollment in special schools. While prevention orientations are commendable for being proactive rather than reactive, there are still limitations. Namely, this approach primarily focuses on deterring young people from risky and delinquent behavior rather than seeking to meet the fundamental developmental needs of all young people. By focusing solely on preventing problems, the prevention approach unintentionally reinforces inaccurate societal perceptions of adolescents. This conception of youths as potential victims and problems has been recently countered by accounts of youths as assets.

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Agency. The agency orientation to violence reduction is based on the Â� principles of positive youth development (PYD). PYD is both a theory and practice that emphasizes “the growing capacity of a young person to understand and act on the environment” (Hamilton & Hamilton, 2004, p. 3). A key tenet of PYD is that youths are resources to be nurtured, not problems to be solved (Damon, 2004). This more holistic approach focuses on not just preventing problems but also building on youth strengths. A central component of PYD theory and practice is youth agency, the recognition that youths are actors in their own development and are significant resources for creating the contexts and communities that promote positive development (Benson, Scales, Hamilton, & Sesma, 2006). An agency orientation, as theorized in PYD, emphasizes the need to engage youths in their communities. There are a range of opportunities through which youths can participate in community decision making and action. Examples include engaging young people on the boards of youthserving agencies, on youth councils that advise elected officials, on community coalitions, or in community-organizing efforts. Agency-oriented approaches integrate young people into the “adult world” and give them a voice in the matters and policies that impact their lives. In short, youth agency recognizes that young people can and should inform the settings that in turn impact their development. Unfortunately, youth agency is not supported by dominant policies or institutional practices in the United States. This is especially true of initiatives aimed at reducing youth violence. As Peterson, Dolan, and Hanft (2010) note, the participation “of students in the identification and implementation of violence prevention programs is almost completely ignored in the literature of violence prevention” (p. 236). Although some public agencies are beginning to create incentives for youth engagement in community decision making, there still remains little institutionalized support at the national or state level (Forum for Youth Investment, 2002).

Ecology of Interventions for Reducing Youth Violence As with the orientations presented in the previous section, the Â�concept of ecology provides a conceptual framework for making distinctions between different approaches to youth violence reduction. For the purposes of this analysis, we draw on Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) conception of the human ecological environment as “a nested arrangement of structures each contained within the next” (p. 514). In a human ecological perspective, individuals are viewed in the context of their environments, similar to biology’s understanding of organisms as components of their

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ecosystems. We conceptually identify three categories of intervention for youth violence reduction that are focused on different components of an ecological system: (a) interventions that emphasize the choices, propensities, responsibilities, and capabilities of individuals; (b) interventions that emphasize the role of settings and environmental factors in constraining or facilitating the occurrence of crime; and (c) interventions that emphasize activities or processes that simultaneously alter individuals and their ecological environments. Inherent in each type of intervention approach is an understanding of the etiology of youth violence. That is, by choosing an intervention approach, one makes a tacit statement about one’s own attributions of responsibility for the occurrence of violence. Individual-level interventions. Individual-level interventions emphasize the choices, propensities, responsibilities, and capabilities of individuals. Â�Individual-level strategies are diverse. Some are control focused, Â�others are focused on prevention, and still others focus on youth agency (see Figure 12.1). At the control end of the spectrum are policies and programs that seek to reduce violence by creating disincentives for individuals to engage in violent behaviors. Most of the functions of systems of juvenile justice can be characterized as individual-level, control-oriented interventions. In these interventions, individuals who commit violent acts are held responsible and punished according to the severity of the crime. The threat that this individual poses to society is temporarily removed while the Â�individual is incarcerated. Alongside the punitive functions of this system, some attempts are made during and after incarceration to rehabilitate the individual and to create a system of stronger disincentives for relapses of violent behavior. Although this system represents the mainstream of intervention for reducing youth violence, there is little evidence to support its effectiveness (Pratt, 2008). In the middle of the spectrum lie individual-level approaches to prevention that seek to reduce the susceptibility of individuals to engage in violence and other problem behaviors. This often takes the form of schoolbased programs that seek to inform young people of the risks and consequences of engaging in these behaviors, train young people in alternative strategies, or develop a set of competencies that are believed to make individuals less susceptible to engaging in drug abuse, gang membership, or violence. A fundamental premise of such programs is that individuals can be inoculated from such susceptibilities. For example, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the Department of Justice began implementing a Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program. GREAT’s objective is “an immunization against delinquency, violence, and gang

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membership” (Department of Justice, 2010). Claims are often made that these programmatic forms of intervention represent “evidence-based” effective practice. However, the evaluations that lead to these claims are frequently plagued by faulty evaluation practices (Gorman, Conde, & Huber, 2007) and conflicts of interest in which the creators of the program are also conducting the evaluation (Gorman & Conde, 2007). At the agency end of the spectrum are youth development programs that seek to build developmental assets of young people (top right in Figure 12.1). These programs do not focus on deficits or risks of problem behaviors like violence. Instead, they focus on building what Lerner and colleagues (2005) call the five C’s of positive youth development: competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring. In a review of youth development programs, Roth and Brooks-Gunn (2003) identify the goals and practices of youth-serving organizations and development programs. These include preventing problem behaviors but also include providing a supportive and empowering environment, family and community connections, and expectations for positive behavior. Hence, the goals of youth development programs extend well beyond avoiding violence into concepts like “thriving” and—at an aggregate level—development of a civil society (Lerner, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003). The notion, Â�substantiated by an emerging body of research is that the promotion of positive youth development outcomes decreases the likelihood of problem behaviors (Benson, Scales, Hamilton, & Sesma, 2006). Environment or setting-level interventions. Environment or setting-level interventions begin with the idea that while individuals may have propensities toward certain types of behaviors, some features of environments are conducive to these behaviors while other features of environments are inhibitive or preventive. This perspective draws on Lewin’s (1935) dynamic theory of personality, which posits that behavior can best be understood as a function of a person’s characteristics and their environment (B  f [P, E]). Yet the modern Western proclivity to attribute responsibility to individuals can stand in the way of implementing interventions that are focused on changing settings and environments rather than changing individuals. This individualist bias is evidenced in much social theory and practice. For example, consider the crime displacement perspective on violence, which argues that if opportunities to commit crime are reduced in one location, perpetrators will simply go elsewhere in search of opportunities to commit crime. The assumption inherent in this view is that criminality is a personal characteristic rather than an interactive function of persons and environments. In reality, there is very little evidence that crime displacement occurs (Weisburd et al., 2006), but the persistence of public belief

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in crime displacement illustrates the difficulty in overcoming individualist bias and moving beyond individual-level interventions to those that focus on other ecological levels. Like individual-level interventions, environmental and setting-level interventions are diverse. They range from interventions that are Â�control oriented to those that are focused on prevention and agency. At the control end of the spectrum lie environmental interventions that block criminal opportunities or otherwise discourage or complicate the occurrence of crime. Examples include fences, gated communities, alarm Â�systems, or surveillance. In the middle of the spectrum are interventions that seek to prevent violence through environmental interventions that are not punitive or threatening. Examples include prevention through urban designs that increase urban and suburban residential density (Christens & Speer, 2005), defensible space, or decrease environmental incivilities (Perkins, Wandersman, Rich, & Taylor, 1993). Other examples include efforts to reduce or mitigate the social conditions that give rise to Â�violence, including policies that ensure human rights, environmental justice, and citizen security (Moser & McIlwaine, 2006) or address oppression with a focus on community well-being (Prilleltensky, 2008). At the agency end of the spectrum are interventions that increase everyday opportunities and supports (middle right of Figure 12.1) to create the preconditions for peaceful settings and environments. This strategy is consistent with many of the goals of PYD. In particular, Benson, Scales, Hamilton, and Sesma (2006) highlight opportunities for skill building and belonging and supportive relationships that promote autonomy and positive social norms. In addition, increasing everyday opportunities and supports can include the creation of new recreational and Â�extracurricular activities, new educational and employment opportunities, and new Â�settings—such as new after-school programs or new community centers— which can function as venues for the facilitation of youth development. Transactional interventions. We turn now to a third category of interventions, transactional interventions: those that emphasize activities or processes that simultaneously alter individuals and their ecological environments. The term “transaction” is drawn from Dewey and Bentley (1946), who distinguish transaction from self-action and interaction as ways of understanding the world. Transaction is distinguished from both self-action and interaction by a refusal to view individual entities or their interactions as detachable. A transactional view seeks to understand whole processes or actions with an understanding that there are no independent intrinsic qualities that these entities possess. Altman and Rogoff (1987) draw on Dewey and Bentley and others to set forth four worldviews in psychology:

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trait, interactional, organismic, and transactional. For Altman and Rogoff, the transactional worldview involves “the study of the changing relations among psychological and environmental aspects of holistic unities” (p. 9). Hence, transactional strategies for youth violence reduction seek to alter the relations between youths and their settings and environments. In other words, unlike strategies that intervene only on individuals or their environments, transactional interventions focus on the relationships between youths and their environments. In practice, transactional interventions are much less common than those focused on individuals or environments and settings. For example, writing about educational intervention, Dokecki, Scanlan, and Strain (1972) describe a pendulum effect, in which the dominance of individualistic interventions leads to calls for more social systemic interventions and vice versa. The authors suggest that “exclusive positions, either social system or individual oriented, may end up looking similar, structurally at least, and perhaps are similarly incomplete and unable to handle complex social problems” (p. 183). We assert that strategies for youth violence reduction that are focused on community engagement represent promising models of transactional interventions.

Agency-Oriented and Transactional Interventions to Reduce Youth Violence Our central argument in this chapter is that the frame for interventions to reduce youth violence should be broadened to include more transactional approaches as well as more approaches that emphasize youth agency. Figure 12.1 depicts this argument. The majority of interventions are currently individual oriented and focused on control. While these approaches may be appropriate in some cases, they are not always optimal solutions. By combating public misconceptions on youth violence and understanding youth development in an ecological context, the frame can be broadened to include more interventions that focus on youth agency and ecological transactions. In order to make these approaches tangible, we put forward three specific models for reducing youth violence that employ a transactional and agency-oriented approach: teen courts, youth coalitions, and youth organizing. The common denominator of these models is youth community engagement. Teen courts. Teen courts, also known as youth courts or peer juries, are an alternative for young people who have committed minor offenses, such as vandalism, stealing, or the possession of drugs. Rather than going to juvenile court and risking formal prosecution, young offenders can opt to attend teen court and avoid having a legal record (Butts, Buck, &

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Coggeshall, 2002). The approach is based on the premise that a young person is less likely to reoffend if he or she is held accountable for the crime and also provided with an opportunity to positively reengage with the community (Forgays & DeMilio, 2005). Teen courts function similarly to juvenile courts except the young offender is tried and sentenced by peers rather than adults. Youth volunteers—many of whom are former offenders returning to participate in other cases—serve as jurors, attorneys, judges, and court clerks. The youth volunteers are ultimately responsible for developing a sentence that reflects restorative justice principles, meaning the sentence must focus on building responsibility and reengagement in the young offender (Bazemore, 2001). Sentences often include serving on a teen court jury, engaging in community service, writing an apology letter to their parent(s) and the victim of their offense, or writing an essay about the effects of crime on the community (Butts et al., 2002). Sentencing allows youths to serve in a responsible role, empowering the young person to engage in prosocial behavior (Peterson-Badali, Ruck, & Koegl, 2001). In this model, youths become agents of restorative justice, not simply recipients. Teen courts are rapidly expanding in the United States, growing from 78 programs in 1994 to 1,050 in 2005 (Pearson & Jurich, 2005). Given their prevalence, greater attention is now given to measuring and evaluating their effectiveness. The results are promising. For example, Harrison, Maupin, and Mays (2001) found that teen court first-time offenders had recidivism rates of 30% or less. Similarly, Butts and colleagues (2002) report that the youth court offenders had a lower recidivism rate than offenders processed through traditional juvenile courts in three surveyed states. By altering the environments in which young offenders are prosecuted and tried, and by allowing youths to exercise some degree of agency in these settings, teen courts represent a transactional model that incorporates youth agency. Because teen courts operate within the juvenile justice system, however, the overarching orientation is still control. Youth coalitions. Youth coalitions bring together diverse community stakeholders—including young people, parents, educators, nonprofit managers, Â�business leaders, and public officials—to address a youth issue of mutual concern (Collura, Graff, & Zeldin, 2009). Youth coalitions may address a variety of youth-related concerns and serve as a valuable resource for the community. For example, the communitywide coalition in Oazakee County, Wisconsin, composed of youths and adults, works primarily on Â�improving young people’s relationships with local law enforcement. However, the Â�coalition also provides input to the park and recreation board, business improvement district, and the chamber of commerce.

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Engaging youths in coalitions is a promising approach for both community change and healthy youth development. Because coalitions engage a diversity of institutions and citizens and encourage cross-sector networking and resource sharing, they have the potential to make community change (Chavis, 2001). Youth coalitions, in particular, provide an effective forum for youth engagement and voice. When young people help define community problems and solutions and participate in settings where they wield influence, they develop a greater sense of community (Evans, 2007). Coalitions also have the potential to build strong relationships between youths and adults. Such relationships serve an important protective and developmental function: They can help prevent youths from engaging in problem behaviors while concurrently helping to promote knowledge, competency, and initiative among youths (Zeldin, Larson, Camino, & O’Connor, 2005). In addition, there is growing evidence that social connectedness is inversely associated with rates of crime at the community level (Kawachi, Kennedy, & Wilkinson, 1999). Youth coalitions engage young people and alter the environments in which policy decisions are made. Hence, this transactional model incorporates youth agency. Youth organizing. Youth organizing “trains young people in community organizing and advocacy, and assists them in employing these skills to alter power relations and create meaningful institutional change in their communities” (Funders Collaborative of Youth Organizing, 2009). This practice is based on the belief that effective youth development and concrete social change occur in tandem. Youth organizing gained considerable momentum during the 1990s, with increasing evidence that it was an effective way for young people to develop leadership skills, effect concrete community change, and become politically engaged (Delgado & Staples, 2008). Perhaps because of its explicit emphasis on empowerment and social justice, youth organizing has been more effective than other youth development programs at engaging diverse youths, particularly youths of color (Yee, 2008). Many youths engage in organizing because the issues have personal meaning to them. For example, young women who lived in poverty and had been involved with the juvenile justice system organized and established the Center for Young Women’s Development in San Francisco. The center’s programs are designed to help disenfranchised young women become employed citizens working to improve their communities. Toward that end, the organization is run completely by low-income women who have progressed through the center’s programs (Camino & Zeldin, 2002). There is a growing body of evidence for supporting youth organizing as an empowering approach to youth engagement and violence prevention (Christens & Dolan, in press; Peterson et al., 2010). Youth

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organizing efforts have lobbied against punitive California legislation that would lead to increased youth incarceration (Gambone et al., 2006), led successful campaigns to increase affordable childcare access for high school–aged mothers (Ginwright, 2003), and expanded after-school programs with the aim of reducing youth violence (Peterson et al., 2010). Researchers are also documenting the positive impacts of youth organizing on both the young participants and their communities. Zeldin, Petrokubi, and Camino (2008) demonstrate that young people involved in organizing develop a sense of belonging and collective efficacy, an increase in sociopolitical awareness and civic competence, and an increase in community connections. Christens and Dolan (in press) describe a youth organizing effort in which young people work to reduce violence and crime through advocacy for policies that support youth development. In the process, they develop leadership skills, such as confidence in public speaking, research expertise, and a greater understanding of social and political issues. Hence, youth organizing is a particularly promising model, representing both a transactional and an agency-oriented approach to reducing youth violence.

Broadening the Frame In this chapter, we provided a conceptual rubric for understanding approaches to youth violence reduction. The two dimensions of this rubric are orientations and ecological levels of intervention. Based on these two dimensions, we assert that policy and program responses aimed at youth violence reduction should be broadened to include more strategies that focus on youth agency and transactional interventions (see Figure 12.1). The commonality of these interventions is that they engage youths in their communities. Youth development programs and setting-level interventions focus on building youth agency through the development of supportive relationships with peers and adults. Youth coalitions and youth organizing engage youths in community-level decision making. Even teen courts, which employ a more traditional control orientation to juvenile justice, create a setting where youths can exercise agency. To be clear, we are not arguing for an exclusive focus on these models of interventions. Indeed, control-oriented and individual-level approaches are necessary in some cases. We are, however, arguing that there is an imbalance in intervention approaches that favors individual-level interventions over environmental and transactional interventions and favors control-oriented approaches over preventive and agency-oriented approaches. This imbalance is reflective of prevalent misconceptions of youth violence. To broaden

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the frame and rectify the imbalance, community engagement approaches to youth violence prevention must be rigorously evaluated, and findings must be translated into practice. Finally, the broader public and key decision makers (e.g., police, judges, prosecutors, legislators, etc.) must become more involved in combating misconceptions of youth violence and helping to broaden the frame.

Note The authors wish to thank Kyle Miller and John Sands for helpful comments on a draft of this chapter.

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Gambone, M. A., Yu, H. C., Lewis-Charp, H., Sipe, C. L., & Lacoe, J. (2006). Youth organizing, identity support, and youth development agencies as avenues for involvement. Journal of Community Practice, 14, 235–253. Gilliam, F. (1998). Youth crime and the superpredator news frame: The impacts of television on attitudes about crime and race. Washington, DC: The National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention. Gilliam, F., & Bales, S. (2001). Strategic frame analysis: Reframing America’s youth. Social Policy Report, 15, 3–15. Ginwright, S. (2003). Youth organizing: Expanding possibilities for youth development. Occasional Paper Series on Youth Organizing. Retrieved on November 8, 2010, from http:www.fcyo.org and available from Jewish Fund for Justice, 260 Fifth Avenue, Suite 701, New York, NY 10001. Goldstein, A. P., & Conoley, J. C. (2004). School violence intervention: A practical handbook. New York: Guilford. Gorman, D. M., & Conde, E. (2007). Conflict of interest in the evaluation and dissemination of “model” school-based drug- and violence-prevention programs. Evaluation and Program Planning, 30, 422–429. doi:10.1016/j .evalprogplan.2007.06.004 Gorman, D. M., Conde, E., & Huber, J. C. (2007). The creation of evidence in “evidence-based” drug prevention: A critique of the Strengthening Families program plus Life Skills Training evaluation. Drug and Alcohol Review, 26, 585–593. doi:10.1080/09595230701613544 Hamilton, S. F., & Hamilton, M. A. (2004). The youth development handbook: Coming of age in American communities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Harrison, P., Maupin, J. R., & Mays, G. L. (2001). Teen court: An examination of the processes and outcomes. Crime and Delinquency, 47, 243–264. Hepburn, J. R. (1973). Violent behavior in interpersonal relationships. Sociological Quarterly, 14, 419–429. Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B. P., & Wilkinson, R. G. (1999). Crime: Social disorganization and relative deprivation. Social Science Medicine, 48, 719–31. Kirshner, B. (2009). Power in numbers: Youth organizing as a context for exploring civic identity. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 19, 414–440. doi:10.1111/j.1532-7795.2009.00601.x Lerner, R. M., Dowling, E. M., & Anderson, P. M. (2003). Positive youth development: Thriving as the basis of personhood and civil society. Applied Developmental Science, 7, 172–180. doi:10.1207/S1532480XADS0703_8 Lerner, R. M., Lerner, J. V., Almerigi, J. B., Theokas, C., Phelps, E., Gestsdottir, S., et al. (2005). Positive youth development, participation in community youth development programs, and community contributions of fifth-grade adolescents: Findings from the first wave of the 4-H study of positive youth development. Journal of Early Adolescence, 25, 17–71. doi:10.1177/0272431604272461 Lewin, K. (1935). A dynamic theory of personality. New York: McGraw-Hill. Males, M. (1999). Framing youth: Ten myths about the next generation. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

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Moser, C. O. N., & McIlwaine, C. (2006). Latin American urban violence as a development concern: Toward a framework for violence reduction. World Development, 34, 89–112. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.07.012 Pearson, S., & Jurich, S. (2005). Youth court: A community solution for embracing at-risk youth. Washington, DC: American Youth Policy Forum. Perkins, D. D., Wandersman, A., Rich, R. C., & Taylor, R. B. (1993). The physical environment of street crime: Defensible space, territoriality, and incivilities. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 13, 29–49. doi:10.1016 /S0272-4944(05)80213-0 Peter Hart Research Associates. (1998). New leadership for a new century. Washington, DC: Author. Peterson, T. H., Dolan, T., & Hanft, S. (2010). Partnering with youth organizers to prevent violence: An analysis of relationships, power, and change. Progress in Comunity Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, 4, 235–242. Peterson-Badali, M., Ruck, M. D., & Koegl, C. J. (2001). Youth court dispositions: Perceptions of Canadian juvenile offenders. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 45, 593–605. Pratt, T. C. (2008). Addicted to incarceration: Corrections policy and the politics of misinformation in the United States. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Prilleltensky, I. (2008). The role of power in wellness, oppression, and liberation: The promise of psychopolitical validity. Journal of Community Psychology, 36, 116–136. doi:10.1002/jcop.20225 Prothrow-Stith, D. (1987). Violence prevention curriculum. Newton, MA: Educational Development Center. Roth, J. L., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2003). What exactly is a youth development program? Answers from research and practice. Applied Developmental Science, 7, 94–111. doi:10.1207/S1532480XADS0702_6 Scales, P., Benson, P., Roehlkepartain, E., Hintz, N., Sullivan, T., & Mannis, M. (2001). The role of neighborhood and community in building developmental assets for children and youth: A national study of social norms among Â�American adults. Journal of Community Psychology, 29, 703–727. Soler, M. (2001). Public opinion on youth, crime, and race: A guide for advocates. Washington, DC: Building Blocks for Youth. Turnock, B. J. (2001). Public health: What it is and how it works (2nd ed.). Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers, Inc. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2001). Youth violence: A report of the surgeon general. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General. Retrieved from http://www.surgeongeneral .gov/library/youthviolence/default.htm. Weisburd, D., Wyckoff, L. A., Ready, J., Eck, J. E., Hinkle, J. C., & Gajewski, F. (2006). Does crime just move around the corner? A controlled study of spatial displacement and diffusion of crime control benefits. Criminology, 44, 549–592. doi:10.1111/j.1745-9125.2006.00057.x

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Yee, S. M. (2008). Developing the field of youth organizing and advocacy: What foundations can do. New Directions for Youth Development, 117(Winter), 109–124. Zeldin, S. (2004). Preventing youth violence through the promotion of community engagement and membership. Journal of Community Psychology, 32, 623– 641. doi:10.1002/jcop.20023 Zeldin, S., Larson, R., Camino, L., & O’Connor, C. (2005). Intergenerational relationships and partnerships in community programs: Purpose, practice, and directions for research. Journal of Community Psychology, 33, 1–10. Zeldin, S., Petrokubi, J., Camino, L. (2008). Youth-adult partnerships in public action: Principles, organizational culture, and outcomes. Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. Zeldin, S., Petrokubi, J., & MacNeil, C. (2007). Youth-adult partnerships in community decision-making: What does it take to engage adults in the practice? Chevy Chase, MD: National 4-H Council.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Abusive Adolescent Boys in Adulthood William E. Schweinle

Abuse is a very broad topic with a number of differing scientific, legal, and lay definitions (Bratton, Roseman, & Schweinle, in press). Abuse can occur within families, between peers, between partners, etc. However, this chapter focuses on a relatively narrow area of abuse: What happens to abusive adolescent males when they become adults and what might be done to stop potentially abusive adolescent boys from becoming adult partner abusers? I focus on young men because, while adolescent girls and adult women may strike their male partners as often as their male partners strike their female partners (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009), women generally do not hit as hard as men and are not as likely to cause serious injury to their partners (Campbell, 2004; Morse, 1995; Schaefer & Caetano, 1998). It is important to focus on adolescent boys because as they become adult men, generally from age 15 to age 25, the likelihood that they will be involved in a close relationship increases. The likelihood that a male will abuse his partner also rapidly increases during this time (O’Leary, 2000). This may be a good time to intervene in ways that may prevent partner-abusive behaviors during adulthood. In order to make this assertion, it is important to ascertain whether abusive or potentially abusive adolescent males become abusive adult males and if intervention programs actually work. If this is the case, then it is important to demonstrate whether adolescence, the time when

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young men are beginning to explore close relationships, might be a better developmental stage than adulthood for interventions designed to reduce adult abusiveness. This chapter reviews the relevant literature and recommends that intervention with potentially partner-abusive males be made during their adolescence, when it might be more effective than intervention during a partner-abuser’s adulthood.

Young Aggressors Become Adult Abusers There is some scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that aggressive boys develop into abusive men. For instance, Herrenkohl, Huang, Tajima, and Whitney (2003) found that 15- to 18-year-olds who were violent toward peers were more likely to be violent toward their intimate partners in adult life. Further, Foshee, Benefield, Ennett, Bauman, and Suchindran (2004) found that physical fighting with adolescent peers predicts partner abuse during adulthood. These results suggest two things. First, adolescents who are violent toward others have a greater tendency to be violent toward their romantic partners when they become adults. Second, because of this relationship between adolescent violence and adult partner violence, it is possible to predict with some reliability which adolescent males are likely later to abuse their adult partners. Longitudinal prospective studies further support the argument that abusive teens are more likely than nonabusive teens to become partnerabusive adults. For instance, Woodward, Fergusson, and Horwood (2002) followed a cohort of New Zealand youths from birth through their 21st year. The youths who behaved in an antisocial manner early in life were significantly more likely to abuse their partners later in life. Further, Magdol, Moffitt, Caspi, and Silva (1998) found among a sample of 992 New Zealanders, who were tracked from birth to 21 years of age, that aggressive delinquency at age 15 was significantly predictive of partner abuse at age 21. Finally, O’Donnell and colleagues (2006) found similar results among an American sample when they surveyed 977 8th graders and then resurveyed the group again around their 19th birthdays. Similarly, Ehrensaft and colleagues (2003) followed 543 children from 1975 to 1999. The children and their mothers were interviewed several times over this time span. The teens who had been abused as children, who had witnessed violence between parents, and who exhibited the most conduct-disordered behaviors while growing up were the most likely to cause injury to their partners as adults. Taken together, these results offer strong evidence that physically aggressive teens tend to become partner-abusive adults.

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If we are to conclude that interventions work for teens, then we must determine whether intervention works at all. If so, then investing intervention effort on at-risk adolescents might not be the best strategy for several reasons. First, while violent adolescents are more likely to become partner-violent adults, not all will. Therefore, one would have to intervene with a larger number of adolescents in order to, hopefully, intervene with the ones who will become abusive adults. If, however, intervention efforts are focused specifically on the men who have demonstrated abusive behavior, then the intervention would need to be brought to a smaller number of people, which could concentrate and/or better focus the available intervention resources.

Abusive Men Are Likely to Continue to Be Violent In general, several investigators have studied the likelihood that an abusive male will stop abusing on his own or through an abuser treatment program. For instance, Feld and Straus (1990) sent questionnaires to 8,145 families over a two-year period as part of their very influential and ongoing National Family Violence Survey (Straus & Gelles, 1990). This longitudinal research was designed specifically to look for changes in abusive behavior over time. Feld and Straus found that about two-thirds of men who had been physically abusive at least three times in the year before completing the first questionnaire were still abusive a year later. If we generalize these findings to the population of men at large, then the probability that an abusive man will stop abusing his wife is substantially less than a coin flip. In other words, it is reasonable to expect that a man who has been abusive will continue to be abusive. Unfortunately, Feld and Straus (1990) did not measure other forms of abuse in their sample, e.g., psychological or financial abuse. Thus, the third of the men in the sample who were no longer physically abusive may have stopped physical abuse and switched to or continued psychological or other forms of abuse. O’Leary and colleagues (1989) conducted a similar longitudinal study of 272 newly married couples. Similar to the Feld and Straus (1990) findings, almost two-thirds (65%) of the men in the sample who were physically violent before marriage also physically abused their wives in the two and a half years following the first interview. Again, no data were collected about the men’s psychological and other nonphysical forms of abuse. However, the results were clear: Only about one in three physically abusive men stop physically abusing their wives. In a similar longitudinal design, Quigley and Leonard (1996) followed 188 newly married couples in which the husband had been physically

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abusive of his fiancée in the previous year. The engaged partners completed their questionnaires separately and submitted them separately by mail. The couples were also paid separately for completing and returning the questionnaires. This process was repeated one year into the couples’ marriages and again at three years into their marriages. While the most violent men were the least likely to stop being violent, the minimally violent men in this sample still had a two out of three chance of continuing their violence in the second and third years of the marriage. While it is possible that an abusive husband will stop being violent, the chance that he will is very low. The studies mentioned above did not investigate forms of abuse other than physical. Aldarondo (1996), however, in his three-year study of 772 married couples, extended previous work by looking into the husbands’ emotional abuse of their wives. Interestingly, all of the husbands who were physically violent in the first year of the study continued to be emotionally abusive in the second and third years. So, even if the man stopped physically assaulting his wife, he continued to abuse her emotionally during the second and third years of their marriage. This finding answers questions left by other studies in that it suggests that abusive men who stop physically abusing their wives are likely to keep abusing them emotionally. Jacobson and Gottman (1998) further extended this line of research by looking into men’s systematic use of intimidation (e.g., physical, emotional, etc.) to control their female partners. This study involved a sample of 140 married couples over two years. This is a much deeper look at couples with an abusive husband because it included the spouses’ physiological (i.e., polygraph-type) reactions as well as videotape analysis of the spouses’ facial expressions and other interaction behaviors while the husband and wife discussed a problematic marital issue. In summary, while 54% of the men in the sample reduced their physical violence during the two-year course of the study, only 7% of the men completely stopped being physically violent over the two-year time frame. Jacobson and Gottman argue that the reduction in physical violence by some of the men may have been replaced by emotional abuse, because once the man had established dominance and control, he could use less extreme abuse methods (e.g., emotional or financial abuse) that were not likely to result in incarceration. Interestingly, Jacobson and Gottman (1998) found that among the men who stopped being violent or became less physically violent, nothing the women did appeared to explain why the men stopped their abusive behavior. It therefore stands to reason that only characteristics of the abusers themselves predict whether the violence will decrease or ultimately stop.

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So, are violent men likely to continue to be violent? The answer is yes; an abusive adult male will probably continue to be abusive over the course of and across his relationship(s). Findings across several studies support the old adage among psychologists: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. It also appears that if an abusive adult male reduces or ceases his physical violence, then the often-accompanying emotional abuse will continue or take the place of physical assault in the man’s pursuit of control and domination in his marriage.

Adult Abuser Treatment Programs Several batterer programs have been created and are used in state and military criminal justice settings. The following discussion is based on the work of Babcock, Green, and Robie (2004); Gondolf (2002); and Roberts (2002). Both Gondolf and Roberts described several of the various batterer treatment programs that have been developed. Babcock and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of these programs in halting men’s abusive behavior. It is important to point out that batterer intervention programs, whether voluntary or court mandated, are essentially afterthe-fact attempts to reduce wife abuse. In other words, these programs are for men who have already demonstrated their abusive nature. The Duluth model (Paymar, 1993; Pence & Paymar, 1993) is perhaps the most widely used batterer intervention program (BIP) in the United States. The Duluth model is built on the idea that abusive men abuse their partners to achieve and maintain power and control in the relationship. The “Power and Control Wheel” developed by Pence and Paymar (1993) diagrams the central theory of the Duluth model, which focuses on stopping the abuse immediately and on changing men’s attitudes that abusive behavior is OK. (Note that there is a positive relationship between attitudes that are permissive of abuse and actual abuse; Schwartz, O’Leary, & Kendziora, 1997.) Duluth model practitioners combine parts of several different approaches to try to change abusive men’s attitudes toward women and abusive behavior. Another BIP approach is based in psychodynamic theory (Browne & Saunders, 1997; Dutton, 1998; Stosney, 1995). Psychodynamic treatment focuses on the personality of the abuser and holds that men’s abusive behavior is the product of the men’s life experiences from birth to present. Psychodynamic abuser therapy includes offering abusive men positive support and the camaraderie of other men through group sessions. Because there is an important association between insecure attachment and abuse (see Dutton, 1998, for an overview), these sessions are designed

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to help the abuser become better able to attach or emotionally bond to his partner and, as a result, have relationships with less fear and no abuse. There are other approaches, including anger management and couples counseling (Geffner & Mantooth, 2000). One problem with anger management is the possible inference that the abuser is somehow provoked by the victim. This is simply not the case (cf. Schweinle & Ickes, 2007; Schweinle, Ickes, & Bernstein, 2002; Schweinle, Ickes, Rollings, & Jacquot, 2010). By treating partner abuse as a relationship problem, couples therapy also implies that the victim is perhaps in part to blame for the abusive behavior and that both partners, the abuser and the victim, need to work together to stop the abuse. Again, this is a false assumption because recent findings have demonstrated that abusiveness is a characteristic of the abuser not the victim. Worse still, couples therapy places the woman in close contact with her abuser to discuss potentially explosive relationship issues. This is inherently risky. Babcock and colleagues (2004) conducted a thorough meta-analysis of 22 scientific articles on batterer treatment program effectiveness. The treatment programs reviewed included the Duluth model, cognitive behavior therapy, anger management, probation, and other abuser treatment modalities. The experimental methods included quasi- and true-experimental designs. Unfortunately, Babcock and colleagues found that the recidivism rates for the abusers who were treated were very similar to the recidivism rates for men who were not treated at all. Further, the differences between treatment types (e.g., Duluth model vs. cognitive behavior therapy) were not significant. Finally, they. summarize that the likelihood that a treated batterer will reabuse is about 40%, whereas for a nontreated batterer it is about 35%. In summary, they found that abuser treatment programs are not very effective in stopping abuse. Jackson, Feder, Forde, Davis, Maxwell, and Taylor conducted a similar but smaller review of two BIP for the National Institute for Justice (2003). These studies compared Duluth model treatment and cognitivebehavioral therapy to probation alone. One program was in Broward County, Florida; the other was in Brooklyn, New York. The findings were startling. Generally speaking, neither of the batterer intervention programs was much more effective than probation alone. In fact, in Broward County, the men who were assigned to the BIP were slightly more likely to abuse their partners again than the men who were given only probation. Batterer intervention programs are built on reasonable psychological theory and follow rational assumptions that seem to explain why men abuse and what can be done to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, however, the

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only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the research reviewed here is that we are unlikely to stop an adult abuser from abusing. Of course, there are anecdotal cases of abusive men who have stopped, either in treatment or on their own. And these cases may, by themselves, justify the use of batterer treatment. However, these are exceptional cases statistically speaking. The vast majority of abusive adult men do not stop abusing within and across their close relationships, and batterer intervention programs are generally not very effective. Given these sobering conclusions, it seems reasonable to direct attention to other possible ways to prevent partner abuse, e.g., intervention during adolescence.

Intervention in Adolescence for Abusive Teens Peer dating violence has significant negative consequences on the mental health of victims. For instance, Banyard and Cross (2008) recently found that victims of dating violence tended to experience more depression and diminished academic performance. (This relationship appears to be further complicated by substance abuse, though the causal pathways are as yet unclear.) Regardless, for these reasons alone, it is important to prevent or stop partner violence between teens. However, intervention with abusive adolescents may have the long-term effect of helping prevent abusive behavior in adulthood. It stands to reason that if most abusive adult men will not or cannot be made to stop abusing, that there might be an earlier developmental period during potentially (or actively) abusive men’s lives when the abuse could be prevented or stopped. Several investigators have made this argument based on sound theory and research (Avery-Leaf, Cascardi, O’Leary, & Cano, 1997; Banyard & Cross, 2008; Ehrensaft et al., 2003; Magdol, Moffitt, Caspi, & Silva, 1998). The following paragraphs describe these arguments as they developed (i.e., in chronological order) and conclude that intervention with abusive and potentially abusive male teens may be a more effective short- and long-term approach to preventing (at least) some abusive behavior during and after adolescence. Avery-Leaf and colleagues (1997) reported on a five-session dating violence training program that they developed and tested among 192 New York high school students. The program focused on changing the students’ attitudes toward acceptance of partner violence, and the program resulted in a significant reduction in the male students’ acceptance of and justification for dating violence. However, on the one hand, there is a psychologically murky and unreliable relationship between peoples’ attitudes and their actual behavior (see Albarracin, Johnson, &

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Zanna, 2009, for a recent and well-written overview of this topic). So, it would be a shaky leap of logic to conclude that the five-session program resulted in less actual partner violence. On the other hand, Schwartz, O’Leary, & Kendziora (1997) found a significant relationship specifically between young males’ attitudes toward aggression (i.e., their justification of aggression) and actual aggression. This does support the conclusion that the program developed by AveryLeaf and colleagues. (1997) does effectively reduce teen dating violence. By extension, and based on the relationship between teen and adult partner violence described above, it is reasonable to conclude that this brief five-session intervention will result in at least some reduction in adult partner violence for the students who participated. As part of the longitudinal study discussed earlier in this chapter, Magdol and colleagues (1998) looked into the possible early childhood, late childhood, and adolescent markers for partner abuse in adulthood. Among the significant predictors, a close relationship between the adolescent and his parent was negatively associated with adult partner abuse. Further, having parents with higher-status occupations while a boy is in middle school and having both parents living in the household were negatively associated with adult partner abuse. Positive childhood predictors of adult partner abuse included dropping out of school and delinquency in adolescence. Considering that it is possible to identify potential adult abusers during their middle school years, it may be reasonable to argue that identifying at-risk middle school males and intervening with them while they are in middle school would be a good approach. However, the reliability of the middle school predictors is somewhat less than that of high school–age predictors. In other words, it is more difficult to predict a person’s behavior the longer the time between the prediction and when you anticipate the behavior occuring. Therefore, identifying at-risk boys during middle school and intervening may not be cost effective, because one would have to intervene with a very large group of boys in order to expect to bring about results. Based on this, Magdol and colleagues (1998) argue that early adolescence (early high school age) would be a better time to intervene, because as time lengthens between an intervention and the focal outcome behavior, the efficacy of the intervention wanes (Caspi & Bem, 1990). In other words, intervention when the early adolescent males are closer to exploring and entering close relationships would be more effective in preventing teen partner abuse and, theoretically, adult partner abuse. Ehrensaft and colleagues (2003) argued on the basis of their findings from the Children in Communities Study that partner violence

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prevention strategies should focus on children with a history of abuse by parents and other adults and that these strategies should focus on avoiding escalation of behavioral problems. They cite social learning theory and research to conclude that children who witness abuse between parents can be helped to understand that violence is not an acceptable or effective means of handling conflict in close relationships. In other words, children who grow up learning that violence is a normal or acceptable means to conflict resolution can learn nonviolent conflict resolution methods. They further suggest that these prevention programs could be coordinated with courts, law enforcement, and services for abused women and children. However, in contrast to Avery-Leaf and colleagues (1997) and Magdol and colleagues (1998), Ehrensaft and colleagues (2003) argue that prevention should occur earlier than adolescence (in late childhood) so that abusive responses to conflict do not become entrenched in the child’s psyche and behavior patterns and then later emerge in adolescent and adult close relationships. They base this argument on their clinical observation that excessive punishment by parents is difficult to extinguish by the time a child becomes an adolescent. Therefore, intervention should occur while the child is younger and has not necessarily been taught to resolve relationship conflict through extreme coercive methods. In summary, there are both theoretical arguments and a few empirical findings that support the conclusion that partner-abuse intervention with adolescent boys should occur sometime earlier than in adulthood. However, the optimal time for such intervention is under debate in the research literature. Some researchers argue that early middle school (preadolescence) would be optimal. Other investigators argue that intervention in early adolescence, when the boys are first exploring close relationships, would be better. Further research is needed in this area to assess the effectiveness of adolescent abuse intervention and to better pinpoint the optimal developmental stage for such intervention.

Summary In summary, there is some direct evidence that an abusive teen will mature into an abusive adult. The research to date tends to suggest that an abusive adult man will continue to be abusive to his partner, whether or not he ever undergoes a batterer intervention program. However, there is some preliminary evidence that intervention with abusive and potentially abusive boys will reduce the likelihood that they will be abusive toward their partners in adulthood. Taken together, these results suggest that

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partner abuse prevention might be more effectively focused on adolescent males, before they become adult abusers who are highly resistant to nonpunitive intervention. Future research should focus on the development of early interventions for young men. More distal research should longitudinally explore the short- and long-term effectiveness of such intervention programs.

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Schwartz, M., O’Leary, S., & Kendziora, K. (1997). Dating aggression among high school students. Violence and Victims, 12, 295–305. Schweinle, W., & Ickes, W. (2007). The role of men’s critical/rejecting overattribution bias, affect, and attentional disengagement in marital aggression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26, 175–199. Schweinle, W., Ickes, W., & Bernstein, I. (2002). Empathic inaccuracy in husband to wife aggression: The overattribution bias. Personal Relationships, 9, 141–158. Schweinle, W., Ickes, W., Rollings, K., & Jacquot, C. (2010). Maritally aggressive men: Angry, egocentric, impulsive, and/or biased. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29, 399–424. Stosney, S. (1995). Treating attachment abuse: A compassion approach. New York: Springer. Straus, M., & Gelles, R. (1990). Physical violence in American families: Risk factors and adaptations to violence in 8,145 families. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Wexler, D. (Ed.). (1999). Domestic violence 2000: An integrated skills program for men. New York: Norton. Woodward, L., Fergusson, D., & Horwood, L. (2002). Romantic relationships of young people with childhood and adolescent onset antisocial behavior problems. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 30, 231–243.

About the Editor and Contributors

The Editor Michele A. Paludi,╇PhD, is the series editor for Women’s Psychology and for Women and Careers in Management for Praeger. She is the author/editor of 38 college textbooks and of more than 170 scholarly articles and conference presentations on sexual harassment, campus violence, Â�psychology of women, gender, and discrimination. Her book Ivory Power: Sexual Â�Harassment on Campus (SUNY Press, 1990) received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States. Dr.€Paludi served as chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Alcohol and Other Drug Problems in Higher Education. She was one of six scholars in the United States to be selected for this subpanel. She also was a consultant to and a member of former New York State governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Dr. Paludi serves as an expert witness for court proceedings and administrative hearings on sexual harassment. She has had extensive experience in conducting training programs and investigations of sexual harassment and other Equal Employment Â�Opportunity issues for businesses and educational institutions. In addition, Â�Dr. Paludi has held faculty positions at Franklin & Marshall College, Kent State University, Hunter College, Union College, and Union Graduate College, where she directs the human resource management certificate program. She is on the faculty in the School of Management. She was recently named “Woman of the Year” by the Business and Professional Women in Schenectady, New York. She is currently the Elihu Root Peace Fund Professor in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College.

About the Editor and Contributors

252

The Contributors Craig A. Anderson╇is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1980 and has served on the Â�faculties of Rice University, the Ohio State University, and the University of Â�Missouri–Columbia. He has been awarded Fellow status by the American Â�Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. Anderson’s 150 plus publications span a wide range of areas, including judgment and decision making; depression, loneliness, and shyness; personality theory and measurement; and attribution theory. In recent years, his work has focused on the development of a General Aggression Model designed to integrate insights from cognitive, developmental, personality, and social psychology. His pioneering work on video game violence has led to Â�consultations with educators, government officials, child advocates, and news organizations worldwide. His recent book Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents, published by Oxford University Press in 2007, describes the effects of playing violent video games, explains how these effects occur, and explores possible actions that parents, educators, and public policy creators can take to deal with this important social issue. His 2010 meta-analysis article published in Psychological Bulletin, psychology’s top review journal, combined the results of all relevant empirical studies (over 130,000 participants) and conclusively demonstrated the harmful effects of violent video games. Bethany Ashby,╇ PsyD, is a postdoctoral fellow in adolescent medicine at Aurora Mental Health Center and the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology with an emphasis in Â�family psychology from Azusa Pacific University. Her research and clinical interests include adolescent pregnancy and parenting, family systems, and cross-cultural issues. Marios N. Avraamides╇is an assistant professor of cognitive psychology and the director of the Experimental Psychology Laboratory at the Â�University of Cyprus. He has a BA degree in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and MSc and PhD degrees in cognitive psychology from Â�Pennsylvania State University. He has previously worked as a Â�postdoctoral scientist at the University of California–Santa Barbara and at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany. His Â�primary research interests lie in the field of spatial cognition, although he is also involved through collaborations in research projects on attention and media violence.

About the Editor and Contributors

Shelly Bloom╇ is currently a master’s student in education at the Ohio State University. She completed in her BS in human development and family studies in March 2010. For the past four years, she has been engaged in research on youth violence prevention. She is a coauthor on a peerreviewed journal article. She plans to teach middle school next year. Imelda N. Bratton╇received her doctorate in counselor education and counseling from Idaho State University in 2008. Dr. Bratton has been a professional school counselor for 12 years and has published several articles relating to childhood disorders, school counseling issues, expressive arts, clinical supervision, and sandtray. She is currently a professional school Â�counselor in Spearfish, South Dakota, and an adjunct faculty member at South Dakota State University, where she trains future professional counselors. Brian D. Christens╇ is an assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on efforts by nonprofit and grassroots organizations to effect change in policies and systems and on the predictors and impacts of voluntary participation in these efforts. He is also interested in young people’s involvement in change efforts and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Jessica J. Collura╇ is a doctoral student in human ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She formerly served as a Teach for America corps member, and her interests include community leadership, youth engagement in community networks, and youth organizing. She recently Â�coedited (with Shepherd Zeldin and Derick Wilson) a special issue of Youth and Society on promoting restorative cultures and shared societies in Northern Ireland and the United States. James Crosby╇ is an assistant professor of psychology at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) in Huntsville, Texas. He received his PhD in educational psychology with an emphasis in school psychology from Â�Oklahoma State University in 2008, following the completion of his doctoral Â�internship with the Devereux Foundation’s Institute of Clinical Training and Research in Villanova, Pennsylvania. At SHSU, James teaches graduate courses in behavioral and academic consultation, psychometric theory, and psychopathology, among others. His primary research interests include peer victimization, psychometrics, and rural psychological service delivery. He lives with his wife and two sons in southeast Texas, where he spends an inordinate amount of time trying to be a drummer.

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254

About the Editor and Contributors

Christina M. Dardis╇ is a graduate student in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Ohio University. Her professional interests include prevention and recovery processes for sexual assault and domestic violence, as well as perceptions of abuse and intervention efforts. Billie Wright Dziech╇is the primary author of The Lecherous Professor (Beacon Press, 1990) and coauthor of On Trial: American Courts and Their Treatment of Sexually Abused Children (Beacon Press, 1991) and Sexual Harassment and Higher Education: Reflections and New Perspectives (Garland Series on Higher Education, 1998). She has authored numerous book chapters and articles in scholarly journals and publishes regularly in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her work has been reviewed and quoted in sources as diverse as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and People Magazine. She has lectured and consulted at higher education institutions and businesses throughout the United States and Canada and has appeared on television and radio, including The Today Show, CNN, Phil Donahue, and Oprah. Dziech is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she has served in both administrative and faculty positions. She is the recipient of the university’s A. B. “Dolly” Cohen Award for Excellence in College Teaching and the Honors Scholars Program’s Faculty Teaching Award. Katie M. Edwards╇ is a fifth-year doctoral student in clinical psychology at Ohio University. She is currently completing her predoctoral clinical internship at the Vanderbilt University–Veterans Affairs Internship Consortium in Nashville, Tennessee. Her area of programmatic research focuses on understanding women’s leaving processes in abusive relationships, ethics of interpersonal trauma research, and interpersonal trauma recovery. She is also engaged in violence-related advocacy work. Kostas A. Fanti╇ is a lecturer of developmental psychology and the director of the Developmental Psychopathology Lab at the University of Cyprus. He has a BSc degree in psychology from the University of New Orleans and MA and PhD degrees in developmental psychology from Georgia State University. He is interested in the development of various types of externalizing problems (overt aggression, delinquency, bullying, proactive and reactive aggression, and conduct and oppositional defiant disorder) and how generalized and specific types of externalizing problems relate to contextual (family, peers, school, community, media) or individual Â�(psychopathic traits, temperament, cognitive functioning, internalizing problems) factors. He is the principal investigator of different funded

About the Editor and Contributors

projects investigating desensitization to media violence, the development of aggressive and depressive problems during adolescence, and the development of Â�attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Roseanne L. Flores╇ is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She is a Â�developmental psychologist by training and was a National Head Start Fellow in the Office of Head Start in Washington, D.C., in 2009–2010. She has Â�expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methods, statistics, testing and measurement, and linguistic, cognitive, and social development of children across various ages and cultural groups. Some of her current research examines the relationship between environmental risk factors, such as community violence, socioeconomic status, and food insecurity, on the health and educational outcomes of children. She recently received an NIH grant to examine the relationships between poverty and nutrition and African American and Latino preschool children’s early learning skills. She has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on children’s exposure to community violence. Alice Fok-Trela,╇ MA, is a PsyD candidate in clinical psychology at Azusa Pacific University. She is registered as a provisional psychologist (Alberta) and has trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy at the Harbor-UCLA Â�Medical Center and British Columbia Mental Health and Addiction Services. Her research and clinical interests include cognitive-behavioral therapy in challenging populations, systems theory, cross-cultural adjustment, and assessment and treatment of families and children. Christine A. Gidycz╇ is a professor of psychology and director of clinical Â�training at Ohio University. Research interests include the evaluation of sexual assault prevention and risk reduction programs and correlates, Â�predictors, and consequences of various forms of violence. Her work has been funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ohio Department of Health. She has served on various state and national panels that address violence-related issues. Marjorie Graham-Howard,╇PhD, is an associate professor at Azusa Pacific Â�University and a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in forensic psychology. Her private practice includes both courtreferred and attorney-retained referrals for evaluations in the juvenile and adult court system. Her research interests are focused primarily on juvenile forensic psychology, specifically the evaluation of juvenile trial

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About the Editor and Contributors

competence, waiver to adult court, juvenile sex offender risk assessment, and treatment of adjudicated minors. Ashley Hicks╇is pursuing her doctorate in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at the Ohio State University. She Â� earned her BS from the Ohio State University in sociology and Spanish. Her research interests include adolescent development, urban Â�communities, trauma-informed intervention, and ecological models. Beth M. Housekamp╇is a professor of clinical psychology at the Los Angeles campus of the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University. Her research and clinical interests include exploring neurodevelopmental contributions to challenging behavior in children and adolescents and assessing and treating those who have experienced traumatic events. Ann Booker Loper,╇ PhD, is a clinical psychologist and professor at the Â�University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Her research focuses on mental health and adjustment of prisoners, with a particular interest in understanding the experiences of women in the criminal justice Â�system and incarcerated parents. Dr. Loper has collaborated with prison, jail, and community partners in the development of a parenting program for Â�incarcerated mothers. She has consulted with local and state agencies concerning the rehabilitative needs of returning prisoners, particularly as related to family reunification. Dr. Loper has also conducted research Â�concerning the needs and characteristics of female juvenile offenders. Emily B. Nichols,╇ MEd, is a doctoral student in the clinical and school Â�psychology program at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia (UVA). She is involved in a wide range of research activities concerning incarcerated parents and affected children, with a particular interest in educational outcomes for children who experience incarceration of Â�family members. Prior to coming to UVA, Nichols worked with children with pediatric bipolar disorder and their families as a predoctoral research Â�fellow at the National Institutes of Mental Health. Caitlin M. Novero,╇ MEd, is a doctoral student in the clinical and school psychology program at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. She has previously conducted research regarding adjustment patterns of prisoners who were themselves children of incarcerated parents, and she continues to examine the long-term impact of parental

About the Editor and Contributors

incarceration. She has also worked with forensic populations in prison rehabilitation programs in Boston, Massachusetts, and central Virginia. Sara Prot╇ completed her master’s degree at the University of Zagreb and is a graduate student at Iowa State University. Christopher P. Roseman╇received his doctorate in counselor education and supervision from the University of Toledo. His research has focused on Â�deficiencies of shame, guilt, and empathy of individuals who are charged and/or convicted of physical and sexual abuse. This research has spawned innovative interventions and treatment modalities in the field of sex offender treatment. He is currently a faculty member at the Â�University of South Dakota in the counseling program, where he trains future Â�professional counselors and counselor educators. William E. Schweinle╇ received his doctorate in 2002 from the University of Texas at Arlington in social and quantitative psychology. He received postdoctoral training in quantitative psychology at the University of Â� Â�Missouri–Columbia. He has studied men’s maltreatment of women for 14 years and has published several articles and book chapters on the Â�subject of abusive men’s social cognition. He is currently an assistant Â�professor of biostatistics in the University of South Dakota School of Health Sciences. Robert L. Thornberg╇is an associate professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning at Linköping University in Sweden. He received his master’s degree in educational science (including psychology and Â�sociology) and doctorate degree in educational science from Linköping University. His current research is on school bullying and peer harassment, with a particular focus on social processes, morality, and students’ perspectives. His second line of research is on school rules, student participation, and moral practices in everyday school life. Robert has published reviewed articles in international academic journals, such as Educational Psychology, Educational Studies, Psychology in the Schools, Child and Youth Forum, Journal of Moral Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Social Psychology of Education, and he serves on the editor review board of the journal Nordic Studies in Education. He is also a board member of the Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA) and a coordinator for the NERA Network for Empirical Research on Value Issues in Education as well. Deanna L. Wilkinson╇ is currently associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Education and

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About the Editor and Contributors

Human Ecology at the Ohio State University. Dr. Wilkinson is a Â�criminologist and expert on urban youth violence, community processes, and violence Â�prevention. She earned her PhD from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, her MA in criminal justice from the University of€Â�Illinois at Chicago, and her BA in sociology from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. Her primary research and teaching interests are adolescent development, risk and problem behaviors, youth violence, evidence-based practice, firearm use, prevention, event perspectives, community-police partnerships, citizen participation in social action, collaborative processes, program evaluation, and urban communities. She is the 2008 recipient of the Society for Research on Adolescence Young Investigator Award. She received the Les Wright Youth Advocacy Award in 2009, the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Dean’s Distinguished Service Award in 2010, and the Fire and Focus Scholarship Service Award in 2010. Shepherd Zeldin╇ is Rothermel Bascom Professor of Human Ecology at the Â�University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research explores the impact of youths on civil society. He is also an outreach specialist for Wisconsin Extension. He provides research and consultation to youth and community initiatives across the United States. His most recent publication, Â�coauthored with Jessica J. Collura and published by Cornell University’s ACT for Youth Center for Excellence (2010), is titled “Being Y-AP Savvy: A Primer on Creating and Sustaining Youth-Adult Partnerships.”

Index

abuse: adolescents’ attitudes toward, 90–92; behavioral problems and, 203; definitions of, 92–95; history of, 203; in the literature, 92–97; patterns of teenagers/adolescents, 99; prevalence of, 89; research on adolescents’ experiencing, 89–90 abused children, risks for, 25 abused teens, risks for, 25 abusers: adult continuation of, 239–241; educators as, 152; future predictors for, 242; identification of, 246; males as, 146, 148; recidivism rates for, 244; sex abuse and characteristics of, 154; treatment programs for, 241 abusive behaviors checklist, 99–100 abusive relationships involvement, 97 abusive situation: mental health issues, 90; recognition, 97–99 abusive vs. nonabusive situation discrimination: abuse in the literature, 92–97; abuse patterns of teenagers/ adolescents, 99; abusive behaviors checklist, 99–100; abusive relationships involvement, 97; abusive situation recognition, 97–99; adolescents’ attitudes toward abuse, 90–92; research on adolescents’ experiencing abuse, 89–90 Achtman, R. L., 58 addictionlike behavioral disorders, 61–62 adolescence: changes described, 138–140, 190, 222; definition of, 138;

developmental stages of, 91; firearms and, 191; harmful behavior during, 163; intervention programs during, 239–240, 245–247; intimate partner violence (IPV) and, 29; physical dating violence during, 74; physical perpetration in, 75; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, 8; victimization experience during, 72, 74, 79; young women’s use of aggression in, 73 adolescents: abuse intervention, 246; adults views about, 222–223; girls’ victimization and subsequent perpetration of dating violence, 73; gun homicide situations, 173; idea of violence, 91; incarceration of, 22; intimate partner violence (IPV), 28–30; persecution venue, 222; rape victims problems incurred by, 26; victims of physical and sexual assault, 25–26 adolescents and firearm suicide: prevalence, 184; trends, 184–185 adolescents and firearms: about, 171–172; adolescent gun violence epidemic, 172–174; adolescents and firearm suicide, 184–185; fixed factors, 186; gun availability and carrying, in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, 179; gun availability and carrying, patterns of, 178–179; gun availability and carrying, suburban and rural patterns of, 180–181; guns and the

260 Index peer context, 181–182; personal factors, 188–189; prevention, 188–189; qualitative study of adolescents and firearms, 182–184; reasons for weapon carrying, 181; risk factors for adolescent suicide, 185–186; social/environmental factors, 186–188; survey about youth violence and firearms, 175; violencerelated risk, 175–177; conclusions, 190–191 adult partner abuse, childhood predictors of, 246 Adults and Children Together Against Violence (ACT) (American Psychological Association), 168 Advocacy Center and the Domestic Abuse Project, 93 affect dysregulation, 25, 27 affect theory, 78–79 African Americans: firearm suicide by, 186; homicide rates, 172; homicides as cause of death, 221; male suicide by firearms, 189 agency orientation to violence reduction, 226 aggression and related variables, short- and long-term effects on, 49–56 aggression in dating relationships: research evidence, 73–75; role of victimization experiences, 71–73; theoretical explanation, 75 aggression in dating relationships, theoretical explanation: about, 75; developmental traumatology theory and affect theory, 78–79; self defense, 76; social learning theory and intergenerational transmission of violence theory, 76–78; summary, 79–81 Aggression in the Schools (Olweus), 4 aggression scores, 125 aggressive affect, 50–51, 54–55 aggressive behavior: aggressive cognition and, 53; chronic desensitization, 56; dating violence and, 56; depression and, 206; factors determining, 50–51; GAM (model), 43, 53, 127; Internet violence, 129; knowledge structures, 121; learning, 43; media habits and, 48; media violence,

127–129; mental pathology, 206; probability of, 45; trait aggression, 121; violent video games and, 50, 52, 56–57, 62, 121, 126, 129 aggressive cognition, 50–51, 53–54 Aisenberg, E., 32 Alexander, J., 7 Altman, I., 230 American Indian/Alaskan natives: suicide rates, 186; violent crime rates, 17–18 American Psychological Association, 168 amusement as cause of bullying, 112–113 Amy and Isabelle (Strout), 142–145 Anderson, C. A., 53, 54, 57, 59, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129 Anderson, Jess, 141–142 anger management, 244 Archer, J., 71 Arcuri, A., 209 Ariga, M., 206 arrests: by gender, 200; rates by race, 225 Arsenault, L., 5, 6 assessment: elements of, 23; of treatment of adolescent victims of violence, 22–24 attention and cognitive control effects: attention deficits, 58–59; benefits to visuospatial attention, 57; disruption of cognitive control:, 59–60 attention deficits, 58–59 attention related problems, 58 Augimeri, L. A., 211 Avraamides, M. N., 123, 128 Azrael, D., 179, 187, 188, 189 Babcock, J., 95 BAI test, 24 Bailey, K., 59 Baldacci, H. B., 53 Bandura, A., 43, 117, 123 Banyard, V., 90 Barber, C., 188, 189 Barlett, C. P., 55 Bartholow, B. D., 54, 56, 125, 126, 127 batterer intervention program (BIP), 243, 244 Bauman, K., 76, 91 Bauman, S., 9 Baumgardner, J., 53, 123

Index Bavelier, D., 58 BDI test, 24 Bechtoldt-Baldacci, H., 123 behavioral changes, 212 behavioral problems, history of abuse and, 203 behavioral scripts, 43, 53 behavioral theory, 147 Belknap, J., 202, 203 Bell, K., 98 Bellmoff, L., 110 Berkowitz, L., 128 bidirectional abuse, 99 bidirectional violence, 94 Bijvank, N. M., 52 biological theory, 147 Birckbichler, L., 110 Birckmayer, J., 187, 190 Birnbaum, H. J., 147 Bjerregaard, B., 182 Black, B. M., 92 black youths homicide rate, 17 Blackburn, A. G., 207 Black’s Law Dictionary, 93 Bloom, S., 184 Boat, B., 154 Bobo doll paradigm, 43 Bonanno, R. A., 116 Bosacki, S. L., 112 Bostic, J., 208 Bowes, L., 5, 6 Boyle, J., 11 boys: dating aggression, 79; dating assaults by, 72; family violence influence on, 204; firearm availability to, 178; firearm ownership of, 181; future assault predictors, 205; grade point average of abused, 90; in abusive relationship, 97; juvenile arrest statistics, 200–202; on bullying, 109, 110, 117; parental monitoring, 205; physical and sexual victimization, 202; power and control, 72; psychological distress, 29; rape, 28; risk factors for, 29; self-defense by, 76; victimization risk factors for, 29; video games rating, 41–42; youthful sexual activity by, 146 Bradford, J., 147 Bradley, J. F., 107

261 Bradley, M. M., 124 Bradley, Michael J., 139 Bradshaw, C. P., 10 Braga, A., 178 Branch, O. L., 55 Bredekamp, J., 110 Bridge, J., 185, 190 Briere, J., 18, 25, 26 Brown, G., 116 Buchanan, P., 106, 112, 114 Buchanan, R., 214 Buckley, K. E., 57 Buka, S., 179 bullies: moral disengagement of, 116; teachers perception of, 10; view of, 114–116 bullying: as harmless fun, 115–116; at schools, 9; benefits of, to bullies, 115–116; blame for, according to bullies, 117–118; gender considerations, 117; interventions for, 30; peer pressure as cause of, 113–114; power and status from, 110–111; prevention and intervention, 117; reports of, 3; self-esteem levels and, 111–112; teenager motivation for, 109–111; victim attributing, by gender, 109; vs. peer victimization (PV), 5; workplace, 7 bullying causes, young people’s representation: about, 105–106; amusement, 112–113; deviant victim, 106–109; disturbed bully, 111–112; from bully’s view, 114–116; peer pressure, 113–114; power, status and friendship, 109–111; practitioners’ implications, 116–118 Burnette, M. L., 203 Burns, S., 116 Bushman, B. J., 52, 53, 55, 57, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 Caldwell, A., 175 Callahan, C., 175, 178 Campbell, D., 154 Campbell, J., 91 Campo, J., 185, 190 Capaccioli, K., 7, 8, 10, 11 Capaldi, D. M., 78 Carlson, K., 107, 180

262 Index Carnagey, N. L., 122, 123, 124 Caspi, A., 71, 73 CDI test, 24 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 163, 175 Chamberlain, P., 215 Champion, H., 175, 181 Charles, D., 76 Chauhan, P., 203 Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws, 189, 190 Child Behavioral Checklist, 24 childhood physical and sexual abuse and assault treatment, 24–25 childhood predictors of adult partner abuse, 246 children: maltreatment of, 24. See also adolescents; boys; girls Children in Communities Study, 246 Clarke, Naomi, 141 Clayton, R., 180 Cline, V. B., 122 Codispoti, M., 124 cognitive desensitization, 123 cognitive-behavioral approach, 27 cognitive-behavioral theory, 148, 211 cognitive-behavioral therapy, 32, 244 cognitive-control disruption, 59–60 cognitive-functioning elements, 23 cognitive-neoassociation theory, 43 cognitive-processing therapy, 27 Cohan, A., 140 Cohen-Kettenis, P. T., 206 community interventions, 163–169 community violence, 33–34 Community Violence Exposure Survey, 24 comorbid diagnoses, 26 competitive reaction-time (CRT) task, 125 complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 18–19 complex trauma, 23 concealed weapons in safe areas, 179 conduct disorder (CD), 212 Cook, P., 172, 173, 174, 178 Cornell, D., 201 Cosby, R., 149 couples: mutual violence, 94; physical abuse after marriage, 241–242

couples counseling, 244 couples therapy, 244 Courrier, S., 122 Court TV, 149–151 Cram, F., 25–26 Crawford, E., 73 Crick, N. R., 105 crime displacement, 228–229 Croft, R. G., 122 Crosby, A., 185 Crosby, J. W., 7, 8, 10, 11 Crosby, L., 78 Cross, C., 90 Cross, D., 116 cross-sectional correlational studies, 47 Cullingford, C., 110, 113, 114, 116 cultivation theory, 43 Cuthbert, B. N., 124 Dane, A. V., 112 date rape incidence, 25–26 dating aggression, 73 dating violence: risk factors for perpetration of, 72; role of girls and women in, 71; training program, 245–246; victims’ academic performance, 245 David, J., 107 Davidson, L. M., 11 Davis, E., 54, 56, 127 Decker, S., 175 DeGarmo, D. S., 214 Del Rio, A., 9 delinquency: reductions in, 215; substance use by girls, 208 delinquency and violent behavior in girls: about, 199; intervention for violent and aggressive girls, 210; mental illness and emotional distress, 205–207; multidimensional treatment foster care, 213–216; risk factors for juvenile female offending and violent behavior, 202; sexual and physical victimization, 202–203; snap-girls connection, 210–213; substance abuse, 207–210; trends in female juvenile offending, 199–202; troubled family life, 203–206; conclusions, 216

Index delinquent girls: mothers of, 204; physical and sexual abuse among, 203; posttraumatic stress symptoms, 206; substance abuse and victimization, 209–210; substance use by, 207; suicide and, 206 Deluca, Ken, 152 Demaray, M. K., 11 Demetriou, A., 129 Denson, D., 154 Department of Justice, 227 Desai, A. D., 72, 74 desensitization: about, 121–122; at psychological level, 124–126; behavior correlates to, 126–128; definition of, 122; empathy and, 50–51, 55–56; future directions, 129–130; individual differences, 128–129; mechanisms, 122; to media violence, 122–124 desensitization theory, 43 developmental concerns, 28 developmental traumatology theory, 78–79 deviancy vs. difference examples, 107–108 deviant victim as cause of bullying, 106–109 DeVille, J., 182 Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 61 Dill, K. E., 127 Ding, C., 179 displacement hypothesis, 61 distal factors, 43–44 disturbed bully, 111–112 Dixon, A., 206, 208 Dodge, K. A., 105 Doll, H., 206 domestic distress homicides, 201–202 D’Onofrio, B. M., 204, 205 Doreleijers, T. A. H., 206 double standard for offenders, 151 Drabman, R. S., 122 Duluth model, 243, 244 Dunn, D. W., 59 Dyer, E., 154 dynamic theory of personality, 228 Dziech, B. W., 140 Eckhardt, C., 97, 98, 99 ecological levels of intervention, 233

263 education of teens to discriminate abusive from nonabusive situations. See abusive vs. nonabusive situation discrimination Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature (Shakeshaft), 136 Edwards, K. E., 72, 74 Einarsen, S., 7 electroencephalography (EEG), 125 Elkind, D., 138 Elvevag, B., 139 emotional desensitization, 123 empathy: bullies and, 111, 118; described, 56, 126; desensitization and, 50, 55, 56; diminished, 53; prosocial video games, 57; protection factor of high levels of, 49; reduction of, 126; therapeutic, 28; violence and, 79; violent films impact on, 56 Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), 42 Entertainment Tonight, 149–151 environmental interventions, 229, 233 Erling, A., 106, 110, 114 Esposito, L. E., 7, 8 Evans, W., 180 Everson, M., 154 experimental studies, 47 Fabio, A., 185, 190 facial electromyography, 124 Fagan, J., 71, 174, 175, 183 Fairbank, J. A., 5 family violence impact, 204 family-of-origin abuse effects, 75 Fanti, K. A., 123, 128, 129 Fazel, S., 206 FBI Supplementary Homicide report, 201 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 199 Fedoroff, J., 147 feminist theory, 79–80 Feng, J., 58 Finkelhor, D., 25–26, 137 firearm availability, 187–188 firearm homicide rates: by race and ethnicity, 174; of inner-city adolescents, 175 firearm selling, 172

264 Index firearm suicide: adolescents and prevalence of, 184; adolescents trends, 184–185; by African Americans, 186, 189; by ethnicity, 186; by females, 185; Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws and, 189; trends of, 184–185 firearms, adolescent accessibility to, 187 five C’s of positive youth development, 228 Foehr, U. G., 61 Foshee, V., 76, 91 foster parents, 214 Fredland, N., 91 Frisén, A., 108, 111, 114 Fualaau, Vili, 148–149 Funk, J. B., 53, 123

199; victimization risk factors for, 28; video games rating, 41; violent behavior of, 200–201; violent offending among, 204; youthful sexual activity by, 146. See also delinquent girls Grasley, C., 78 Graves, K. N., 75 Green, C. S., 58 Greenhouse, J., 185, 190 Greenwald, M. K., 124 Groth, A. N., 147 Gruber, M. L., 124 gun violence, 172 gun violence decline, 172 gun-carrying data, 176

Gainer, P., 175, 181 galvanic skin response (GSR), 56, 124 gaming addiction, 61–62 Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program, 227–228 Gary, N., 154 Gavazzi, S., 208, 209 gender bias theory, 151 gender variations in dating violence, 80 gender-neutral vs. gender-specific programming, 80 general aggression model (GAM), 43–46, 127, 128 general learning model (GLM), 43–46 Gentile, D. A., 57, 59, 60 Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall (Wolfe), 138 Giauque, A. L., 59 Gidycz, C. A., 72, 74 Giedd, J., 139 Giordano, P. C., 204, 205 girls: arrests rates of, 200; dating aggression, 79; dating assaults by, 72; family violence influence on, 204; future assault predictors, 205; grade point average of abused, 90; in abusive relationship, 97; juvenile arrest statistics, 200–202; on bullying, 109, 110, 117; parental monitoring, 205; physical and sexual victimization, 202; psychological distress, 29; rape, 28; risk factors for, 28; self-defense by, 72; stereotypes of,

Hamarus, P., 108 Hamerlynck, S. M. J. J., 206, 207 Hamm, A. O., 124 Hara, H., 116 Hardy, M., 190 Harris, R. H., 55, 56 Harris, W. H., 5 Harrison, P., 231 Hassle Log, 211 hate and bias incidents against LGBTQ victims, 18 Hawa, V., 129 Hazler, R. J., 111 heart rate, 55, 124 helpful and prosocial behavior, 57 Hemenway, D., 178, 187, 188, 189, 190 Henrich, C. C., 123, 128 Hepburn, L., 187 Herrera, V. M., 201, 204 Hilkene, B., 167 Hoffman, M. L., 117 Holmqvist, K., 108, 111 Holsinger, K., 202, 203 homicides: adolescents and guns, 173; African Americans rates of, 172; age groups risk of, 221; as cause of death of African Americans, 221; domestic distress, 201–202; firearm homicide rates, 174, 175, 185; records of, 201 Hoover, J. H., 111 Hopf, W. H., 54 Horowitz, J. A., 107

Index Horowitz, R., 179 Horton, R. W., 122 Howard, J., 209 Howie, P., 205 Huber, G. L., 54 Huesmann, L. R., 43 human brain, changes in, 139 Hunsaker, D., 187 Hunsaker, J., 187 Hunter, S., 11 Hwang, C. P., 106, 110 Hymel, S., 116 identity disturbance, 25 Ihori, N., 53, 55, 57 imminent risk treatment, 20 impaired-self capacities, 25 impaired-self disturbance, 25 Inciardi, J., 179 individualist bias, 228, 229 individual-level interventions, 233 inner-city adolescents, firearm homicide rates of, 175 integrative treatment of complex trauma (ITCT), 26–28 interdependence theory, 77 intergenerational transmission of violence theory, 76–78 internalized distress, 4, 6 Internet violence, 129–130 Internet-related sex crimes, 26 interparental violence, 73 intervention focus, 227 interventions: categories for youth violence reduction, 227; conclusions and implications, 11–13; effectiveness of, 31–32, 241; family-based, for community violence, 34; for bullying and school violence, 30; gender sensitive programs, 210 intimate partner violence (IPV): causes of, 98; mental health issues and, 29; prevalence of, 28 intimate terrorism, 96 Jackson, S. M., 25–26 Jamison, T. R., 97–98 Jansen, L. M. C., 206

265 Jenkins, P., 181 Joe, S., 186 Johnson, A., 114 Johnson, M., 96 Jones, D., 154 Jones, L., 137 Joseph, S., 7 juvenile justice detention center, 21 juvenile justice system, 21–22, 224–225 Kahn, D., 179 Kaikkonen, P., 108 Kalamas, A. D., 124 Kaplan, M., 186 Karch, D., 185 Kasian, M., 90 Kazimi, M., 179 Keenan, K., 204, 205 Kegler, S., 185 Kelleher, K., 185, 190 Kennedy, D., 178 Kenny, D. T., 209 Kercher, G., 148 Khoo, A., 57 Kirsh, S. J., 53, 127 Kline, Heather, 155 knowledge structure changes, 127 Knutsen, S., 110, 113, 116, 117 Konijn, E. A., 52 Krahé, B., 53 Kronenberger, W. G., 59 Krugman, R., 154 Krull, R. A., 124 Kub, J., 91 Kubrin, C., 187, 189 Lafave, Debra, 149–151 Lahelma, E., 116 Lahey, B. B., 204, 205 Lang, B. J., 124 Lang, P. J., 124 Langhinrichsen-Rohling, J., 94–95, 99 Langstrom, N., 206 Lanktree, C. B., 18, 26 Larsen, J. L., 59 Lassonde, C., 179 Laub, J., 172, 173, 174 Lauer, M., 149

266 Index Layne, C. M., 32 Lennings, C. L., 209 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (LGBTQ) victims, 18 Letourneau, Mary Kay, 148–149 Leve, L. D., 215 Levene, K., 211 Lewin, K., 228 LH Research Survey, 181 Li, T. Q., 59 Liau, A. K., 57 Lim, J., 208 Linder, F., 76, 91 Linder, J. R., 60 Lippincott, E. C., 122 Lippmann, S., 187 Lipsey, M. W., 31–32 Lizotte, A., 181, 182 longitudinal studies, 47 Loper, A., 201 Lopp, E., 110 Lorenz, Konrad, 4 Lowe, M. J., 59 Lower, R., 90 Lubell, K. M., 185 Ludwig, J., 178 Lurito, J. T., 59 Luster, T., 90 Luthra, R., 74 Lynch, P. J., 60 MACI test, 24 Mackdacy, L., 209 Magdol, L., 71, 73 Makepeace, J. M., 89 Male Perpetrators of Child Maltreatment: Findings from NCANDS (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System), 146 Manganello, J., 189 Mansfield, Troy, 155 Marini, Z. A., 112 Marquart, J. W., 205 Marsh, S., 180 Marshall, M., 110 maternal abuse vs. paternal abuse, 73 Mathews, V. P., 59 Maupin, J. R., 231 Maycock, B., 116

Mays, G. L., 231 McBryde, M., 184 McCloskey, L. A., 201, 204 McCullough, B., 107 McGee, Z., 182 McGraw, J., 154 McKinney, C., 34 media violence: bidirectional relationship view of, 128; causal links to aggression, 121; desensitization to, 121–130; imitative behavior source, 123; mechanisms and effects, 122 medical centers and hospitals, 20–21 Meichenbaum’s anxiety management procedures, 27 mental health issues: dating violence, 90; intimate partner violence (IPV) and, 29; risk factors for adolescent firearm suicide, 186–187 mental illness: abuse and, 203; among incarcerated adolescents, 206; depression and, 206; emotional stress, 205–207; family dysfunction, 209; female offenders and, 202; substance abuse and, 207; suicide attempts, 206 mentors, 168 Meyers, J., 110 Mikkelsen, E., 7 Mikuni, M., 207 Miller, M., 178, 179, 187, 188, 189 Ming, L. K., 57 Mitchell, K. J., 25–26 MMPI-A test, 24 mobbing, 4 Moffitt, T. E., 71, 73 Mohler Rockwell, S., 204, 205 Molidor, C., 76 Möller, I., 53 Molnar, B., 179 Montoya, C., 107 Moor, A., 28 moral disengagement, 116, 118 Moretti, M. M., 203, 204, 205 Morrison, J., 110, 113, 114, 116 mother-daughter relationship, 204 Mulhall, P., 182 Mullings, J. L., 207 Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care

Index program, 213 multiple trauma experiences, 18–19 multiple treatment modalities, 27 Mulvihill, M., 179 Murphy, C., 98–99 Mynard, H., 7 Nakano, R., 207 National Center for Health Statistics Mortality, 184 National Center for Victims of Crime, 17, 93 National Center of Juvenile Justice, 203 National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, 89 National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 18 National Family Violence Survey, 241 National Institute of Justice, 244 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 205 National Survey of Adolescent Males, 178 National Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (National Youth Risk Behavior Survey) (YRBSS), 175, 188 Naugle, A., 98 Neff, J., 209 Nelsen, E., 179 New York City Youth Violence Study, 182–184 Newman, D. L., 71 Noonan, R. K., 76 Norris, F. H., 6, 12 Oates, R., 154 O’Brennan, L. M., 10 Obsuth, I., 204, 205 odd student repertoire, 106 Odgers, C. L., 203, 204, 205 Oehler, J., 7, 8, 10, 11 Okeefe, M., 73, 74, 76 O’Leary, D. K., 76, 77 Olweus, D., 4–5, 20 One Hundred Black Men of America, Inc., 168 opposition defiant disorder (ODD), 212 orientations of intervention, 233 Oscarsson, D., 108, 111

267 Owens, L., 110, 113 PAI-A test, 24 Painter, S., 90 Paradise, M. J., 75, 76 parental monitoring, 205 parental rights, 22 parental violence factors in father relationships, 91 partner-abusive behaviors, 239 Pasold, T., 53, 123 paternal abuse: perpetration of physical dating violence and, 74; vs. maternal abuse, 73 pathological gamers, 62 pecking order process, 111 Pedlow, S., 204, 205 peer juries, 230 peer pressure as cause of bullying, 113–114 peer victimization (PV): about, 3, 4; adult perception, 10; as traumatic experience, 4; behaviors, 9; definition, 4–5; forms of, 5; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, 7; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology and, 8; social support relationship, 10–11; vs. bullying, 5 peer victimization (PV) and posttraumatic stress disorder in children and adolescents, 3–13; intervention, conclusions and implications, 11–13; peer victimization and post-traumatic stress disorder, 6–9; peer victimization and post-traumatic stress disorder in children and adolescents, 10; trauma and ecology, 9–10; trauma in children, 5–6 peer violence intervention, 92 Pennell, S., 175 People (magazine), 3 Pepler, D. J., 211, 212 perpetrators, subtypes of, 95 person factors, 44–45 personal factors: life experiences, 188–189; mental health problems, 188 personality assessment tools, 98 Persson, C., 114

268 Index Peterson, Robert, 135, 140 Phillips, C., 110, 111 physical aggression in dating relationships: by women, 71; motivation for, 72 physical and sexual abuse among delinquent girls, 203 physical and sexual victimization among delinquents, 202 physical victimization, 11 physiological arousal, 50–51, 55 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): definition of, 5; peer victimization (PV) and, 7; rate of, 18; severity of exposure for symptoms, 22–23; violence as cause of, 6. See also peer victimization (PV) and post-traumatic stress disorder in children and adolescents post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology: as violence perpetration predictor, 78; peer victimization (PV) and, 8; peer victimization (PV) behaviors, 9 Pottieger, A., 179 power, status and friendship as causes of bullying, 109–111 Power and Control Wheel, 243 practitioners’ implications, 116–118 Pratt, J., 58 prevention strategies, 225 primary care providers, 20–21 primary preventions, 225 probabilistic causality, 48–49 prolonged exposure therapy, 27 prosocial (helping) behavior, 50–51, 57 protective factors, 49 proweapon socialization, 181–182 proximate factors, 43–44 psychiatric hospital settings, short- or long-term, 20 psychodynamic abuser therapy, 243 psychodynamic theory, 147 psychodynamic treatment, 243 psychological abuse prevalence between teens, 90 psychological aggression in dating relationships, 72 psychological trauma, 18 punitive policies vs. restorative justice, 32

Putnam, Adam, 156 Putnam, F. W., 5 Pynoos, R. S., 32 pyschoeducation, 27 rape: date rape, 25–26; problems incurred by adolescent rape victims, 26; statutory rape, 26; trauma, 27 Rathouz, P., 204, 205 recidivism rates, 222, 231, 244–245 Reebye, P., 204, 205 Reid, J. B., 214 relational disturbance, 25 relational victimization, 9 Rembusch, M. E., 59 Renk, K., 34 Reppucci, N. D., 203 residential treatment settings, 20–22 Resnick, M., 167 restorative justice principles, 231 restorative justice vs. punitive policies, 32 Ricardo, I., 91 Rice, J., 76, 91 Richardson, Clive, 141 Rickards, S., 25 Rideout, V. J., 61 Riggs, D. S., 76, 77 Ris, J., 182 risk factor approach, 48–49 risk factors: by gender, 29; for adolescent suicide, 185–186; for aggression, 49, 52; for juvenile female offending and violent behavior, 202; for perpetration of dating violence, 72; victimization, for boys, 29; victimization, for girls, 28 Rivara, F., 175, 178 Roberts, D. F., 61 Robertson, C., 154 Robins, Sydney L., 152–154 Rochester Youth Survey, 181 Rocke-Henderson, N., 116 Rodeheffer, C. D., 55 Rodgers, J. L., 204, 205 Roethke, Theodore, 137 Rogoff, B., 230 Rojas-Vilches, A., 34 Romero, M., 184 Ross, D., 43, 123

Index Ross, J., 95 Ross, S. A., 43, 123 Rothstein, H. R., 53, 55, 57 Rountree, P., 180, 181–182 Safe Dates Program, 29, 80 Sakamoto, A., 53, 55, 57 Saldana, L., 214 Saleem, M., 53, 55, 57 Salmivalli, C., 106, 110, 114 Saltzman, W. R., 32 SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), 207 Samper, R., 98–99 Sawyer, A. L., 10 Schackner, R., 188, 189 Scheer, S., 208 school gun carrying rates, 175 school performance, 60–61 school settings, treatment in, 19–20 school violence: common forms of, 30; prevention program elements, 31 school-based group therapy, 32 schools: bullying at, 9–10; student’s weapon carrying at, 176–177; youth safety in, 223; zero-tolerance policies at, 174 Schubiner, H., 179 Scott, K., 78 Scott, R., 179 screen time, 60 script theory, 43 Sechrist, S. M., 75 secondary preventions, 225 Seiger, K., 34 self defense, 72, 76 self-blame, 27 self-devaluation, 27 sentencing, 149–151 Sestir, M. A., 54, 56, 125, 126, 127 setting-level interventions, 229 sexual abuse: about, 135; definition of, 136; prevalence of, 137 sexually transmitted disease (STD) risks, 25 Seymour, F. W., 25–26 Shain, B., 188, 190 Shakeshaft, C., 136, 140, 156 Shakoor, S., 5, 6

269 Sharps, P., 91 Sheftall, A., 185, 190 Sheley, J., 178, 179, 182 Sheppard, D., 181 Shibuya, A., 53, 55, 57 Shields, L., 187 Shute, R., 110, 113 Sidwell Friends school, 135 Silva, P. A., 71, 73 Sirotnak, A., 154 situational couple violence, 96 situational factors, 43–44 Slee, P., 110, 113 Sloan, L. B., 6, 12 Slovak, K., 178 Small, S., 90 Smith, M., 179 Snyder, H., 137, 145 social cognitive theory, 42–43 social environment, 18 social information processing (SIP) models, 105 social learning theory: feminist theory, 79–80; intergenerational transmission of violence theory and, 76–78; social cognitive theory and, 42–43 social support: access to, 12; definition of, 11; effect of reliance on, 11 social victimization, 12 social/environmental factors: firearm availability, 187–188; geographic location, 186–187; socioeconomic status (SES), 187 socioeconomic status (SES): social/ environmental factors, 187; weapons carriers, 181 Spence, I., 58 Stark, E., 95–96 Starling, J., 206, 208 State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI), 97–98 statutory rape, 26 Steinberg, A. M., 32 stereotypes: about adolescents, 222; of girls, 199 Storch, E. A., 7, 8 Straatman, A., 78 Strengthening Families model, 168

270 Index stress inoculation training, 27 Stroop effect, 59 Stroop tasks, 59–60 Strout, Elizabeth, 142–145 Student Protection Act of 2009, 156 student’s weapon carrying at schools, 176–177 substance abuse: about, 207–210; adolescents, 22; aggressive behavior, 51; bully victims and, 30; by female delinquents, 207–209; childhood abuse and, 25, 26; dating violence role, 81, 99, 245; parental involvement, 164; personal factors, 188; psychiatric hospital settings, 20; residential treatment settings, 21; risk factors for, 168, 202, 209–210; treatment facilities, 20, 21; victimization and, 209 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 30 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 207 substance use: by delinquent girls, 207, 208; fighting and, 207 suicide: delinquent girls and, 206. See also firearm suicide suicide rates: by gender, 186; mental health problems and, 188; rural vs. urban, 186–187 Swart, E., 110 Swing, E. L., 53, 55, 57, 59 symbolic interactionism, 105 systemic interventions, 20 teachers: abuse identification by, 99–100; intervention by, 9–10; perception of bullying by, 10; responsibilities and actions of, 153–155; social support from, 11 teachers, abuse by: as educators, 140; DeLuca case, 149–150; fiction about, 142–145; Lafave case, 149–150; Letourneau case, 146; male adolescent student response to, 146; Mansfield case, 155–156; Mary Kay, 148–149; Peterson case, 135; prevalence rate of, 137; reporting of teacher misconduct, 145; reporting problems, 154–155; Richardson case, 141; school investigations regarding, 152–154; sexual

victimization by, 135; Sidwell Friends school, 135; Student Protection Act of 2009 proposal, 159 teen pregnancy risks, 25 teenage victims of violence: community interventions, 167–169; protective factors for, 167; scenarios of, 164–166; support for, 163–164 television and television watching, 58 television violence, 123 Teräsahjo, T., 106, 110, 114, 116 tertiary preventions, 225 “The Adolescent Brain: A Work in Progress” (Weingberger, Elvevag, and Giedd), 139 theoretical frameworks, 41–46 Thomas, M. H., 122 Thornberg, R., 107, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117 Tolman, R. M., 76 trait aggressiveness, 125, 128 transactional interventions, 233 transactional strategies for youth violence reduction, 230 trauma: ecology and, 9–10; in children, 5–6; integrative treatment of complex trauma (ITCT), 26–28; psychological trauma, 18; rape trauma, 27; severity of exposure for, 22–23. See also posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trauma-specific measures, 24 traumatic events, 6, 17 treatment: court ordered, 22; for aggressors, 32; for individuals, 32–33; interventions for adolescents and community violence, 33–34; types of settings, 19 treatment of adolescent victims of violence: about, 17–19; adolescent intimate partner violence (IPV), 28–30; adolescent victims of physical and sexual assault, 25–26; assessment of, 22–24; childhood physical and sexual abuse and assault, treatment of, 24–25; community violence, 33–34; integrative treatment of complex trauma (ITCT), 26–28; interventions, effectiveness of, 31–32; interventions, for bullying and school violence, 30; juvenile justice system, 21–22;

Index medical centers and hospitals, 20–21; psychiatric hospital settings, short- or long-term, 20; residential treatment settings, 20–22; school settings, treatment within, 19–20; school violence prevention programs, common elements in, 31; treatment for individuals, 32–33; treatment setting types, 19; summary, 35 triggers, 211 Trulson, C. R., 205 Tzelepis, A., 179 Van, Hulle, C. A., 204, 205 Vandiver, D., 148 Vanman, E., 123, 128 VanWynsberghe, A., 72, 74 Varjas, K., 110 Vaughan, A., 212 verbal victimization, 12 Vermeiren, R., 206 Vernick, J., 189 Vessey, J. A., 107 victim attributing, 109, 116 victimization: dating relationship aggression, 71–73; dating violence, 73; delinquent girls and substance abuse, 209–210; physical, 11; relational, 9; risk factors by gender, 29; risk factors for boys, 29; risk factors for girls, 28; sexual and physical, 202–203; social, 12; verbal, 12. See also peer victimization (PV) video games: popularity and usage of, 41; rating, 42; types of studies in research, 47–48. See also violent video game effects violence: acceptance of, 91, 92; adaptive role of, 183; agency orientation to reduction, 226; as cause of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 6; as outlet for traumatic experiences, 78; cessation by adult males, 242; functional material and symbolic meanings, 183; initiation of, by gender, 92; race and ethnicity, 223; resistance to, 96; surge of, 5 violence-related risk factors, 174 violent crime rates by racial groups, 17–18 violent video game effects: about, 41–42; aggressive affect, 54–55; aggressive

271 behavior, 52, 56–57, 62, 121, 126, 129; aggressive cognition, 53–54; desensitization and empathy, 55–56; effects on attention and cognitive control, 57–60; gaming addiction, 61–62; physiological arousal, 55; probabilistic causality and the risk factor approach, 48–49; school performance, 60–61; short- and longterm effects on aggression and related variables, 49–56; theoretical frameworks, 41–46; types of studies in video game research, 47–48; summary, 62–63 visuospatial attention benefits, 57 Vittes, K., 178 Wadsworth, T., 187, 189 WAIS-IV or WISC-IV measures, 23–24 Waite, D., 203, 209 Waldman, I. D., 204, 205 Walsh, D. A., 59, 60 Walsh, M., 211, 212 Wang, Y., 59 Watt, J. H., 124 Watts, K., 97–98 weapons carriers: gender, ethnicity, and economic status of, 180; peers of, 182, 184; socioeconomic status (SES), 181 Weaver, A., 5, 7, 8 Webber, J., 212 Webster, D., 175, 181, 189 Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), 23 Weiner, L., 140 Weingberger, D., 139 Weisz, A. N., 92 Wekerle, C., 78 West, R., 59 White, J. W., 75 white youths: firearm homicide rates, 174; homicide rates, 17–18; weapon carrying, 180 Wilcher, R., 76, 91 Wilcox, P., 180 Wilkinson, D., 174, 175, 183, 184 Williams, B., 184 Williams, S., 182 Wilson, S. J., 31–32 Wintemute, G., 184

272 Index Winzer, M., 106, 112, 114 Wolak, J., 25–26 Wolfe, Anthony, 138 Wolfe, D. A., 78 Wolpe J., 122 Wood, E. A., 59 workplace bullying, 7 World Health Organization, 186 Wright, J., 178, 179, 182 Wright, M. O., 73 Yarcheck, C., 208 Ybarra, M. L., 25–26 Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind (Bradley, Michael J.), 139 Yonas, M., 91 young women: dating aggression, 79, 81; mental illness and emotional distress, 205–207; sexual abuse experience, 78; victimization and subsequent

perpetration of dating violence, 73, 74, 77–78; youth organizing by, 232 youth agency, 224, 226, 227, 230 youth courts, 230 youth development program, 228 youth engagement and violence prevention, 232 Youth Relationship Project, 80 youth violence: decreases in, 163, 169; prevention strategies, 224; rates of, 223; reduction methods, 223–224 youth violence reduction: from youth agency, 230; intervention categories for, 227; transactional strategies for, 230 YRBSS (National Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System), 175, 188 Yuile, A., 212 Yukawa. S., 57 Zeoli, A., 189 zero-tolerance policies, 32, 174