Teens: The Company They Keep
Preventing Destructive Behavior by Harnessing
the Power of Peers
Recent tragic events such as school shootings have
presented us with images of adolescent aggressive and antisocial behavior. There is a national search for answers. Fortunately, a long-term commitment to basic
behavioral research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is now
having some very practical payoff for just these vexing problems.
Recent data from the National Youth Survey (NYS), a
long-term study of violent offenders, point compellingly to the influence of
deviant peers of a young person’s tendency to engage in aggressive and violent
behavior. The flip side of this finding
is that interventions must pay attention to the peer group, a key factor
influencing whether a young person will lead a young adulthood characterized by
violent and aggressive behaviors.
In 1976, the NYS began to follow a nationally
representative sample of 1,725 boys and girls, ages 11 to 17. NYS investigators
have monitored participants’ self-reports of serious violent behaviors as well
as official records of law violations.
At the time of most recent interview, the survey participants were
between ages 27 and 33. More than half
of all participants with records of violent behavior began to engage in such
behavior between the ages of 14 and 17, although a substantial number began as
young as age 12. After age 20, the risk
of initiating a pattern of violent behavior was found to be close to zero.
They found that association with delinquent peers
precedes the initiation and progression to serious violent offenses in 90
percent of cases. This finding was true
of young people of all races.
Many well-intended attempts to “reform” severely
delinquent youths have had few positive effects and even negative outcomes.
Typically, these programs place delinquent youth with other delinquents in
settings such as “group homes.” One alternative based on the new understanding
of peer influence is the Therapeutic Foster Care program, a treatment model for
serious and chronic delinquents (i.e., with an average of 14 arrests, including
4 for felonies). In this program, severely delinquent youths are placed in the
homes of “therapeutic foster parents”--carefully selected couples who are specially
trained in science-based procedures for working with these troubled youngsters
and are given round-the-clock support as well.
Evaluations of the Therapeutic Foster Care program
have shown that it is more effective in reducing delinquency than the usual
placement in group homes. It is also significantly less expensive, and has
fewer runaways and fewer program failures. The Foster Family-based Treatment
Association, developed under NIMH leadership, now has some 400 agency members
across the U.S. who promote the use of the science-based and effective model.
The research and its effective application seriously challenge the policies,
programs and procedures that bring problem youth together.
Today’s research is also suggesting new ways to
prevent antisocial behavior through an array of interventions for youth that is
aimed at peers and other key components of their social environment. That
research has revealed that although there are identifiable and escalating
pathways to antisocial behavior, and possibly some biological factors placing
some children at risk, they are not set in stone, and individuals can make a
long-term difference in the lives of troubled and troubling children.
As summed up in a major review of current research on
antisocial and aggressive behavior:“Current
levels of delinquency and violence in many Western societies, particularly the
United States, are sufficiently high in many communities that successful
intervention and prevention require a focus on the attitudes and behavioral
norms of the whole adolescent peer culture. In many urban schools, an
aggressive reputation is positively related to adolescent peer popularity. It
is not just the deviant peer group that influences delinquency and risk taking.
Children in these schools grow up in neighborhoods of poverty and high crime
rates, being exposed to homicide and the frequent use of guns. All this is
embedded in a media culture of highly explicit violence...The challenge of
contemporary prevention, whether for the high-risk early starter group or the
late-starting adolescence-limited group is to alter these adolescent norms.
The primary strategy currently employed to achieve
this goal is through the use of classroom and school-based programs in social
problem solving, conflict management, violence prevention,, and more
broad-based curriculum for promoting emotional and social development in the
total school population....These universal interventions should not be
considered as alternatives to more targeted interventions with high-risk youth,
because each approach provides a complementary strategy to reducing violence
and antisocial activity in the entire community. The success of one approach
should influence the success of another.”
For More Information About NIMH: For more information about
Mental Illnesses - Contact:
Office
of Communications and Public Liaison The
Alliance for the Mentally Ill
NIMH
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of Greater Chicago
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Bethesda,
MD 20892-9663 Phone:
312-563-0445
Phone: 301-443-4513 E-mail: nimhinfo@nih.gov