Highly publicized anti-violence
programs like Scared Straight, D.A.R.E., and boot camp-type
interventions won't change troubled kids' violent behaviors and may
even encourage them, according to a new report from a U.S. government
panel of experts.
"These programs can cost money and yet
not produce any outcome the community wants -- and there's also the
possibility that the programs might actually harm some youth and the
community," said panel chairman Dr. Robert C. Johnson, director of
Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at the University of Medicine and
Dentistry of New Jersey.
He and other panelists spoke to
reporters at a press conference held Friday in Washington, D.C.
In their State-of-the-Science
Conference Statement, experts from the panel -- convened and supported
by the National Institutes of Health -- noted that rates of youth
violence in the United States remain high, despite declining from a
peak in the mid-1990s.
In their deliberations, the panelists
sifted through data from trials going back to 1990 on the causes and
prevention of youth violence. They found that anti-violence programs
involving "scare tactics" or bullying by adults simply don't work.
"Many of these programs take the child
out of the family," explained panelist Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a professor
of social medicine and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "And
whatever they may do or not do for the child while he's in the
institutional setting, [they] leave him completely adrift when the
treatment is over. Some of these programs are, frankly, quite
dreadful."
Johnson agreed. In fact, these
"tough-love," group-oriented efforts "often exacerbate problems, by
grouping young people with delinquent tendencies together, where the
more sophisticated instruct the more naive" in destructive behaviors,
he said.
Often, Eisenberg said, parents see
boot-camp type programs as a quick fix for problems that have much
more complex roots.
"It [temporarily] gets rid of the
problem. You don't see it every day, and you assuage your guilt by
paying money for it -- you think you're doing something for your
child," he said.
Unfortunately, that may not be the
case, since studies show no benefit to these types of initiatives in
curbing bad juvenile behavior, according to the experts.
Fortunately, safer, more effective
violence-prevention programs exist. Studies suggest that long-term,
one-on-one or family-oriented therapy does seem to work in turning
kids' lives around, the panel found.
Panelist Richard Lempert, a professor
of law and sociology at the University of Michigan, said it's easy to
think "nothing works," but many models do. "Working with individuals
to increase skills and competencies, sometimes in school settings,
sometimes in homes, sometimes in families -- that seems to be
promising," he said.
Looking over the data, the experts
noticed common threads between programs that worked and those that
didn't. Effective programs -- such as one-on-one behavioral therapy or
family interventions -- tended to involve long-term treatment, lasting
a year or longer, and were targeted at specific stages in child
development. They were also most often delivered outside of
institutions such as juvenile detention centers.
On the other hand, programs that didn't
work also shared certain features, such as gathering troubled kids
together in large groups, using poorly trained and under-supervised
staff, and emphasizing scare tactics, boot-camp-type environments, or
browbeating by stern adults.
Johnson said much more research needs
to be done to figure out exactly which interventions work best at
keeping troubled teens from violence. Right now, the panel is urging
the creation of a national, population-based Adolescent Violence
Registry to better track youth violence trends, as well as research
focused on how communities can best spend their money to keep youth
violence at bay.
Simply locking violent juvenile
offenders away may help society feel safer, but studies suggest it
does not serve as a deterrent to others, the experts noted.
"Simply put, the practice of
transferring juveniles to adult jurisdictional systems can be
counterproductive," Johnson said, "resulting in greater violence among
incarcerated youth."
According to Johnson, youth violence is
most often rooted in the family, and that's where the real solutions
may lie. "If parents make sure to communicate on a constant basis with
their children, and if they model the appropriate behavior to their
kids, that's going to be a very important support throughout
childhood," he said.