Quantum Units Education®

Why Are Principles So Important?

1. Youth involved in gangs are far more likely than youths not involved in gangs to be victims and perpetrators of violence, and violence among young people results in an average of ___ deaths everyday among those ages 10-24.

What You Will Learn

2. Experts believe that early prevention strategies increase the protective role of families by enhancing consistent and appropriate discipline, monitoring, communication and _________.

Vocabulary: Some Basic Definitions

3. James C. Howell offers a practical definition of a youth gang as having three or more members who share an identity which is often linked to a name and other symbols.  

4. In a 2010 national survey, 35 percent of high school students and 25 percent of middle school students said that there were gangs or students who considered themselves to be part of a gang in their school.

The Consequences of Gang Membership

5. Gang involvement encourages more active participation in delinquency, drug use, drug trafficking and violence, and in turn may result in arrest, conviction and incarceration.

Prevention Options

6. In order to address gang victimization in the contexts of the individual, family, school, and community, the authors recommend each of the following EXCEPT:

The Attraction of Gangs: How Can We Reduce It?

7. A youth's decision to join a gang may be impacted by economics, relationships, protection, support and belonging, status, and having an “outlaw” mentality.

Reducing the Attractions of Gangs

8. Healthy adolescent growth is fostered when communities are able to promote strong connections to schools, positive presence of adult mentors and family members, safety, and other factors, which are known as:

Train and Educate for Meaningful Employment

9. A comprehensive program to help prevent gang joining might include providing alternative identities to 11 to 14 year olds by teaching them skills and exposing them to vocational environments.

What is The Role of Public Health in Gang Membership Prevention

10. Because of its focus on ______________________, public health is uniquely positioned to convene partners, encourage collaboration across disciplines and sectors, and develop and evaluate comprehensive strategies to prevent gang involvement.

The Public Health Perspective

11. Which of the following is NOT one of the steps included in the public health approach to youth violence?

Public Health Principle #2: Identifying Risk and Protective Factors

12. One method for measuring risk and protective factors is surveying youth, their families, and other influential adults about youth themselves, their relationships, and the environments that they grow up in.

Public Health Principle #3: Developing and Evaluating Interventions

13. In general, a greater priority has been placed on developing and evaluating prevention approaches than on intervention approaches for combating gang violence.

Public Health Principle #4: Ensuring Widespread Adoption of Evidence Based Strategies

14. The Zone Initiative was developed by the CDC to raise awareness that youth violence is a preventable public health problem and to promote the use of intervention strategies.

Policy Issues and Future Directions

15. Although numerous gang-membership prevention programs have been implemented in the past, few have been proven to be effective, probably because they have not been rigorously evaluated.

What is the Role of Police in Preventing Gang Membership?-The Sara Model

16. The four steps of SARA are scanning the environment to identify a problem, analyzing the problem using multiple sources of information, developing a response, and:

The Role of Police in Assessment

17. The police have an opportunity to provide a realistic assessment of a gang problem, which may otherwise be denied or overidentified if left to other community members.

Understanding the Risk Factors

18. Membership in a gang usually lasts for a relatively short period of time, generally less than:

19. Local law enforcement agencies should encourage prevention activities that increase the accountability of youth to social institutions, including family, schools and communities.

20. Through partnerships with other agencies and groups, law enforcement can help increase ________________, an important principle in gang prevention.

How Should We Identify and Intervene With Youth at Risk of Joining Gangs?-In Brief

21. Research of youth suggest that ______ percent of youth from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods actually affiliate with or join a gang during their lifetime.

22. Although the simple answer to prevent group involvement is to start early and prevent risk, a more complex issue is determining how best to do this across different ages and within the context of communities, family, school, and peers.

Risk Factors During the Very Early Years: Ages 0-5

23. Risks factors that develop from birth to age 5 that may increase risk for antisocial behavior include each of the following EXCEPT:

Risk Factors

24. Low levels of school achievement and low attachment to school in elementary years predict gang involvement and other types of antisocial behavior later on.

What Should Be Done in the Family to Prevent Gang Membership?

25. While aggressive and antisocial behavior during childhood is a risk factor for more serious crime, poor attachment to family and community is related to the severity of involvement.

The Role of Child Development in Risks for Gang-Joining

26. Typically, when delinquent behaviors develop in adolescence, it indicates that the youth's family has, for most part, functioned poorly across areas of parenting and family interaction.

Family-Focused Prevention Programs and Strategies

27. By focusing on strategies that strengthen families at the outset, mitigate the harm of adolescent delinquency, and bolster _____________, gang involvement and the related community violence can be effectively neutralized.

Family-Focused Prevention Programs and Strategies-Adolescence

28. Psychodynamic therapy is one of the more widely implemented and empirically supported family-focused intervention strategies, targeting youth at highest risk for gang involvement.

Implementation Challenges-Engaging Families

29. Studies have shown that family participation in gang prevention programs has been influenced by perceived or anticipated benefits of the program, logistical barriers, and:

30. Based on the scholarship of prevention scientists and the experience of practitioners, community and school focused interventions are among the most successful and cost effective approaches to preventing youth involvement in risky, antisocial behaviors.

What Can Schools do to Help Prevent Gang-Joining?-In Brief

31. Despite the large number of prevention programs in schools, school-based gang-membership prevention programs are seldom based on a careful consideration of specific needs, but rather on universal strategies.

32. The development of gang problems may involve a cyclical process of ________________ in which real or perceived threat, intimidation, social contagion and retaliation feed on each other to exacerbate a gang problem.

Weaknesses of Existing Prevention Activity

33. The most common school based prevention activities tend to involve curriculum, instruction, and training, while gang intervention activities include counseling, social work, and therapeutic intervention.

Policy Implications

34. Efforts to alter school environments will generally be fundamentally similar to working with individual youth to decrease their propensity for gang involvement.

What Should be Done in the Community to Prevent Gang-Joining?

35. Community gang prevention strategies should be designed around core activities such as tutoring, mentoring, life-skills training, case management, parental involvement, connection with schools, supervised recreational activities and community mobilization.

Collaborate to Ensure Seamlessness

36. Programs that reduce gang activity within a community are also likely to reduce the attraction of gang life for youth who have not yet joined.

Implementation Challenges with Community-Based Prevention Programs

37. When building community collaborations, strategies include:

Policy Issues

38. Which of the following is NOT one of the key principles to consider when funding and implementing community based gang membership prevention strategies?

Conclusion

39. True continuity means that strategies aimed at preventing gang-joining do not end at the school door, but also must be connected to what happens on the streets.

How Can We Prevent Girls From Joining Gangs?

40. In the U.S., girls may constitute one-eighth to one-quarter of all gang members.

Why Do Girls Join Gangs?

41. A multistate study of gang youth reported that:

Substance Abuse

42. Gang membership is clearly associated with increased substance abuse and the sale of drugs, and research shows that up to 88% of girls in gangs smoke marijuana and 52% sold it.

Policy Implications

43. Girls who are at risk for gang involvement have histories of abuse, strained family relationships, and troubled relationships with their peers and they attend unsafe schools and live in dangerous neighborhoods.

Race and Ethnicity: What Are Their Roles in Gang Membership?

44. The National Gang Center reports law enforcement data that indicate 84% of gang members are racial or ethnic minorities, including which of the following?

Are Risk and Protective Factors for Gang-Joining Race/Ethnic Specific?

45. The reason that more minority youth are involved in gangs might not be because the risk and protective factors are different but, rather, because they are exposed to greater risk levels based on the communities in which they typically live.

46. In looking at numerous programs, researchers found that mainstream delinquency prevention programs do not work as well for minority youth as they do for whites.

Program Evaluation: How Do We Know If We Are Preventing Gang Membership?

47. Erroneous conclusions based on poor program evaluations can lead to wasted resources if an ineffective program is continued and to missed opportunities if an effective program is stopped.

Outcome Evaluation: Assessing Program Effectiveness

48. To determine whether a program reduces gang membership, answers to gang affiliation questions after program completion must be compared with before implementation answers and ___________________ must be employed.

Generalization and Selection Bias

49. A type of selection bias, known as false generalization, occurs when, for example, youth at greatest risk for gang joining are excluded from participation in a program due to staff concerns about meeting program goals.

Conclusion: An Invitation to Contribute to Gang-Joining Prevention

50. Although decision-makers and practitioners should work together to reduce the risks for gang-joining, they must also build on existing strengths so that prevention strategies will be more helpful to youth and more welcomed within communities.