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Salzburg Global Fellow Eduardo Moncada proposes a research agenda on developing more effective, context-sensitive approaches to prevention and intervention in youth violence

Photo Credit: Siegrid Cain

This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Eduardo Moncada, who participated in the Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice initiative.

The Global Innovations on Youth, Violence and Safety initiative is a major multi-year initiative to tackle youth violence and promote youth safety and criminal justice reform. Starting in 2021, Salzburg Global – in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and David Rockefeller Fund – brought together a diverse set of participants from across the world both online and in-person to explore, discuss, and debate the drivers and dynamics of youth violence, and a range of policy responses to prevent and stem this phenomenon.

This first phase of the initiative identified the many opportunities and challenges for reducing global youth violence in ways that prioritize empathy, dignity, personal growth, and human rights. A general consensus among initiative participants is the need for a shift away from the disproportionately punitive model of justice to an alternative model that emphasizes prevention at multiple scales – from the individual to the collective – and across different policy areas – from public health to the criminal legal system.

This “whole systems approach” recognizes that forms of injustice and bias, including along racial, ethnic, and class lines, shape both the incidence of youth violence and the conventional punitive responses to it – producing vicious cycles with damaging effects for communities and institutions.

Several overarching recommendations emerged from this first phase of the initiative:

• Foster a culture of justice that embraces the potential of restorative justice mechanisms.
• Advance public health approaches to identify the structural and proximate drivers of youth violence.
• Build new models of collaborative data collection and analysis that are cross-disciplinary and inclusive of communities most directly vulnerable to youth violence.
• Craft innovative, accessible, and compelling strategies of public communication to convey the logic, scope, and potential of institutional reforms to the public.
• Develop preventative interventions in school settings that address the role of trauma and environmental stresses in youth violence early in childhood development.

Toward a Research Agenda on Youth, Violence, and Safety

Violence challenges development, governance, and the fundamental freedom of people to live the lives that they value.² Violence is defined as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against another person or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury[,] death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.”³ 

While the levels of lethal violence that claim the lives of youth between ages 10 and 29 vary across countries, we know that it is among the leading causes of death worldwide for people within this age group. Likewise, it primarily claims the lives of young men, and the majority of these deaths take place in low- and middle-income countries.⁴ And like lethal violence, diverse forms of non-lethal violence – from physical assault to bullying – contribute to physical, psychological, and behavioral issues that negatively impact individuals, families, communities, social groups, and institutions.

The Global Innovations on Youth, Violence and Safety initiative has taken important steps to explore the global and multi-faceted scale of youth violence by marshaling a diverse group of activists, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from across the world. The resulting conversations and debates, along with the report and statement emerging from this first phase of the initiative, provide a strong foundation on which to look forward and craft an agenda to focus future research with which to better understand and respond to youth violence.

Among the potential questions that emerge from this first phase are the following:

What Drives Youth Violence?

Existing research on preventing youth violence primarily evaluates interventions in high-income countries. Both the levels and forms of youth violence in high-income countries are sobering. But the majority of youth violence in the world takes place in low- and middle-income countries.⁵ The result is a disconnect between the existing scientific knowledge about the correlates of youth violence on the one hand and the applicability of this knowledge in the contrasting political, social, economic, and historical environments in which the majority of youth violence takes place.

• What, if any, factors correlate with youth violence regardless of context? 
• How could global institutions cooperate to better address the “universal” drivers of youth violence? And conversely, what factors are contingent on particular political, social, and/or economic features found in distinct contexts? 
• Are the drivers of youth violence in autocratic regimes similar or distinct from those in the formal democracies found in most high-income countries? Are they similar or distinct across contrasting political, social, and economic settings in the Global South? 
• What challenges do the comparatively more volatile economic and institutional conditions prevalent outside of high-income countries pose for preventive measures? 
• What implications do the history and ongoing patterns of armed conflict and civil war pose for the incidence and nature of youth violence in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and the Maghreb?

Broadening existing research beyond its focus on high-income countries is needed to test the portability of existing findings and policy prescriptions, but also to develop and evaluate new hypotheses on what drives, reduces, and prevents youth violence.

How Do We Broaden the Scope of Existing Research on Youth Violence?

As evident in other scientific areas of study, existing mainstream research on youth violence also fails to engage substantively with the significant body of research on this very topic generated by scholars, researchers, and policy-oriented organizations across the developing world.  

There are important research initiatives in academic and policymaking spheres in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East that generate data and analyses on youth violence as well invaluable insights into the conditions that facilitate effective local policy experiments to stem such violence – initiatives that often go unobserved by researchers in the Global North.

Overlooking research generated in world regions where levels of youth violence are most acute severely limits the scope of associated research and practical knowledge. The implications of this oversight are not limited to academic research: developing policy prescriptions on the basis of incomplete data and analysis risks replicating interventions that may have already been found to have limited effects on youth violence. Likewise, failure to engage with research outside of high-income settings can lead policymakers to neglect evidence-based analyses of interventions shown to have robust effects in deterring youth violence.

• What tools exist and which need to be developed to facilitate greater engagement with research on youth violence produced in the Global South? 
• How can funders support more cross-regional dialogue between researchers and scholars working on youth violence?

What Are the Data Needs, Challenges, and Opportunities for Research on Youth Violence?

A challenge for public policy to address youth violence is the ability to systematically and continuously evaluate the potential effects of policy interventions. This requires, among other things, robust systems dedicated to collecting and analyzing multiple forms of data.

Yet, such systems are incomplete, underfunded, or non-existent in parts of the developing world. Moreover, researchers across the world often encounter political barriers to conducting research on youth violence, including the politicization of violence in ways that advance electoral and partisan objectives while doing little to address the root drivers of youth violence and, in some cases, generating conditions that can further fuel such violence.

• What are the logistical, social, and political barriers and opportunities to build and sustain effective monitoring systems for youth violence? 
• How can cooperation across civil society, government, and the private sector bolster data collection and analysis? 
• How much overlap is there between the type of data that policymakers need to make informed decisions on how to prevent or respond to youth violence and the type of data that researchers conventionally focus on generating?
• What institutional mechanisms can help that the main recommendations from research on youth violence reach and inform the policymaking process in ways that are scalable, efficient, and timely? And how do we ensure that data collected by actors outside of government do not end up being used by government actors to engage in repression against youth and other specific demographic populations?

How are Distinct Forms of Youth Violence Related to Each Other?

Aligning with the “whole systems approach,” we need further research to identify potential causal linkages between distinct forms of youth violence and ways to effectively address them. This entails systematically mapping the distinct forms of youth violence.

Among two overarching forms of youth violence are interpersonal violence between individuals and within households and forms of collective violence organized along social, political, or economic dimensions. For example, there is some evidence that sexual violence against young women can result in the birth of individuals who grow up in socioeconomic and familial conditions that increase their probability of engaging in criminal behavior later in life.⁶ 

• When and how does violence in one realm interact with violence in other realms? 
• Do interactions shape the levels or forms of violence in a particular place and at a given time? 
• How would effective policy interventions address the multi-dimensional nature of such violence? Would it do so simultaneously on all fronts or selectively by prioritizing specific drivers in a sequential format? 
• What are the key starting points for governments, civil society, and the private sector to address distinct forms of youth violence?

How Do Interactions With the Criminal Legal System Impact the Political Identity and Behaviors of Youth?

Much existing research identifies the negative consequences of coming into contact with elements of punitive criminal legal systems for economic and social development, including income, education, and class. Less is known about what consequences these interactions have for youths’ political beliefs, preferences, and behaviors.

This gap in existing knowledge is particularly worrisome given that today’s youth are expected to be protagonists in the trajectory of both domestic and international politics precisely as the world confronts any number of sobering challenges that will require – among other things – sustained political engagement, including climate change, ethnic and religious strife, and socioeconomic inequality, among others. But can we realistically expect youth to take up these causes through political engagement when many experience government and politics not at the ballot box but instead in personal traumatic encounters with police and other parts of the criminal legal system?

• How does contact with police and judicial institutions impact how youth view core aspects of their political identity, including citizenship, government, and the rule of law? 
• When does interacting with punitive elements of the criminal justice system influence the different ways that youth engage in or withdraw from both traditional (e.g., voting) and non-traditional (e.g., protests, civic engagement) forms of political participation?

What Are the Methodological Opportunities and Challenges for Researching Youth Violence?

Different social science methodologies have different analytical strengths and limits. What implications does this have for the types of methodological tools used to study the causes and consequences of youth violence and the policy responses to address it?

• What are the methodological gaps in existing research? 
• How can communities most vulnerable to youth violence be effectively and ethically incorporated into the research process? 
• What would a research agenda on global youth violence that prioritizes the voices, agency, and participation of youth and marginalized communities vulnerable to youth violence look like? 
• When does contact with punitive criminal justice institutions foster political engagement for political and social change by youth?

¹Eduardo Moncada, Associate Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University. emoncada@barnard.edu

²Sen, Amartya. Development as freedom. Oxford Paperbacks, 2001.

³Krug E, Dahlberg L, Mercy J, et al. World report on violence and health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002, p.5.

⁴De Ribera, Olga Sanchez, Nicolás Trajtenberg, Yulia Shenderovich, and Joseph Murray. "Correlates of youth violence in low- and middle-income countries: A meta-analysis." Aggression and Violent Behavior 49 (2019): 101306.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Donohue III, John J., and Steven D. Levitt. "The impact of legalized abortion on crime." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 2 (2001): 379-420.

Since 2021, Fellows participating in the Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice initiative have contributed to the Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice Report. Each section highlights the key challenges and opportunities identified by the initiative’s international participants, with illustrative case studies, recommendations for consideration and action, and suggestions of where the research agenda should focus in future. This report is continuously updated to reflect new findings, case studies, and resources.

Explore the full digital report here.

Learn more about the Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice initiative.

Salzburg Global is grateful to the MacArthur Foundation and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation​​​​​​​ for their generous support and partnership that made this program possible.