The blame game does not play out in the public health approach to youth violence, according to an author and nationally-known physician who works against youth violence and defines it as a public health issue.
Deborah Prothrow-Stith, M.D., associate dean and professor of public health practice at Harvard School of Public Health, was guest speaker at the 11th annual Homer G. Phillips Public Health Lecture Series held October 19 at the Washington University School of Medicine.
In her comments, “Youth Violence from a Public Health Perspective,” she used statistics to frame the disconnect between violent crimes and current laws. Prothrow-Stith said 30 percent of homicides are committed by family members and over half of rape victims know their attacker, although “most of our laws are geared toward stranger-bad guy violence.”
She said health professionals deal with violence on three levels: “up front,” or primary prevention; “in the thick,” secondary prevention when children are at risk; and the “aftermath,” tertiary prevention.
“Criminal justice primarily deals with the aftermath,” Prothrow-Stith said. “If you want to prevent violence, we got to help children in the thick and look at the attitude we have regarding it.”
She said in the 1990s, the arrest rates of boys went down while the arrest rates for girls went up.
“Boys rates are still higher than girls. Girls are about one-fourth to one-third of those arrested for crime, but that rate is higher than it used to be a decade ago,” she said.
“We’ve been marketing and advertising violence to girls for the last two decades, the way we’ve been doing boys for centuries.” She described it as the feminization of the superhero as “admirable, sexy, successful and glamorous.”
“We live in a society that glorifies violence and we don’t help our children heal from that trauma and pain that occurs,” she said. “It matters what we do with our children. It matters in St. Louis what we do, block by block.”
She said adults can help children in the healing process by helping them handle failures and successes. She identified pairing children with Big Brothers/Big Sisters as a positive community effort to address the problem.
“One of the biggest problems we face in youth violence is the cultural expectation that our children fight. They are doing exactly what we teach them to do,” Prothrow-Stith said.
She said there is an advantage to identifying youth violence as a public health problem.
“We are labeling it a preventable problem, and we are calling on everybody to come up with a way to solve it,” Prothrow-Stith said.
“We have an industry around jails and prisons that need to be called into question. As citizens, we need to demand that our money be spent smarter in regards to this issue.”
At the event, Richard King, CEO of Annie Malone Children and Family Services, received an award for its work with youth. King said the organization teaches children healthy ways to behave and concurred with Prothrow-Stith on the need for new approaches.
“We do have to look at small ways and medium ways we can affect public policy on prevention and intervention when kids are ‘in the thick,’” King said.
He encouraged doctors to have conversations with public policy makers on the issue and said he wants parents to take an active role to reduce youth violence.
King said, “There are parents who are not doing the right thing and have abdicated their responsibility.”