SPH To Study Youth Violence

The Harvard School of Public Health (SPH) has established a research center that will study youth violence with a $5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Professor of Health Policy David Hemenway will direct the new institute, called the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center.

The center aims to examine the causes of youth violence and to form partnerships with community organizations to help reduce violence at the local, regional and national levels.

For example, the center will focus through one project on youth suicide attempts. The study will examine the correlation between socioeconomic factors--such as poverty, unemployment, median income and the community's ethnic composition--and suicide rates.

Another project will study violence among girls in urban areas.

Two others will examine the effectiveness of community violence prevention programs.

The center will expand upon the model of violence prevention that Boston used to dramatically decrease its high levels of youth violence.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Deborah Prothrow-Stith, now co-director of the Youth Violence Prevention Center, encouraged community members to work with the police department and hospitals to bring down crime rates.

"In the late 80s and early 90s, figures were astronomical for youths being shot and killed," said Marci L. Feldman, assistant to Prothrow-Stith. By 1999, Feldman added, "Boston had gone three years without a child under 16 being involved in a gun death."

The goal of this center is to maintain vigilance towards youth violence.

"Now is not the time to be complacent," Feldman said.

Additional funds will support smaller research projects, including an examination of domestic violence, a survey of Boston middle school students and an evaluation of the Massachusetts Medical Society's violence prevention program.