Interventions to Prevent Youth Violence

Abstract

This chapter summarizes research on interventions to reduce or prevent the perpetration of youth violence. Youth violence is defined broadly to include acts of interpersonal aggression, ranging in seriousness from crimes against individuals (e.g., robbery, assault) to aggressive behaviors, such as hitting, bullying, and, for younger students, biting and hurling objects at others. This definition explicitly includes aggressive acts of younger children that have been shown to be precursors of later, more serious and violent delinquency (see Tolan and Gorman-Smith [1998] for a summary of such precursors). By defining youth violence to include these precursor behaviors, we are able to consider a broader array of early prevention intervention strategies targeting these earlier behaviors.