Gang research scholars have discovered a multitude of risk factors that are statistically linked to gang joining. These individual risk factors span the many dimensions in a youth’s life and are typically grouped into five categories (called social developmental “domains”): individual, family, school, peer, and neighborhood/community (Howell and Griffiths, 2016). The following discussion explains how risk factors in these domains operate from infancy onward.
Family Risk Factors
Several types of family interactions and interrelationships can predict gang membership. In a Seattle study (Hill, Howell, Hawkins et al., 1999), the most negative arrangement was one biological parent and other adults in the home. One of the most prominent risk factors is poor parental supervision (including control, monitoring, and management of family matters). Other family conditions compromise parental capacity to carry out child development responsibilities, including low parent education, family poverty, low family socioeconomic status, proviolence attitudes, and child maltreatment (abuse or neglect). Living with a gang member is a key risk factor for gang joining (Gilman et al., 2014).
Individual Risk Factors
Children who are involved in delinquency, violence, and drug use at an early age are at higher risk for gang membership than are other youngsters (Craig, Vitaro, and Tremblay, 2002). Mental health problems predict gang joining (Hill et al., 1999), and experiencing life stressors is another important individual risk factor at the early adolescence stage (Eitle, Gunkel, and Gundy, 2004; Thornberry, Krohn, et al., 2003). Trauma from violent victimization, involvement in violence, and aggression are predictors of gang membership (Craig et al., 2002; Hill et al., 1999; Lahey, Gordon, Loeber et al., 1999; Taylor, Freng, Esbensen, et al., 2008). Various sociopathic behaviors are also associated with bonding to gangs, including aggressive, reckless, impulsive, manipulative, superficial, callous, irresponsible, and cunning behavioral displays (Goldstein and Glick, 1994).
School Risk Factors
Most studies of risk factors for juvenile delinquency and gang membership have examined only one segment of the school-student relationship: satisfactory academic performance. The low achievement of children is one side of the coin; poor-quality (poorly functioning) and unsafe schools is the other side (Gottfredson, 2013). Thornberry’s team (2003) concluded that poor school performance on math tests predicts gang membership for males, as well as low attachment to teachers. Hill and colleagues (1999), and also Le Blanc and Lanctot (1998), found that future gang members perform poorly in elementary school, and they have a low degree of commitment to and involvement in school. Suspensions and explusions from school often mean that students are removed from adult supervision and, in turn, are exposed to greater association with delinquent peers, which can increase delinquency (Hemphill, Toumborou, Herrenkohl, et al., 2006). Delinquency involvement can increase gang membership and court referral (Esbensen and Huizinga, 1993; Hill et al., 1999; Thornberry et al., 2003). Students who feel vulnerable at school may seek protection in the gang (Gottfredson, 2013).
Peer Risk Factors
Thornberry and colleagues (2003) identified association with peers who engage in delinquency as one of the strongest risk factors for gang membership, particularly for boys. Moreover, both Craig and colleagues (2002) and Lahey and colleagues (1999) found that association with aggressive peers—whether or not they are involved in delinquency—during adolescence is a strong predictor of gang joining. Further, rejection by prosocial peers (being unpopular) seems to be a key factor that pushes children into affiliations with delinquent groups and gangs (Haviland and Nagin, 2005; Thornberry, et al., 2003).
Community Risk Factors
Community or neighborhood risk factors that have been shown to predict gang membership in early adolescence include availability and perceived access to drugs, neighborhood youth in trouble, feeling unsafe in the neighborhood, and low neighborhood attachment (Hill et al., 1999; Hill, Lui, and Hawkins, 2001). Other important neighborhood risk factors include high community arrest rates, high drug use, and neighborhood disorganization. As children grow older and venture outward from their families, they are more and more influenced by community conditions. The key factors include residence in a disadvantaged neighborhood, lots of neighborhood youth in trouble, and a ready availability and use of drugs. Availability of firearms also may be an important community variable (Lizotte, Krohn, Howell, et al., 2000). Exposure to firearm violence approximately doubles the probability that an adolescent will perpetrate serious violence over the subsequent two years (Bingenheimer, Brennan, and Earls, 2005). Communities that suffer from concentrated disadvantage may lack the necessary “collective efficacy” (informal control and social cohesion) among residents to ameliorate the negative effects of concentrated disadvantage (Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush, 2001; Sampson and Laub, 1997). This condition is probably exacerbated by the prevalence of crime in the community, availability of drugs, and so on, all of which weaken neighborhood attachment.
Risk factors have a cumulative impact; that is, the greater the numbers of risk factors that are present, the greater the likelihood of gang involvement. Hill et al. (1999) found in the Seattle study that children with seven or more risk factor indicators were 13 times more likely to join a gang than were children with none or only one of these indicators, although only 32 percent of these youth joined a gang. Another study found that the accumulation of more risk factors leads youth to become gang-involved as opposed to violence-involved (52 percent of gang members experienced 11 or more risk factors, compared with 36 percent of violent offenders; Esbensen, Peterson, Taylor, and Freng, 2009). “A greater ‘push,’ perhaps, is required for youths to become gang-involved than violence-involved. Related to this, it seems that the number of risk factors an individual possesses has the most impact on violence” (p. 322).
Moreover, the presence of a large number of risk factors in multiple developmental domains appears to increase the likelihood of gang involvement even more. Rochester researchers found that a majority (61 percent) of the boys and 40 percent of the girls who scored above the median in seven risk factor domains (area characteristics, family sociodemographic characteristics, parent-child relations, school, peers, individual characteristics, and early delinquency) were gang members. In contrast, approximately one-third of the boys and one-fifth of the girls who experienced risk in four to six domains joined a gang. Thus, for optimal impact, gang prevention and intervention programs do not only need to address multiple risk factors; they also need to address a number of risk factors in multiple developmental domains.
Protective factors are not included in this SPT because research on their effects on gang membership, and delinquency as well, is yet in its infancy. Protective factors for gang involvement and related violence must be validated in longitudinal studies. Just two such studies have been conducted to date. The first study found research support for protective factors in the major developmental domains from the fifth to the twelfth grade: prosocial family, school, neighborhood, peer environments, and individual characteristics (Gilman et al., 2014). Positive family and school environments appeared to operate through other domains, mainly peer and neighborhood. Research in the Rochester Youth Developmental Study (Krohn, Lizotte, Bushway, et al., 2014) found that, from mid-adolescence onward, six of the protective factors interacted with the chronic violence trajectory to reduce violence incidence (including gang fighting and gun carrying): (1) cumulative protection across domains, (2) cumulative protection in the family domain, (3) educational aspirations and (4) self-esteem in the individual domain, and (5) parental supervision and (6) parent-partner status in the family domain. Thus, of central importance is increasing the level of positive feelings youth have for themselves and their parents, and empowering parents to better supervise teenagers’ behavior and choice of friends.
Completing a thorough assessment of the gang problem achieves the following results for communities:
- Develops a structure and a mechanism for organized and ongoing data collection relating to implementation of the Model.
- Creates a common understanding of the gang problem among key agencies and gains buy-in from these agencies.
- Identifies the most appropriate target area for the Model.
- Identifies the demographics of the client population that is most heavily involved in gang-related crimes for suppression and intervention activities.
- Allows the community to quantify, on paper, the types of crimes that gangs are committing in the community, the factors in the community that have given rise to (and perpetuate) the local gang culture, and the gaps in existing services and resources.
- Allows the community to strategically target specific problems with effective strategies.
- Creates a numerical baseline of the problem for measuring the impact of the Model in the community.
Most important, communities that have conducted a comprehensive assessment and implemented the Model have been more likely to sustain the Model structure long-term than those areas where an assessment was not conducted.
Based on the status of data availability, the level and extent of the assessment that is contemplated, and the availability of the assessment work group members to collect data, it can take communities from 3 to 12 months to complete a comprehensive assessment and prepare an assessment report.
Most of the data that should be collected during the assessment is relatively simple to analyze and interpret. The types of data to collect, along with samples of how these data can be reported, are discussed in depth in the assessment manual. For more complex types of data, such as the student surveys and gang member interviews, it is advisable that communities work with a research partner, usually someone from a local college, university, or other research organization, who can provide data collection and analysis experience and skills.
During the assessment process, your community should identify existing programs and services, as well as gaps in existing resources. The Model recommends engaging existing programs and services that work with gang members, rather than duplicating them.
The membership of the steering committee should include decision makers from agencies and organizations that have an interest in or a responsibility for addressing the community’s gang problem. These representatives should not only set policy and oversee the overall direction of the project, but should take responsibility for spearheading efforts in their own organizations to remove barriers to services and to social and economic opportunities; develop effective criminal justice, school, and social agency procedures; and promote policies that will further the goals of the community’s gang strategy. An existing community committee may meet this need. Or the membership of this group might be expanded to fit the desired representation. In some cases, implementing the Model may require the creation of an entirely new body. This should be determined by local conditions and the membership/mandate of existing groups.
The Model is designed for areas with a serious, violent gang problem. Gang problems of this nature tend to be unevenly distributed throughout an entire metropolitan area, clustered in smaller sections of the community. Experience has shown that the Model has the most impact when it is implemented in an area of the community that has a population smaller than 80–100,000.
Many assessment and planning activities can lend themselves to community mobilization, one of the Model’s five core strategies. Conducting these activities can assist the project in learning about community dynamics and needs. Activities that can be conducted during the assessment and planning process include the following:
- Meeting with elected officials to educate them on the Model.
- Engaging ancillary agencies and organizations.
- Conducting community gang awareness and crime prevention trainings.
- Conducting community meetings and focus groups to address critical incidents.
- Sponsoring or participating in community fairs.
- Publicizing the work of the steering committee.