Schools, Neighborhoods, and Adolescent Conflicts: A Situational Examination of Reciprocal Dynamics

Abstract

Youths' exposure to school violence is ecologically patterned, occurring disproportionately in public schools located in urban disadvantaged communities. We know less, however, about how situational processes and environmental contexts shape school violence. In addition, limited research has examined the reciprocal nature of school and neighborhood conflicts. Here we draw from a qualitative study of violence in the lives of African American youths from a disadvantaged inner‐city community to examine young men's experiences with school‐based violence. Specifically, we investigate two questions: (1) how conflicts are shaped by the school setting, and (2) how and when such conflicts unfold and spill over between neighborhoods and schools. Our findings highlight the importance of examining the situational and ecological contexts of youth violence to further illuminate its causes and consequences.

Keywords:

• African American youth
• interpersonal violence
• school disorder
• urban disadvantage

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research funded by the National Consortium on Violence Research. The authors would like to thank Richard Tewksbury and the anonymous reviewers at Justice Quarterly for their comments on the manuscript. We also thank Norm White, co‐PI on the project, and Toya Like, Dennis Mares, Jenna St. Cyr, and Iris Foster for their research assistance.

Notes

1. Not surprisingly, research suggests that students in schools where gangs, drugs, and weapons are present face higher risks for victimization (see Ferguson, 2003).

2. Lockwood (1997), on the other hand, found that the “opening moves” of school conflicts‐those interactional sequences that trigger an impending fight‐most often start in the classroom, even when they are ultimately resolved elsewhere.

3. Like Knox (1992), Mateu‐Gelabert (2000) suggests this is because youths from rival groups and neighborhoods are brought together in school and thus are unable to avoid one another. Though serious gang violence is much more common in neighborhood settings, there is evidence that youths can better avoid rival gang members, when they choose to, by limiting their mobility outside their immediate neighborhood boundaries (see Cobbina, Miller, & Brunson, 2008).

4. A primary focus of the larger project is violence against young women. It also includes interviews with 35 female study participants, who are excluded from the analysis here. We limit our focus to young men because research has identified them as disproportionately involved in serious violence across the social settings of schools and neighborhoods. Here we have also excluded two young men included in the original project: one who completed the survey but not the in‐depth interview, and the second because he was the only young man in the sample who was in middle school. For more on the study methodology and data collection process, see (Miller, 2008).

5. Pseudonyms are used throughout the manuscript, both for young men and for the schools and neighborhoods they occasionally name.

6. See the Appendix for detailed information on the extent of respondents' delinquency and gang exposure.

7. Our use of the term conflict in the analyses that follow includes incidents that escalate to violence as well as those that do not. We use the term fight when specifically referencing incidents that involve physical violence.

8. The location where respondents said the violent episode took place determined whether we classified it as a school or neighborhood incident. If a physical altercation took place anywhere on school property, for our purposes, it was designated as a school violence incident. Alternatively, if it took place off school grounds‐including in the immediate neighborhood of the school‐it was classified as a neighborhood incident.

9. Welsh et al. (2000, p. 247) stress the importance of examining both “the community surrounding the school and the communities from which students are drawn,” particularly in the case of high schools since they are more likely to draw students from larger community areas. They found that both local and imported community poverty negatively affected school stability, which in turn increased rates of school disorder.

10. To ensure anonymity, we did not obtain young men's addresses. Instead, we asked them to provide the names of two cross streets near to where they live. Residential neighborhood data in Table 1 come from census block data from these cross streets. Thus, it is not a precise measure, but does provide a rough match for their neighborhoods. We were unable to obtain this information from four young men in our sample, because the street names they gave us were parallel. Zip code level data for two of these was comparable for block level characteristics, though it is not included in Table 1. We used school addresses to obtain census tract data for the schools to provide a composite picture of the neighborhoods in which they were embedded. One additional note on Table 1: the figures for St. Louis county do not include those of the city, as the city is its own county.

11. This dropout rate is striking, even by St. Louis public school standards. In 1999, District's average dropout rate was 16.2 percent, compared to the state average of 5.3 percent (Pierce, 1999b). Both alternative schools we interviewed in were among a large number of St. Louis public schools closed down in 2003 as part of a controversial reorganization effort to address a $90 million deficit (see Harris, 2003a, 2003b).

12. To determine violence perpetration, young men were asked during the survey whether they had ever hit someone with the idea of hurting them (84 percent) or attacked someone with a weapon or with the intent to seriously hurt them (39 percent). Violent victimization included being “slapped, punched, kicked or hit” (74 percent), being “jumped or beaten up” (66 percent), being stabbed (11 percent) or shot (13 percent). Finally, young men were classified as having witnessed violence when they described seeing “someone else get slapped, punched, hit or kicked” (89 percent), seen someone else get “jumped or beaten up” (97 percent), seen a stabbing (53 percent), seen someone get shot (71 percent), or seen someone killed (50 percent).

13. Gangs are perhaps the quintessential example by which to examine the reciprocal dynamics of neighborhood and school conflicts. In St. Louis, they are clearly demarcated neighborhood‐based groups (see Decker & Van Winkle, 1996; Miller, 2001) that are thus “imported” into the school. At the same time, as we will see, gang conflicts routinely spill over from school back into the community. In this section, we will focus specifically on facets of the school setting that contribute to gang conflicts.

14. For young men in the large mainstream school, this was the result of the 1,000 student plus enrollment, drawing from numerous neighborhoods around north St. Louis. Similarly, young men in the alternative schools were placed there for infractions from schools throughout the city.

15. Notably, Terence clarified, “that's the only fight I done seen over a gal. Other than that, it's mainly colors.”

16. In fact, as noted earlier, these schools had an 82 percent dropout rate, suggesting this was more common than Travis assumed.

17. “Why you off the locker?” was a school‐specific reference to Raymond's confrontational body language, meaning he was leaning toward the young man, who interpreted it as a challenge to fight, rather than leaning back against a locker in a more deferential or at least less challenging way.

18. It is important to note, however, that youths do not simply accept and conform to norms favoring violence in schools where high rates of violence are present (see Anderson, 1999; Mateu‐Gelabert & Lune, 2007). It is beyond the scope of our research to examine these processes in detail.