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

Introduction

While “young people continue to be the victims of serious violent crime less often in school than away from school,” just over a third of serious violent incidents among juveniles occur either at or on the way to and from school (Gottfredson, Gottfredson, Payne, & Gottfredson, 2005, p. 413; see also DeVoe, Peter, Noonan, Snyder, & Baum, 2005). In addition, youths' exposure to school violence is ecologically patterned. It occurs disproportionately in public schools located in urban disadvantaged settings, where neighborhood and community violence is also disproportionately high (Gottfredson, 2001; Hellman & Beaton, 1986; Snyder & Sickmund, 1999).

Researchers have sought a number of explanations for these patterns, examining the roles of individual and compositional, school context, and community setting effects (see, for example, Gottfredson et al., 2005; Payne, Gottfredson, & Gottfredson, 2003; Stewart, 2003; Welsh, Stokes, & Greene, 2000). However, because most research on the topic has been quantitative, scholars have had limited opportunities to thoroughly investigate situational and interactional features of school violence. As Hagan, Hirschfield, and Shedd (2002, p. 220) argue, to better understand the nature and causes of school violence in urban settings, we need a “meaningful consideration of social context” (see also Short, 1998).

Recent research utilizing such approaches has been particularly fruitful in illuminating those features of schools' physical and social environment that contribute to school‐based conflicts and violence (see Anderson, 1999; Astor & Meyer, 2001; Astor, Meyer, & Behre, 1999; Felson, Liska, South, & McNulty, 1994; Lockwood, 1997). Even more promising is recent scholarship that also examines how school violence is situated within, and overlaps with, neighborhood violence among adolescents (see Hagan et al., 2002; Hellman & Beaton, 1986; Mateu‐Gelabert, 2000; Sullivan, 2002). This work is particularly important since survey measures of school violence often merge events that occur in school with those that occur on the way to and from school. In fact, Snyder and Sickmund (1999, p. 65) report that “19 percent of all juvenile violent crimes occur in the 4 hours between 3pm and 7pm on school days (i.e., 4 hours on one‐half of the days of the year).” This suggests important dynamics present in the overlap between schools and neighborhoods.

Here we build from this emerging research on the situational contexts of school violence and its relationship to youths' conflicts in the community. Drawing from in‐depth interviews with 38 African American adolescent boys in a disadvantaged urban community, we investigate the interplay of school and community contexts, analyzing how youth violence unfolds across time and space and spills over between schools and neighborhoods. We examine situational and interactional facets of youths' conflicts (see Short, 1998) in order to capture the dynamic processes at play within and across settings.

School Violence and Ecological Context

Youths are 70 times more likely to be victims of homicide away from school than in school, and rates of serious violent victimization in school are half that of serious violent victimization among adolescents elsewhere (DeVoe et al., 2005). Nonetheless, “youths are at elevated risks for victimization when they are in school” (Gottfredson et al., 2005, p. 413). In fact, recent analyses of the National Crime Victimization Survey reveal that half of youths' experiences with violent victimization occur at or on the way to and from school. Such school‐based victimization is higher for males than females, for younger as compared to older adolescents, and for urban as compared to suburban and rural youths (DeVoe et al., 2005).

In addition, urban minority youth in public schools are more likely than youths in other racial groups and settings to report the presence of gangs in their schools, and are more likely to report being fearful of an attack at or on the way to or from school ¹ (DeVoe et al., 2005; Mijanovich & Weitzman, 2003). Findings from the Centers for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Survey reveal that around a third of all high school students reported participating in a physical fight in the last 12 months, with a substantial minority of these occurring on school property (DeVoe et al., 2005). Again, these reports are higher for males as compared to females, urban as compared to rural students, and, for in‐school fights, African American as compared to White students. Finally, among schools, the highest incidence of serious violence is reported in urban high schools, those with high minority enrollment, and larger proportions of students who are free lunch eligible (DeVoe et al., 2005).

These findings are indicative of important ecological patterns in school violence. As Gottfredson (2001, p. 63) explains, “Schools are embedded within communities, and, in many ways, reflect larger community‐level processes…. Schools in urban, poor, disorganized communities experience much more violence and other forms of disorder than do schools in rural or suburban, affluent, organized communities.” Scholars have sought a number of explanations for these patterns, examining the impact of compositional effects and community factors on student and school characteristics and processes, including student bonding; normative peer culture; economic, human and social resources; school climate; and school organization, including size, educational and disciplinary practices (Felson et al., 1994; Gottfredson, 2001; Gottfredson et al., 2005; Mijanovich & Weitzman, 2003; Payne et al., 2003; Stewart, 2003; Welsh, 2001; Welsh et al., 2000).

On the whole, this research suggests that a complex array of factors contribute to these patterns of violence and school disorder. While “community characteristics and school structural characteristics … account for the lion's share of predictable between‐school variance in disorder” (Gottfredson et al., 2005, p. 418), more malleable features of school organization are also significant. Schools in disadvantaged urban communities—which have fewer resources, difficulties in staff recruitment and retention, and limited community support—are “less likely to include a system of shared values, a clear mission, high expectations, meaningful social interactions, collegial relations among adults, and extended teacher roles” (Gottfredson, 2001, pp. 82–3), and are also more likely to be inconsistent in enforcing rules and communicating expectations for student behavior (Gottfredson et al., 2005).

Compositional effects and normative student culture are also significant. Numerous studies suggest that students' social bonds to school affect their likelihood of participating in violence and other forms of disruptive behavior (Payne et al., 2003; Stewart, 2003; Welsh, 2001). Moreover, rather than simply an individual‐level phenomenon, these findings reflect the impact of group norms or student subcultures. Felson and his colleagues (1994, p. 168) found consistent evidence that “a boy's violence and delinquency are related to the values prevalent in his school, independent of his own values…. [Thus] delinquency involves public compliance and impression management.” As Welsh (2001, p. 940) summarizes:

Conventional values may be a liability in large urban school districts. In the absence of strong school support for good behavior, and without effective discipline for bad behavior, students will reduce their risk of victimization through means of their own intervention. Unfortunately the defensive strategies they adopt may only fuel a vicious circle whereby aggressive postures adopted for self defense convert all too easily to higher incidence of aggressive behavior.

Welsh's argument, based on his interpretation of quantitative findings, is certainly suggestive of the importance of investigating the situational processes at play in creating high rates of violence in and around schools in urban disadvantaged communities. As we describe in the next section, there has been a promising growth of research in this area in recent years.

Situational Analyses of School Violence

Over the last decades, criminological research has increasingly investigated the situational dynamics that surround violent events. This work has identified broader subcultural patterns that heighten the use of or need for violent response and their roots in disadvantaged ecological contexts (Anderson, 1999; Baumer, Horney, Felson, & Lauritsen, 2003; Bernard, 1990; Stewart, Schreck, & Simons, 2006). It has also highlighted the physical and social properties of settings that are productive of violence—including the location of the conflict, presence and behavior of third parties, access to weapons, and relationship between event participants—and has identified stages associated with the culmination of a dispute to violence (Baron, Kennedy, & Forde, 2001; Deibert & Meithe, 2003; Felson & Steadman, 1983; Luckenbill & Doyle, 1989). While most of this research has focused on street crime, several scholars have also used situational theoretical frameworks to examine violence in schools.

To begin with, numerous studies suggest that structural dislocations associated with urban disadvantage produce “aggressive regulative rules” that encourage individuals to resolve conflicts with violence (Baron et al., 2001, p. 726). According to Anderson (1999), this is a prominent feature of the “street code,” which spills over into the school environment. Anderson (1999, p. 22) observes that “the hallways of the school are in many ways an extension of the street,” and provide youths the opportunity to establish and display personas that can result in the acquisition and maintenance of respect (see also Lockwood, 1997; Welsh et al., 2000).

In addition, numerous studies have examined the situational dynamics of school violence and the impact of schools' ecological environments. This research suggests that both social and physical features of schools can contribute to youths' violence. Astor et al. (1999; see also Astor & Meyer, 2001) found important temporal and spatial patterns to school violence: it is most likely to occur during transitions between classes or lunch, or before and after school, and most often occurs in spatial “hot spots” such as hallways, bathrooms, parking lots, stairwells and cafeterias. ² Astor and his colleagues suggest that these places and times represent “undefined public spaces” in which teachers are both less likely to be present and more likely to define the areas as beyond their realm of responsibilities (2001, p. 384; see also Welsh et al., 2000).

Mulvey and Cauffman (2001, p. 798) note that “violent events in schools are part of a chain of actions and reactions, often among numerous other individuals … [with] bystanders … a critical component of the escalation of disputes into violence.” Lockwood (1997, p. 1) reports that school fights can emerge as the result of what outsiders may perceive as “minor slights and teasing.” In addition, research consistently demonstrates the significance of third parties in escalating violence. This may be heightened in the school setting as the result of the large numbers of youths brought into continuous contact with one another (Lauritsen and Quinet, 1995), the presence of numerous sites of “unowned” spaces in schools (Astor & Meyer, 2001), and “age‐grad[ed] … identity building via violent performances” among adolescents (Wilkinson, 2001, p. 254). In fact, Lockwood (1997) found that peers were present in the majority of high school fights, and most often encouraged the violence or joined in. Based on an analysis of 250 violent school incidents, he reports that peers attempted to mediate in less than 5 percent of cases.

In addition, the “school environment brings rival gang members in close proximity to one another and blurs haphazard turf lines, which leads to confrontations and challenges within school, on school property and on the streets surrounding schools” (Knox, 1992, p. 242; Trump, 2001). Thus, not surprisingly, Mateu‐Gelabert (2000) found that the majority of conflicts that arose in the urban school he investigated were best classified as gang or “proto‐gang”‐related. ³ In addition, and likely related to the prevalence of adolescent gangs in disadvantaged urban communities, Hellman and Beaton (1986, p. 123) note that “the ‘intruder’ problem appears to be a significant one in large urban schools.” Specifically, youths from the surrounding community are more likely to trespass in these schools and facilitate conflicts on school grounds. Moreover, as Welsh et al. (2000, p. 270) note, “students must travel through the local community … to get to and from school. Their perceived exposure to risk may cause them to carry weapons, avoid certain places, or engage in aggressive behaviors that reduce their sense of danger.”

These findings point to the importance of school/neighborhood overlaps in adolescent violence. However, as Mateu‐Gelabert (2000, p. 2) surmises, the “literature hints at the existence of a bi‐directional flow of violence between schools and neighborhoods but has yet described the process by which this phenomenon takes place.” His ethnographic investigation of school violence revealed that 39 percent of students' fights involved some kind of carryover between the school and community, including 18 percent of incidents that began in school and escalated to the neighborhood and 21 percent that began in the neighborhood and were brought into the school (see also Lockwood, 1997). The majority of these were gang‐related, but also included what he calls “staged fights”—conflicts that began in school but were purposely scheduled by youths to be resolved off school grounds. Often, Mateu‐Gelabert (2000) notes, these staged fights included “backup” youths who joined in from participants' neighborhoods.

Our goal in this study is to further investigate both the situational contexts of school‐based violence, and the reciprocal nature of school and neighborhood conflicts in disadvantaged urban settings. Previous research highlights some of the important situational processes and environmental factors at play, but few studies have explicitly attended to school and neighborhood overlaps. We draw from qualitative interviews with 38 African American young men from disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis, Missouri to examine the dynamic processes at play within and across these settings.

Methodology

Data for this investigation come from a larger study of Black urban youths' experiences with interpersonal violence. The current examination utilizes survey and qualitative in‐depth interviews with 38 African American male high school students residing in St. Louis, Missouri. ⁴ Study participants were 13 to 19 years old, with a mean age of 16. The interviews were conducted between spring 1999 and spring 2000. Participation in the project was voluntary, and respondents were paid twenty dollars and promised confidentiality. ⁵

Young men were recruited for the project with the assistance of several organizations working with both “at‐risk” and delinquent youths. These included two alternative St. Louis public high schools and one neighborhood‐based organization. The schools served students who had been expelled from mainstream public schools for a variety of rule violations, including in‐school disorderly conduct and violence. The neighborhood‐based agency operated within a recreation center for youths on St. Louis' north side. School counselors and center staff were asked to identify youths for participation in the research when they were known to reside in disadvantaged St. Louis neighborhoods. Interviews were conducted in unoccupied classrooms or private areas at each site.

Sampling was purposive in nature. We selected African American youths from distressed neighborhoods in St. Louis given our interest in the impact of urban disadvantage on youth violence. These are precisely the ecological contexts researchers have associated with disproportionate rates of interpersonal violence in both neighborhoods and schools (Anderson, 1999; Gottfredson, 2001). We interviewed young men at risk or involved in delinquency ⁶ , all of whom had experience with male‐on‐male violence as perpetrators (89 percent), victims (87 percent), and/or witnesses (100 percent). Data collection began with the administration of a survey, and youths were then asked to participate in an audiotaped in‐depth interview that was typically completed on the same day. The tapes from those interviews were later transcribed, and serve as the primary data for this contextual examination.

Young men's responses in the survey were used to help guide the conversation in the in‐depth interviews. Specifically, the survey supplied baseline information about the extent of young men's exposure to violence. They were asked whether they had hit someone with the idea of hurting them, and whether they had attacked someone with a weapon or with the intent to seriously injure them. In addition, they were asked whether they had been hit, jumped or beaten up, stabbed, or shot, and whether they had seen people hit, attacked, stabbed or shot. They were also asked to provide basic contextual information about the most recent of each of these events, including who did it and where it happened.

Primary contextual and perceptual information was collected during the in‐depth interviews. These were semistructured, with open‐ended questions that allowed for considerable probing. Our goal was to gather data that could provide a relatively holistic assessment of the nature of young men's violence, situated in the context of boys' perceptions of adolescent male violence, general patterns of male‐on‐male conflicts, and the features and motives behind specific arguments and violent events. ⁷ Young men were first asked about the nature of conflicts between boys and to describe recent examples, including those they had participated in or witnessed. They were then asked for details about these incidents, including the circumstances leading up to the conflict; whether, when, where and how it escalated to violence; what actually happened; how third parties responded; and the consequences of the events. Finally, when they described fights that took place at school, young men were asked their perceptions of school officials' responses to these incidents.

Young men's accounts revealed important information about the situational contexts of such violence, including how some altercations began in one setting but spilled over into another. ⁸ In‐depth interviewing provided a means of understanding the social world from the points of view of the study participants. Rigorous examination of such accounts offers a means of “arriving at meanings or culturally embedded normative explanations [for behavior, as they] represent ways in which people organize views of themselves, of others, and of their social worlds” (Orbuch, 1997, p. 455).

In the analysis, we took care to ensure that the concepts developed and illustrations provided typified the most common patterns in young men's accounts. Internal validity was achieved using grounded theory analytic techniques, including the search for and explication of deviant cases (Strauss, 1987). Reliability was strengthened through triangulated data collection techniques, by asking respondents about their reports at multiple points across two interviews, and asking for detailed accounts during the in‐depth interviews. Nonetheless, the study is not generalizable. The nature of our sample and the locales from which it was drawn means we are unable to address whether and how non‐delinquent young men can utilize school‐based and other resources to disrupt or avoid exposure to violence. Moreover, our focus on youths' conflicts means we cannot speak, more broadly, to how young men negotiate school life (see Mateu‐Gelabert & Lune, 2007). Nonetheless, we believe the study raises significant issues that may guide future inquiries into the contexts of school conflicts, and the sometimes bidirectional nature of young men's school and community violence.

Study Setting

St. Louis typifies the highly distressed urban city. It includes large concentrations of extreme disadvantage that result in social isolation, limited resources, and high levels of violence (Baybeck & Jones, 2004). All of the young men in our sample lived in St. Louis, with the vast majority living in neighborhoods characterized by intense racial segregation; disproportionate rates of poverty, unemployment and female‐headed families; and high rates of crime. In addition, all attended schools situated in neighborhoods with these characteristics. ⁹ In fact, as seen in Table 1—which compares youths' residential and school neighborhoods with St. Louis city and county—young men's schools were situated in neighborhoods even more racially segregated and economically distressed than their home communities. ¹⁰

Table 1 Select neighborhood characteristics

	Respondents' neighborhoods	Respondents' schools	St. Louis City	St. Louis County
Percent African American	82.6%	91.3%	51.2%	18.9%
Percent poverty	33.8%	50.5%	24.6%	6.9%
Percent Unemployment	18.0%	19.4%	11.3%	4.6%
Percent female‐headed
Families with children	43.1%	53.6%	28.8%	10.7%
Median family income	$24,806	$17,587	$32,585	$61,680
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2000).

As noted earlier, research demonstrates that schools are strongly affected by the larger social processes, resources, and characteristics of the communities in which they are embedded. This is exemplified in the St. Louis Public School District, which has been under threat of a state takeover as a result of consistently poor student test performances, low attendance and graduation rates, high dropout rates, serious fiscal problems, and accusations of political patronage. It has been characterized as “crumbling,” “failing,” “in crisis,” “in decline and decay,” “perpetually unstable,” and “underperforming [and] violence‐plagued” (see, in sequence, Carroll, 1998a, p. 12; St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1998, p. C20; Pierce, 1998, p. B1; Dobbs, 2004, p. A3; Giegerich, 2006a, p. C4; Giegerich, 2006b, p. A1).

In addition, the city school district has suffered from decades of falling enrollments (Howard & Kumar, 2004). It continues to face chronic problems with teacher hiring and retention, and must rely on a large population of substitutes. During the period of our study, nearly eight percent of the district's teaching positions remained vacant, and a similar proportion did “not have proper state certification” (Pierce, 1999a, p. B3). Discipline problems rank as one of the “top concerns” of the teacher's union, and the School Board has convened multiple task forces in an attempt to address violence and other disciplinary concerns (Clubb, 2006; Howard & Shinkle, 2005). Each of the district's middle and high schools has metal detectors and uniformed security officers, in addition to the district's mobile security unit (Pierce, 1999c).

These problems are epitomized in the schools the young men in our sample attended. The vast majority (32 of 38) were interviewed in one of two alternative high schools in the St. Louis Public School District. These schools, which serviced youths expelled from mainstream public schools, had the highest dropout rates in the region (82 percent), with a graduation rate of just 6.5 percent ¹¹ (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 2003, p. 14). From 1998 to 2002, not a single student at these schools finished at or above the state standard in test performances. The student body was more than 90 percent African American and around 70 percent low income. One of these schools, described by state evaluators as having “cracked walls and ceilings, broken windows, asbestos problems and dim lighting,” was slated for renovation prior to its closure (Carroll, 1998a, p. 12). And just prior to our research, the principal was one of four in the district terminated after a St. Louis Post Dispatch inquiry revealed their lack of certification (Carroll, 1998b).

The six young men in our sample interviewed at a local community center also attended a St. Louis public school with poor outcome measures, though not quite as severe as those at the alternative schools. This school was 100 percent African American and 99 percent low income, with a dropout rate of 7.5 percent and graduation rate of 43 percent. The proportion of youths who performed at or above the state testing standards was just zero to three percent (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 2003, p. 14). In addition, it was in such infrastructural disrepair at the time of our research that it was later rebuilt on a new site in the early 2000s, though its gang problems and “reputation as an academic abyss” continued (Hinman, 2006).

While we might expect compositional effects to create higher levels of interpersonal violence in the alternative schools, as compared to the mainstream school, respondents' accounts revealed few systematic differences in the nature of violence across sites. Perhaps this is because the concentration of previously expelled students was offset by the considerably smaller size of the alternative schools, each with approximately 50 students as compared to the 1,000 plus at the mainstream school some young men in our sample attended (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 2003, p. 14). In addition, as we describe below, some young men recognized alternative schools as their last resort, and described tailoring their behaviors accordingly.

Study Findings

All of our study participants were exposed to violence as perpetrators (89 percent), victims (87 percent) and/or witnesses (100 percent) ¹² . Not surprisingly, the more serious the violence they reported, the more likely it was to have occurred in neighborhood, as opposed to school contexts. For example, when young men responded affirmatively to having been victimized or witnessed violence, we asked where it happened. Of incidents in which they described having been slapped, punched, kicked or hit, 43 percent were reported as having occurred in school, and 49 percent in neighborhoods. When young men described having been jumped or beaten up, 30 percent of incidents were described as occurring in school, compared to 63 percent in neighborhoods. In contrast, the four young men who were stabbed, and four of the five who had been shot, reported that these assaults occurred in neighborhoods. Just one had been shot outside of school. The same patterns held for witnessing violence.

These findings are in keeping with research that consistently shows young men are at greater risk for serious violence away from school than at school (DeVoe et al., 2005; Gottfredson et al., 2005). Our primary interest here is to examine how these school and neighborhood contexts reciprocally influence young men's participation in and exposure to such violence. We begin with a brief overview of the nature of young men's conflicts, including what they describe as the proximate triggers of fights: individual reputational challenges, “flo' showing” (e.g., showing off), and gang‐related disputes. We next examine young men's accounts of school‐based fights, paying particular attention to their descriptions of why and where fights occur at school, and their perceptions of how the school context compares to neighborhood settings. Finally, we analyze the overlaps of school and neighborhood conflicts, examining how school disputes are heightened due to neighborhood spillover effects, how school conflicts sometimes carry over into neighborhoods, and ongoing reciprocal conflicts across sites.

The Nature of Boys' Conflicts

Young men described their conflicts as emanating from both individual disputes and gang rivalries. Notably, when asked initially about boys' conflicts, study participants characterized them as uniform across settings, tied to young men's nature and their interactions with one another. Ronald surmised, “everywhere you go, you gonna see some boys. And somebody gonna say something to you and end up fightin.’” And Shaun explained, “you are what you are. You might be going to the store and somebody see you, they get to trippin' and you all start fighting. Or could be at a club or something, somebody start trippin,’ be fighting. At school, anywhere.”

Individual conflicts between young men were multifaceted, but primarily centered on their attempts to maintain or elevate their social positions. Young men noted that conflicts between boys typically occurred during rather mundane interactions, tended to be spontaneous, and generally stemmed from public tests of one another's willingness to stand up for themselves. One of the most critical challenges to young men's reputations resulted from being called or treated like a “punk.” For instance, Tyrell said boys get into conflicts when they're “just trying to prove theyselves to other people, [trying to show] they ain't no punk or whatever.” Maurice noted, “if one boy say something to another boy that he don't like, they'll fight…. Like, ‘you a punk, you a punk.’” Asked why someone would be called a “punk,” he elaborated:

If you lose a fight, you a punk. If somebody straight talkin' about, “what's up, you wanna fight?” Push you or hit you or something and you don't do nuttin,’ you a punk…. If you don't defend yourself when [that happens], you a punk…. It don't, punk don't necessarily mean lose a fight, ‘cause a punk can be tough, punk can whoop. A punk just in his heart, he's scared to fight.

Thus, there were consequences for young men of having others think of them as soft or weak, and this helped shape their interactions across contexts. Some boys worked to communicate to others that they were tough or hard by presenting themselves as ever ready to fight. Young men referred to these displays as “flo' [floor] showing,” or showing off, and believed they contributed to violence. Leon complained of boys who were “loud, obnoxious or something, that's always tryin' to get something started, fights and stuff,” and Dwayne surmised, “when people show off, they be getting whooped.” Shaun explained, “if you can talk, then you might as well be able to back it up. ‘Lot of cats talk too much [and] we get to fighting and stuff.” Young men said onlookers played an important role in these events, both by encouraging fights, and, in the case of friends, by providing the added security of having backup. Darnell remarked, “People like to show off around they friends. You know, ‘cause they think they friends is gonna really have they back.”

In addition to conflicts resulting from efforts to defend their personal reputations, young men emphasized that gangs had a considerable presence in their neighborhoods and schools, and thus defense of group status also fueled many boys' disputes. Terence said conflicts between boys were “mainly about gangs and stuff, colors.” Thus, group identity concerns created and exacerbated tensions between factions of young men. These were often prompted by verbal exchanges between rival gang members, during which they disparaged one another's argot, colors, and symbols. As with interpersonal disputes, young men initially characterized these as consistent problems across settings. Eugene noted, “every day, somebody don't like somebody because of gang colors…. [It] happen at school, happen when I go other places. ‘Cause sometimes it is hard to go somewhere and you wear a certain color.” Eric said, “one person will say something about the other person['s] color, and they get mad and they'll start arguing from there, and they'll fight.”

In addition to colors, young men in gangs used mundane symbols and code words to antagonize rival gang members. Andrew noted that “they could have [one] pants leg pulled up and the other one down, and that's disrespectful [to a particular gang].” Leon said, “it's names for the gangs, but it's [also] a name that you could use to dis' [disrespect] 'em. Sometimes they might say this [name] … so they gon' want to get on them, fight 'em. It's like if you're a Six Deuce and somebody say ‘Dookie,’ they don't like that at all, that's disrespectful.” Likewise, Wayne explained that rival gang members insulted one another by “like deforming of words…. Like instead of red they might say dead. Instead of blue, they might say flu. You know what I'm saying, it be like, ‘Look at this dude with all this flu on!’ He'll be like, ‘this straight TRUE BLUE!’ And they're just getting it all started right from there.”

Conflicts in Schools

Despite their general descriptions of the causes of conflicts between young men, study participants' accounts of these incidents also shed light on the situational contexts surrounding them. Young men described a combination of factors specific to the school setting that resulted in the nature of conflicts there: the impact of students' continuous contact with one another, including their unavoidable proximity to rival gang members ¹³ or others with whom they have a problem, and group processes in school that encourage fights; selection effects resulting from the behaviors of “troublemakers”; and schools' physical and supervisory environments.

Ricky's description of the causes of boys' fights encapsulates these themes:

You can sit in the classroom with somebody you don't like for like, two hours. I mean, and if it's hot and you already got an attitude and you gotta look at this guy for two hours—a lot of times a fight'll break out ‘cause you around this person for so long. You already know what you wanna do to him but you tryin' to be cool and you just sit up with this guy for two hours…. and you done hear his people done punched yo' grandmomma [laughs] in the face or something or robbed yo' sister while she was comin' home from work or something. I mean, [laughs] you not just gone sit there for two hours and look this man in his face. I mean, if you got that street mentality you not.

As he noted, young men's conflicts may result from knowledge or rumors about their behavior in neighborhoods (though Ricky used exaggerated gendered examples), but are exacerbated by their close and lengthy proximity to one another in school. Terence likewise noted that “up in here everybody got a gang that they pump, or they trying to be a part of a gang that everybody else pump. So, you know, when two gangs get together, it ain't never gon' be nothin' nice” [our emphasis]. In fact, young men typically described multiple rival gangs interacting in their schools, which contributed to ongoing conflicts. ¹⁴ Frank explained:

Most of 'em [at this school] from Six‐O's, but some of 'em ain't Six‐O's, but they cool with the Six‐O's. Like One‐9's, they cool. Uh, and the dookies [Six Deuces] and the Bloods, they cool up there…. Bloods, they wear red, dookies, they wear blue and orange. Six‐O's, we wear blue and gold. One‐9's, they wear blue and gray…. Six‐O's diss the Bloods, ‘cause they wear red.

Thus, it's not surprising that young men believed most fights were about, as Wayne put it, “all this represent[ing] different gangs…. [fights over] colors and places where they from.”

Ricky also made reference to the temperature in his comments above. As described earlier, the schools our study participants attended were in poor infrastructural condition, making it easy to assume this includes poor climate control—the lack of air conditioning as well as outdated boiler heating, both of which result in extreme classroom temperatures. In addition, he clarified that some young men's “street mentality” further contributed to the likelihood of school fights. He continued:

If you care and you think about the situation and what the consequences are, nine times out of ten you won't hear about the situation until lunchtime or after school…. See the smart ones know when to react and when not to. Them the ones that wanna be there. You got some that come to school just so a fight could kick off, just so they can fight…. You got people that do that, or come to school just to be there. Just to see if he can get a dice game goin' or just to see if he could sell some weed or something…. I mean, those mainly the type of guys that have fights. But you got people like me that go [to this school], like a C average student, I mean, you might see us in the hall every now and then, or you might see us at two lunches, but the majority of the time we somewhere tryin' to get somewhere, tryin' to work…. You got a lot of people at school that want to be something.

Likewise, Wayne said most fights involved “just a small group that want to be known,” and Darnell noted, “some guys come here just to fight and I guess for lunch, you know.” Doug believed such conflicts were over “like who runs it, like you know, who's dominant between everybody.” He surmised, “a lot of kids just want attention, that's all…. It's like a showcase here, you know, a lot of people, they just want people to watch 'em … [so] they try to make theyself look hard.” As his comments suggest, it isn't just the presence of attention‐seekers, but also how the grouping of youths in school provides a “showcase” for their behaviors.

While some young men focused on the selection effects of certain peers—those gang‐involved and with a “street mentality,” they also focused on the broader student culture in school, including the impact of youths spreading rumors about one another, instigating conflicts for entertainment purposes, and “amping up” those conflicts in order to see fights. Again, these behaviors were also exacerbated by setting effects. Darnell explained, “you can [over]hear another conversation, [people] talking in the lunchroom or something. Like they talking about what happened today and things like that, like conflicts, you know what I'm saying, between other people.” Once rumors began to spread, “it's like they just start getting out of line, getting mad … and be like, whatever, you know, like they wanna fight.” Ronald described a “conflict that's going on [now]” that began when another boy's “friend told me, ‘this person wants to fight you.’” Travis surmised, “a lot of kids like to instigate stuff to see things … somebody say something to start off [a] little [tension] and [it] start getting to a bigger issue.”

Once a fight began, young men consistently described student bystanders' efforts to escalate it further. Jamal explained, “people will start crowding around … [egg] stuff on, probably get souped up or into the heat of the moment.” Leon said bystanders get “all rowdy, screaming and hollering, standing around just watching.” Asked whether anyone ever tried to intervene, he continued, “nobody I've seen. It's like everybody crowd around cheerin' it on, that's how I look at it.” Similarly, Doug said students “cheer [it] on. Be like, ‘man, you let him whoop you like that? Get up and hit him back!’ You know, they'll promote 'em.” Tomme explained, “I know it's a fight when it be a whole lot of people coming around…. It be too many people, I can't even hardly be seein'!”

Features of schools' environmental layout were also significant. Recall Darnell's comment about the cafeteria as a site where gossip was transmitted. A number of young men described fights taking place in this setting. Terence described a recent incident:

We was all in the lunchroom eating lunch, and dude was staring at some other guy['s] girlfriend or whatever. And then he saw him looking at her so he walked over and was like, “don't do that man, don't do that!” and he was like, “man who is you?” and then ole' boy just smacked [the guy]…. He just smacked him, upped and smacked him. Then the other dude got up, he smacked him back. Before you knew it, they was just fightin' up in the corner. Then that's when security and everybody came and broke it up. ¹⁵

Frank described “this one fight in the lunchroom. I was fighting, I was helping.” He continued, “it was this one big dude, we kept messing with him ‘cause we wanted to fight him, we kept messing with him.” The “big dude” they were messing with “told the security guard” who:

Didn't do nuttin' … told him to go to the office ‘cause he was cussin' and stuff like that. Then when he went to walk out the lunchroom, somebody said something, he turned around, grabbed one of my little partners by they neck, slammed they head against the table. I jumped up, just banged him right there.

One reason the cafeteria seemed a common site for fights to break out—in addition to the large numbers of students who congregated there at lunchtime—was that it provided ready‐made props for young men to “mess with” other boys. Marcus said “somebody get a spoon or something, and they flip [food with] it, and somebody jump up and say, ‘you hit me!.’ … Pow, he hit him.” And Carlos described “people throwing cookies, throwing juice, chips … just to do something [to] mess with somebody.” Several young men from one of the alternative schools described an incident the previous week that began over a thrown cookie and escalated. According to Lamont:

They funny … ‘cause when they fight, I mean they throw chairs at each other and smack each other with [cafeteria] trays, bust each other eyes…. It's just like [a] recent fight, they was throwing cookies, dude threw a [cookie], then dude threw another cookie, then dude stole [punched] him and the other dude got up, stole him in the [face], then he knocked the table over.

Other locations were common sites of conflict as well. Like cafeterias, hallways often contained groups of unsupervised youths. Darryl surmised, “the teachers probably [could do a better job to] make sure the students get to they classes on time. ‘Cause they be just sittin' in the hallways talkin,’ conversating when the bell rings for class.” Thus, Ricky noted that “most of the fights really kick off in the hallways…. You might find a group of guys standing somewhere and they just feel like they want to cause some trouble. And that's usually when that happens.”

In addition, young men described numerous secluded places in their schools that boys selected for fights. Tommie, who attended the large mainstream school, noted, “the cafeteria is all the way on the top floor … and then the school is real big and … it's a whole lot of vacant parts of the school where you can just go. Ain't no teachers … just empty classrooms and stuff.” Doug, in one of the alternative schools, said when boys fight they go “to the basement where there's nothing but two classes, and sometimes … teachers don't even be in there most of the time…. So they won't get caught … they say, ‘we gonna go back here where there's no teachers or nothing there, no police, no nothing. Dudes just fight all day, that's how they'll do it.” These sites represent what Astor and his colleagues (1999; Astor & Meyer, 2001) describe as undefined public space, where fights can take place beyond the purview of teachers' perceived responsibilities.

Secluded spots in the school were also used for other illicit activities, which themselves sometimes resulted in fights. Tyrell described a recent incident in the basement of his alternative school, where boys had gathered to shoot dice:

This one dude, they had a bet—like they make side bets, like say if your point is ten, you can bet somebody else [that] you gonna hit the ten. You supposed to drop the money down, if the money ain't there [then] that bet [is] off. But the dude didn't drop the money all the way [down]. He picked his money back up ‘cause the other dude had hit the ten…. Then they start arguing and they eventually start fighting…. [Even though it was only over a dollar], if you let somebody cheat you one time, they keep cheating you over and over.

Here, the reputational trigger for boys' fights described earlier coalesced with young men's unsupervised activities in the school and resulted in violence.

The physical layout of boys' schools also caused concerns about youths' ability to bring weapons into school. Darnell felt secure at his alternative school “because you got securities. There ain't no doors open that you can get in. The gym door stay locked and the other doors you can't get out or come in ‘cept the front door.” He contrasted this with the situation at his previous school, which had “about seven or eight doors around you, and you can go out any one of 'em. Some of 'em had chains on 'em and some of 'em didn't.” Likewise, of the mainstream school he attended, Tommie explained:

The people in the [nearby housing project], if they want to for real, they could bring weapons and stuff from there…. They got metal detectors and everything but if it's lunchtime or something, where most of the security guards upstairs [in the cafeteria], some of the [project] people can run downstairs, open up a side door or somethin,’ put a pencil or somethin' in the door run out there and get somethin' and come back in ‘cause all the security guards'll be upstairs but they'll be spreaded out still but they won't be around like [at every entry point].

Unlike Darnell, Travis and Ronnie were skeptical of the security metal detectors provided. Travis noted:

I've been to schools to where they have metal detectors and kids still get guns in the school. It's bad to the point where you don't feel safe in school. In a way, it just make you think like, what is the system doing? I mean, they spend all this money on metal detectors and here kids still walk up through the metal detectors with guns but they don't find 'em.

Of his alternative school, Ronald lamented, “this school is not safe. People bring … knives in school. [I] know somebody with an ink pen, but it's a knife…. We wear boxers, [but] you put on some Fruit of the Looms on under 'em, you can get anything in school.”

Nonetheless, some young men at the two alternative schools described less conflict there than in their schools of origin. Darryl and Travis attributed this to youths' recognition of their placement as a “last resort.” Darryl explained, “at this school, it's not really like fightin,’ it's like people trying to get back to regular school…. If somebody gets put out at this school … they can't go to no other schools. I think they just drop out.” ¹⁶ And Travis surmised:

This [is the] last resort for a school…. In St. Louis this means that you've done something at another school and you got kicked out of all St. Louis public schools so this is your last resort. If you get kicked out, you ain't got no choice but GED school. So when people come here to [school] they ain't got no other choice but to go to GED school I mean, they ain't got no choice but to straighten up.

Tyrell, on the other hand, attributed fewer fights to his school's size:

It's so small you gotta try to get along with people, other gangs…. Ain't nobody here trip off [gang] stuff like that. Like if you go somewhere like [another St. Louis school], it would be different. Like you … probably be fighting all the time, probably waiting by the door with Bloods and all that kinda stuff waiting on you to come outside. But up here, they ain't even like that.

Finally, regardless of the school they attended, young men were in agreement that school violence was less serious than neighborhood violence. For instance, Marvin noted, “they argue [at school] but it never lead to fightin.’ … [The other day] they was talkin' and one [boy] just called this [other] boy a dookie and the boy got real mad. Then they just kept arguin,’ sayin' what they was gonna do to each other, but [it] never came to it. They just like man ‘forget it.’” Likewise, describing gang fights, Andrew said he had “only seen one really up here [at school]. Out there on the streets I see a lot of fights.” And Walter explained that fights:

Happen often. I seen a whole bunch of dudes jump one dude and then a couple days later the dude see one of the dudes who he jumped and if he got his friends with him he'll go back and jump him…. [But] it ain't happening in school. I ain't ever seen no dude fighting in school, it's really outside school…. Well, some dudes will fight [at school] if they hate each other…. Like if a dude go here and then they find out that the dude don't like him—’cause you say something to somebody that you think you real cool with and he won't go back and tell that person [but he does]—and then that's how most of the stuff start.

In addition, though most young men did describe fights they had witnessed in school, their accounts of neighborhood violence were more brutal and often involved the threat or use of firearms. For instance, recall Tyrell's description of the school fight that emerged as a result of a young man's cheating at dice. In contrast, Curtis described what happened when he “seen a dude get shot” in his neighborhood:

They was in a dice game, shooting dice and the dude got to cheatin' so he told the dude, he said “man keep on cheatin,’ I'm gonna kill you.” So he kept on cheatin' so he pult out his gun and then got to shootin' at everybody. And that dude that was cheatin,’ he got shot five times, no three times. And he had, and, he shot at his friends too.

And Travis noted:

I seen some brutal fist fights to where it's like 20 people against 30 people or something to where it's just, they ain't shooting or nothing, but they might have a board they hitting somebody with, but it's just a big fight. But usually those fights do lead to other things. And sometimes those things can last for a long time. Years. Not the fights, just you having static with somebody else. Like we don't get along with their hood.

In that sense, schools can be seen as providing relative sanctuary from risks for serious violence in the community. However, as we will see in the next section, the relationship between school and neighborhood conflicts was actually more complex.

The Reciprocal Dynamics of School and Neighborhood Conflict

Young men described multiple ways in which school and neighborhood conflicts could overlap. Tommie, for example, described the risks he faced crossing rival gang territory in order to get to and from his school:

I walk past a whole lotta different projects, that's a whole lot of different gangs…. My school, see I'm from [one housing project]. That's a whole different project. And [my school] is inside [these other] projects. And that's a whole different project that don't like each other. And we go to that school. So we just gotta go to that school. We walk to school and we walk back.

He said “early in the mornin' when we goin' to school” it was safer because “don't be nobody out.” But later in the day, it was “a whole different story ‘cause everybody out of school and outside.”

In addition, young men reported that when there were neighborhood tensions, due to a particular violent incident or longstanding feud, these often fueled conflicts at school. Ricky explained:

Well, say like the night before it might have been a shooting on somebody street, right. And this particular gang might think that this gang did it. And when they get to school, it's a lot of tension. Or it might be a fight at a mall or something, or at a store or something. And they bring it to school, you know…. You could have a normal conflict and you wouldn't hear about it at school, but as far as the gang activity—they can carry that far.

Young men's gang affiliations, or even their neighborhoods' reputations, could carry over into school and cause conflicts. Leon's neighborhood gang was well known around the community, which he described affecting him both in the community and at school, despite his own avoidance of gang activities:

They might ask me where I'm from and I'll be like, ‘I stay over there on [this street]’ or whatever and they'll be like, ‘yeah, you be with them ole Sixty Crab ass niggas,’ or something like that. They say that type of stuff…. They may be like, ‘oh, he from [this block], we goin' to beat him up after school.’ They may feel like that towards me. I try not to keep it like that…. I guess they just be talkin,’ tryin' to act tough…. I haven't actually tried to fight nobody. I try to keep to myself, ‘cause I ain't tryin' to get put out of school right now.

Most often, when youths described conflicts coming to school from the neighborhood, they said tensions escalating during school hours through further instigation, but with violent resolutions deliberately occurring just after school ended. Raymond provided a recent example:

[I] came to school one morning, dude came up to me saying uh, “you and your aunt had fought my cousin.” I was like “no, I fought your cousin, he got what he deserved.” So he was like “oh,” so I had stepped in his face. He was like “why you off the locker ¹⁷ ?” I was like “why you think I'm off the locker?” So he was talking about it and stuff, going around school like, “yeah he gonna get it after school. I'm gonna whoop him after school!” So all his partners came up here and there wasn't nothing but like me and two of my partners. So I was gonna fight him then, but … the security guard came over and broke it up so we had hopped in the car … and we went down the street so. Then my other two partners had came … so I hopped in the car with them … went down there and fought 'em.

In addition, some conflicts that began at school were intentionally diverted until after school ended, and school hours were used to threaten and build hype. Dwayne said when young men tried to fight with him at school, “I tell 'em, ‘I ain't gonna fight you at school.’ I tell 'em to meet me outside, something like that…. I be getting into fights after school though. I don't like to fight at school, ‘cause I don't wan' get suspended.”

Though Kevin noted that “you can find any reason to fight … especially in this school,” he clarified, “they usually don't fight at school though, they'll wait and go in the park after school or something.” Bobby said “after school, like when school is out at two, you see most of the fights going on right at the bus stop, going on at bus catching time.” And Cooper described that he “heard rumors” at school in advance of a recent fight in which the young men “met up after school and fought about a block away.” These consistent findings shed situational light on Snyder and Sickmund's (1999) report that nearly 20 percent of adolescent violence occurs in the four hours immediately following school on weekdays. Such violence is closely coupled with school conflicts and their deliberate spillover into neighborhoods.

In addition, boys said after‐school fights typically involved additional combatants—either because one participant purposely called on his partners outside of school for backup, or because a fight emerged spontaneously when rival group members came to school to pick up their friends. Doug explained:

Like say for instance you get into it with somebody in here [at school] … from a [rival] gang with each other. And [one guy] leave, but he ain't just left that day—he's coming back after school with some more of his partners. They gonna come and get him. And it's always some more people out here, it's always a crowd of people outside when school's out. Always, and they don't even go here.

Leon described witnessing a fight just after school in which “it was a group, I'd say it was about seven males jumpin' on this one person…. He in a gang, but they caught him by hisself. They Six Deuces and I think they said he was a Gangsta Disciple…. After he … got beat up, he brought his group or whatever and they met up with that group.” Likewise, Travis emphasized how the school setting contributed to escalating conflicts, which were then re‐broadened to include non‐school participants:

From the schools that I've done been to, most of the fights that I've done seen [are] from gang‐bangers…. [They get into it at school] because, I guess, it's how they [class] schedule are. You know, one neighborhood don't get along with the next, and it's a Blood [in] one class and it's a Crip, and they all in the same classroom. One say something to one of 'em, and they friends tell they other friends from the neighborhood, and it become just a big ol,’ just a big clash, calamity, violence that just happens.

Travis noted that large group fights happened quite often around school because one combatant's “friend or his neighborhood wanna jump in, and [then] the other person's neighborhood wanna jump in, [and] it become bigger than you thought.” Likewise, Leon surmised that young men were often scared to “fight one‐on‐one, they need a group.”

Finally, James described an incident that occurred spontaneously when “my cousin and my partners came up there” at the end of the school day and resulted in a neighborhood fight:

They came to pick … all of us up at school and we was fina go somewhere…. Dudes [in the school's neighborhood] didn't like what they had on…. My partner … told 'em, he wear what he want to and … only one way they gonna get it up off of him was to beat it up off of him. He's like ‘cause can't nobody tell him what to wear unless they buy it for him…. And the dude was like well, whatever, so they walked away. [But] they went and got some of [their] partners or whatever and they came back…. They kept on following us. So we stopped … the car. And I was talking to some female, and the dude started saying something to my cousin, talking to him crazy and he … tried to spit on him or whatever. So my cousin hit him … got to fighting. They all rushed him, him and all my partners and all them, so I went down to help them out.

Thus, while both schools and neighborhoods each have internal dynamics that contribute to young men's conflicts, there also appear to be significant reciprocal dynamics in the overlap between schools and neighborhoods in disadvantaged communities that heighten boys' conflicts and precipitate violence within and across these settings.

Discussion

Quantitative research reveals important temporal and spatial patterns in adolescent violence. Youths' exposure to violence occurs disproportionately in disadvantaged urban settings, and just over a third of serious violent incidents occur at or on the way to and from school (Gottfredson, 2001; Gottfredson et al., 2005). In fact, nearly 20 percent of such violence occurs during weekdays of the school year, between the hours of 3 pm and 7 pm (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Despite these patterns, only a small number of scholars have examined the situational dynamics of such violence, including features of the physical and social environments of schools that contribute to conflicts (Astor & Meyer, 2001; Astor et al., 1999; Lockwood, 1997), and the reciprocal nature of neighborhood and school settings (Hagan et al., 2002; Hellman & Beaton, 1986; Mateu‐Gelabert, 2000). Our goal in this analysis has been to build from these studies to further illuminate the situational contexts of school violence and the significant school/neighborhood interaction effects that contribute to adolescent violence.

Not surprisingly, the young men in our study described boys' conflicts as emerging from both interpersonal disputes over reputational concerns (see also Anderson, 1999) and from gang rivalries that were fueled by the strongly territorial nature of St. Louis neighborhood gangs (see Decker & Van Winkle, 1996; Miller, 2001). Notably, young men attributed the vast majority of serious violence—in school and in their neighborhoods—to gangs. In fact, they described individual disputes sometimes morphing into group fights as a result of young men routinely calling their gang‐involved partners to participate in after school fights. Thus, Ferguson's (2003) finding that youths are more likely to be victimized in schools where gangs are present makes sense in light of these patterns.

Features of the school setting also contributed to young men's fights. In keeping with survey research on the correlates of school violence, young men pointed to compositional or selection effects—noting that gang members and other boys with a “street mentality” were often most responsible for instigating conflicts. Gottfredson (2001, p. 82) argues that “the higher the concentration of educationally and socially disadvantaged students in the school, the poorer the outcomes for individual students in the school, regardless of their own level of disadvantage.” As our findings show, these poor outcomes include exposure to both school and school/neighborhood‐based violence.

In addition, these compositional effects have been linked to normative peer cultures in schools (Felson et al., 1994; Gottfredson, 2001). Beyond individual contributions to violence, young men pointed to important group processes in their schools—including the role of gossip and rumors, and the entertainment value of fights in settings characterized by boredom—that heightened tensions and encouraged conflicts. ¹⁸ Notably, both the impoverished, unstimulating educational environment often found in disadvantaged urban schools (Gottfredson, 2001), and young men's continuous contact with one another in school, contributed to these dynamics. Boys described problems created by rival gang members or others with interpersonal disputes sitting in classes with one another, as well as how time spent in large groups in the cafeteria and hallways, functioned to fuel boys' animosities.

Finally, young men linked the physical and supervisory environment in their schools to the situational contexts of their fights. Lunchtime, for example, not only resulted in the congregation of large numbers of youths in an enclosed space, but also provided props—cafeteria trays, food—that could be used to “mess with” other young men and escalate conflicts. Boys also made note of isolated areas in their schools that remained unmonitored and thus could be used for fights or other illicit activities, and also complained of the dangers posed by unmonitored school entrances that could be used to bring in weapons or intruders. As Astor and his colleagues (1999, Astor & Meyer, 2001) point out, these represent spatial hotspots for violence in schools precisely because they represent undefined public spaces which teachers tend to see as beyond the purview of their responsibilities. And such definitions are particularly likely to occur in disadvantaged urban schools, like those in St. Louis, that are underfunded, serve students with “greater social and emotional needs” (Gottfredson, 2001, p. 65), are unable to consistently recruit and retain talented, dedicated teachers, and are “less likely to include … a shared mission … and extended teacher roles” (Gottfredson, 2001, p. 83).

Turning to the overlap of school and neighborhood interactions, our findings suggest the critical importance of decoupling measures of school violence to distinguish between those events that occur in school from those that occur on the way to and from school. The young men in our investigation consistently argued that the most serious incidents of school‐related violence took place beyond the school grounds and immediately following school hours. Despite occurring in neighborhood settings, such violence was tied to the school setting. Most obviously, because high schools draw students from a larger community area than elementary or middle schools, young men from a variety of neighborhoods—each with strong territorial identities—came into contact with one another entering and exiting school grounds. And the schools themselves were located in neighborhoods with their own gangs.

Welsh and his colleagues (2000) found that poor socioeconomic conditions in both schools' neighborhoods and those of their pupils negatively affected school stability, and thus school disorder. Our situational analyses suggest that the overlap of these two—i.e., the effects of bringing similarly situated students from across neighborhood territories together—also contributes to violence in the vicinity of schools. Specifically, young men in our study said that most fights were purposely planned to occur after school, and often involved other young men from the immediate neighborhood and the partners of students who came to the school from other neighborhoods. This is in keeping with Hellman and Beaton's (1986) finding that urban schools have the most problem with “intruders” coming to schools other than their own and contributing to conflicts there.

In addition, the school setting could exacerbate neighborhood conflicts. Neighborhood tensions, most notably rival gang conflicts and incidents of violence, were brought into the school, where these tensions escalated further as a result of youths' proximity to one another, and further escalations resulting from gossip, rumors, and attempts to “amp up” feuds. While we cannot say whether such conflicts would have escalated to violence regardless of youths' school contacts with one another, our findings shed additional light on the importance of examining both the situational contexts of school violence and the reciprocal dynamics of school and neighborhood conflicts.

Our study, however, is not without important limitations. The sampling frame we utilized means our findings are not generalizable. In particular, our oversampling of youths in alternative schools that served as students' last resort prior to expulsion from St. Louis Public Schools, suggests important contextual effects—including student composition and school size—that likely affect the nature of our findings. We found few systematic differences in young men's descriptions of school violence across settings, but those we found were notable nonetheless. In addition, some research suggests that rates of school violence are higher in middle schools than high schools (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Thus, the dynamics across these settings might also be significantly different.

Moreover, because our research questions were limited to incidents of violence, we cannot speak to the important question of when and how young men avoid violence, and what role school attachments might play in this process (see Mateu‐Gelabert & Lune, 2007). Relatedly, our research suggests that some conflicts were temporally truncated (for instance, in‐school conflicts which escalated to violence immediately after school the same day), while others appeared to play out for days, weeks, or even months. Future research should investigate these temporal processes with more precision than we were able to here, as each type raises unique challenges for school security, supervision, and prevention.

Despite these limitations, our study adds credence to the recent call for research that attends to the social contexts and situational dynamics of school violence, as well as the importance of reciprocal dynamics between school and neighborhood settings (Hagan et al., 2002; Mateu‐Gelabert, 2000). We suggest that comparative qualitative investigations are a fruitful means for better understanding these phenomena.

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.

Appendix A. Study Participants (N = 38)

Table

Name	Age	Delinquency^a	Exposure to gangs
Andrew	17	Non‐serious only	Former gang member
Arthur	16	Serious—ever	Friends are gang members
Bobby	17	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Carlos	13	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Cooper	18	Serious—ever	Former gang member; friends are gang members
Curtis	14	Serious—last 6 months	Former gang member
Darnell	17	Serious—last 6 months	Former gang member
Darryl	15	Serious—last 6 months	None
Doug	17	Serious—ever	None
Dwayne	17	Non‐serious only	Present in neighborhood
Eric	17	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Eugene	19	Non‐serious only	Friends are a gang
Frank	13	Serious—ever	Current gang member
Gary	18	Serious—ever	Present in neighborhood
Jamal	19	Non‐serious only	Present in neighborhood
James	17	Non‐serious only	Present in neighborhood
Jermaine	15	Serious—ever	Present in neighborhood
Kenny	14	Serious—last 6 months	Friends are a gang
Kevin	16	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Lamont	13	Serious—ever	Friends are gang members
Larry	18	Serious—ever	Former gang member
Leon	18	Serious—last 6 months	Friends are gang members
Marcus	16	Non‐serious only	Friends are gang members
Marvin	17	Serious—last 6 months	Present in neighborhood
Maurice	14	Serious—ever	Friends are gang members
Raymond	17	Non‐serious only	Present in neighborhood
Ricky	17	Serious—ever	Former gang member; friends are gang members
Robert	16	Serious—ever	Former gang member
Ronald	15	Serious—last 6 months	Present in neighborhood
Shaun	16	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Terence	18	Serious—ever	Present in neighborhood
Tommie	15	Non‐serious only	Present in neighborhood
Tony	15	Non‐serious only	None
Travis	16	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Tyrell	17	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
Walter	15	Non‐serious only	Former gang member; friends are a gang
Wayne	16	Serious—last 6 months	Current gang member
William	15	Serious—last 6 months	Former gang member
^aYouths' delinquency is classified as serious if they responded affirmatively to any of the following survey items: stole between $50 and $100; stole over $100; stole a motor vehicle; attacked someone with a weapon or with the intent of seriously injuring them; committed a robbery; sold marijuana, crack cocaine or other drugs. We do not include carrying a hidden weapon, as this confounds behaviors adopted for protection with those indicative of broader participation in delinquency.