Teaching and Learning Guide for: Youth (and) Violence

Author's introduction By reflecting on violence in its many manifestations this course is intended to problematize youth's relationship to violence. Not only will it underscore how and why violence is perpetrated by young people, but, perhaps more important, how young people are affected. Students will reflect on how violence impacts and enters their own lives – sometimes in very inauspicious ways. Much of what counts as entertainment is laden with, and centres on, violence. For example, Grand Theft Auto is a popular video game wherein game players assume the role of a wannabe gangster whose rise though the criminal underworld is predicated upon his thieving and murderous efficiency. Similarly, the movie Never Back Down follows a young male as he attempts to fight his way into the vaunted inner circle of his high school's ‘in’ group. Marred by and revered for his reputation as a ‘tough guy’, the protagonist is forced, in a contradiction that only makes coherent sense in the context of the pervasive violent masculinity which buoys the film, to fight his way clear of this foul reputation. Human intersections with violence are undeniably and unexpectedly complicated. We are fascinated and our lives are directly affected by violence regardless of proximity. Significantly, violence – both the Hollywood version and that which is ‘real’– affects each and all. Fears of violence, whether they are informed by official statistics, crime‐based dramas, the 6 o’clock news or reality television, contour our existence in very definite ways. Our temporal and spatial movement through urban space, our understandings of law and governance strategies, our relations with ‘others’– significant and otherwise – are conditioned by tangential, lived, experienced and witnessed violence. It alters our way of being, where we choose to live, and how we conduct, protect and entertain ourselves. No one is immune. Human experience is contoured irrevocably by violence. At issue is our inconsistent and contradictory relationship to youth violence. Parents applaud young people's violence – especially their sons’– as they ‘duke it out’ on the football field and in the hockey arena and urge them to ‘get’ or ‘kill’ the other team. At the same time, young people are overrepresented as victims of violence – especially our daughters. This course provides an opportunity to explore and analyze how youth [and] violence is braided into the fabric of Western culture. Starting points/learning objectives What follows are issues students should consider and meditate on throughout the term. I encourage readers to introduce them at the beginning of the semester and return to them several times throughout. They may also be used to frame study questions and as a course summary. What is violence? Why is there such growing concern about youth violence? What role does the media play in our understanding of youth violence? How are youth gangs perceived? What is the relationship between youth and violence? What is the connection between masculinity(ies) and violence? How does Western culture champion and, at the same time, abhor youth violence? What are ‘solutions’ to youth violence? What role can youth play in this process? Author recommendations Hannah Arendt, 1970, On Violence . New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Following her tumultuous experiences of living through the Second World War and student protests of the 1960s, Hannah Arendt penned her reflections on violence. She famously writes that, ‘Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power’ (53). She maintains that even though power and violence may hold phenomological elements in common, they are in fact opposites: ‘where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance’ (56). Arendt develops this line of argument later in the book and concludes that, ‘Every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence – if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands ... have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it’ (87). For Arendt, worlds (both individual and global) become irrevocably altered through incidences of violence. She writes, ‘the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world’ (80). Arendt's reflections occasion an opportunity to reflect not only on interpersonal violence, but perhaps more important, state violence. Fearnley, Fran (ed.). 2004. I wrote on all Four Walls: Teens Speak Out on Violence . Toronto, Canada: Annick. How do youth experience violence? This collection contains the captivating stories of nine affected youth whose voices narrate experiences of being victims and instigators of violence. Their stories evidence the complexities of violence. They demonstrate how a great deal of slippage exists between the categories of victim and offender. Instead of being clear cut, the spellbinding tales evidence how the line separating the violent and the victim is often blurred. Most striking about this collection is the demand that adults listen to youth's voices. Tragically, youth are too often the objects of social regulation and academic discourse without being its authors. This collection forces the reader to consider what role, if any, youth voices may play in the amelioration of violence. Loeber, Rolf and David P. Farrington (eds.). 1998. Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Co‐edited by Rolf Loeber and David Farrington, this impressive collection offers innovative and insightful essays centring on the aetiology and trajectory of violent youth. This report of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's focus group on serious and violent offenders asks the reader to reflect on well‐worn assumptions. Instead of attending to single and static causal explanations of youth violence, the authors identify significant risk and resiliency factors. Collectively, the 17 chapters argue for more proactive responses to youth violence that attend to the complexity of juvenile development. The authors maintain that effective reforms and interventions can be implemented only when predictable assemblages of risk and protective factors are isolated. This volume of essays is impressive for the surfeit of data on risk and resiliency. Messerschmidt, James. 2000. Nine Lives: Adolescent Masculinities, The Body and Violence . Boulder, CO: Westview Press. No list of recommended readings on violence would be complete without at least one of James Messerschmidt's splendid books. In addition to Nine Lives , his Masculinities and Crime and Flesh and Blood are equally impressive. Tying these works together is the author's insistence that masculini

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