I<\/span>n the basement of the Edmund D. Edelman Children\u2019s Court of Los Angeles, 30 children and teens await hearings on criminal charges or updates on their foster placements. A facilitator from the LA-based nonprofit violence prevention program Peace Over Violence (POV)<\/a> asks each young person how they\u2019re feeling.<\/p>\n \u201cNot good. Not at all,\u201d says one teen.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s going on that is making you feel bad?\u201d the facilitator asks. But the teen shakes her head, fixing her gaze on the wall.<\/p>\n A moment of silence lingers between them, and the facilitator moves on.<\/p>\n \u201cIf this was my only peek inside a room like this, I might have thought that [the teen\u2019s] change of heart had something specific to do with the court and its representatives, or with [the facilitator],\u201d writes sociologist Max Greenberg<\/a>, a lecturer of sociology, in his book Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At-Risk Youth in a Fractured State<\/i><\/a> (University of California Press, 2019). \u201cBut this happened nearly everywhere facilitators went. This is one of the things facilitators learn: young people want to talk, often badly, but then don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Greenberg is an expert on gender, interpersonal violence, and social policy; his research has focused on violence prevention programs and he\u2019s the author of a book on ending violence against women. He has also volunteered and then served as a board member for POV. \u201cThey were able to graze a lot of young people\u2019s lives,\u201d he says, \u201cbut they were rarely able to really dig in and form a lasting connection or enable larger systemic changes.\u201d<\/p>\n With Twelve Weeks to Change a Life<\/i>, Greenberg set out to \u201cmake the tensions and contradictions in these programs visible and find a way to talk about them,\u201d he says. \u201cI hope this book helps the people doing this work day to day\u2014that includes the paid professionals, but also the thousands of volunteers, many of them college students\u2014to talk about the issues they\u2019ve noticed but don\u2019t have a framework for talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n Sixty-five percent of young people in the United States are enrolled in these violence prevention programs in locations like juvenile courts and school health classes. As part of his research for the book, Greenberg conducted interviews with middle and high schoolers who participated in POV lessons, often as part of school health classes.<\/p>\n My hope is that my book shifts the conversation about how we engage with young people as a society and moves us more to thinking about long-term investment and resources rather than fleeting interventions.<\/p>\n Over three years, he observed thousands of students to determine the impact of the sessions on their personal relationships. He found that young people were hesitant to engage with facilitators because mandated reporting laws require adults to report any suspicions of child abuse or neglect to the authorities. Only 37 percent of participants in violence prevention programs say they told an adult about a violent incident, Greenberg says, pointing to colleagues\u2019 research in the Child Abuse & Neglect<\/i> journal. While mandated reporting laws are meant to protect children, he says, they often dissuade young people from speaking up.<\/p>\n \u201cMandated reporting laws are there for good reason; they encourage adults to be on the lookout for risks in young people\u2019s lives and help connect young people with support, but it\u2019s helpful to see things from the perspective of young people. Nearly every adult they come across\u2014their teacher, their coach, their program facilitator\u2014tells them that they are a mandated reporter, which makes clear that adults\u2019 allegiances rest more with the institution than with them.<\/p>\n \u201cYoung people don\u2019t know how these institutions work and don\u2019t trust them. They want to tell an adult about something hard they\u2019re going through, and instead of being able to say, \u2018I am here for you,\u2019 or \u2018Here are our options; what would you like to do?,\u2019 what the adult so often says in response is, \u2018Before you say another word, I want you to know that I am going to need to tell someone else, who you don\u2019t know\u2014and I can\u2019t tell you what the consequences will be.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cFor a lot of the young people I met in Los Angeles, their experiences with authority were often punitive and unpredictable and the potential benefits vague and distant.\u201d<\/p>\n While some young people learn valuable lessons in the programs about things like communication strategies in relationships or legal definitions of violence, Greenberg says violence prevention programs \u201cwill not solve the problems that they purport to. The programs focus on changing young people, but they do nothing to change wider systems that harm them. Underfunded schools, violence in their neighborhood, limited institutional support, untreated trauma, food insecurity. So often, programs try to act like those things aren\u2019t happening.\u201d<\/p>\n In Twelve Weeks to Change a Life<\/i>, Greenberg argues that we should tackle violence prevention through solutions that foster deeper, longer-term relationships between young people and the adults in their lives. Such solutions could include incentivizing teachers to encourage them not to quit their positions, relaxing mandated reporting rules, and preparing adults to participate in personal conversations with young people.<\/p>\n \u201cMy hope is that my book shifts the conversation about how we engage with young people as a society,\u201d says Greenberg, \u201cand moves us more to thinking about long-term investment and resources rather than fleeting interventions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How mandated reporting laws are crippling violence prevention programs for children and teens<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":39237,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/37394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/37394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39078,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/37394\/revisions\/39078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=37394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}