The Road to Gang Membership: Characteristics of Male Gang and Nongang Members from Ages 10 to 14

Individual, Familial, and Socio-Environmental Risk Factors of Gang Membership in a Community Sample of Adolescents in Southern Italy

Despite the growing social alarm generated by the recurrent news concerning violent episodes involving youth gangs, systematic research in Italy in this field, especially within a psychological framework, is still limited. Following a social-ecological approach, the present study aimed at investigating the role of self-serving cognitive distortions (CDs), parental rejection, and community violence witnessing in youth gang membership (YGM). Furthermore, we examined the mediating and/or moderating role of YGM in the association between risk factors and involvement in antisocial behaviors (ASBs). A community sample of 817 adolescents attending middle and high schools in a high-risk urban area in Southern Italy (46.9% males; 53% middle school students; M_age = 14.67; SD = 1.65) were involved in the study. One hundred and fifty-seven participants (19.2%) were found to be gang members. Employing counterfactual-based mediation analysis, we found that CDs and community violence witnessing were directly associated with YGM and ASBs. The association between CDs and ASBs was mediated by YGM. Parental rejection was directly related to ASBs but not to YGM. A significant interaction effect between parental rejection and YGM was found, revealing that high levels of parental rejection, along with being a gang member, amplified the involvement in ASBs. These findings pointed out that distorted moral cognitions and the experience of violence witnessing within the community may represent a fertile ground for gang involvement. Both individual and contextual factors should be considered in order to implement interventions aimed to prevent adolescents' risk of joining a gang.

Gangs and Adolescent Mental Health: a Narrative Review

This study presents a narrative review of the literature on gang culture and its association with mental health, including an in-depth overview of the topic area and reference to key systematic reviews and meta-analyses. This review will define gang culture, discuss the multiple interacting reasons (biological, psychological and social) why some young people may be attracted to gangs; and the psychiatric morbidities associated with being part of a gang. Gang culture and some adolescent mental health problems are intricately linked. This paper highlights ways in which research, practice and policy could be extended to minimise the injurious effects of gang culture on adolescent mental health.

Do behavioral disorders render gang status spurious? New insights

In community and correctional settings, gang status is a robust predictor of offending, unfortunately relatively few studies have considered behavioral disorders of offenders and whether these disorders mediate the gang-offending relationship. Drawing on a near population of correctional clients on federal supervised release, negative binomial regression and ROC-AUC models found that gang variables were rendered insignificant or were generally weak classifiers of severe offending once behavioral disorders were specified. The only exception was security threat group status that was robustly associated with prison misconduct. Gang researchers should consider behavioral disorders and other psychopathology of gang members to inform theory and research.

Differentiating Gang Members, Gang Affiliates, and Violent Men on Their Psychiatric Morbidity and Traumatic Experiences

OBJECTIVE

Little is known about the differences between gang members and gang affiliates-or those individuals who associate with gangs but are not gang members. Even less is known about how these groups compare with other violent populations. This study examined how gang members, gang affiliates, and violent men compare on mental health symptoms and traumatic experiences.

METHOD

Data included a sample of 1,539 adult males, aged 19 to 34 years, taken from an earlier survey conducted in the United Kingdom. Participants provided informed consent before completing questionnaires and were paid £5 for participation. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to compare participants' symptoms of psychiatric morbidity and traumatic event exposure.

RESULTS

Findings showed that, compared to violent men and gang affiliates, gang members had experienced more severe violence, sexual assaults, and suffered more serious/life-threatening injuries. Compared to violent men, gang members and gang affiliates had made more suicide attempts; had self-harmed more frequently; and had experienced more domestic violence, violence at work, homelessness, stalking, and bankruptcy. Findings further showed a decreasing gradient from gang members to gang affiliates to violent men in symptom levels of anxiety, antisocial personality disorder, pathological gambling, stalking others, and drug and/or alcohol dependence. Depression symptoms were similar across groups.

CONCLUSIONS

The identified relationship between gang membership, affiliation, and adverse mental health indicates that mental health in gang membership deserves more research attention. Findings also indicate that criminal justice strategies need to consider gang members' mental health more fully, if gang membership is to be appropriately addressed and reduced.

Dual Trajectories of Gang Affiliation and Delinquent Peer Association During Adolescence: An Examination of Long-Term Offending Outcomes

Prior research has demonstrated that both adolescent gang affiliation and perceived delinquent peer association are important predictors of individual offending. A crucial question is whether and how youth gang affiliation contributes to a spectrum of criminal acts above and beyond the influence of associating with delinquent peers. Using 14 waves of data from the Rochester Youth Developmental Study, an ongoing longitudinal panel study aimed at understanding the causes and consequences of delinquency and drug use in an urban sample of adolescents, the current study employs a relatively new modeling technique-dual trajectory analysis-to illustrate the dynamic relationship between these two measures among 666 male youth. The results suggest that the two measures, while overlapping, may constitute distinct concepts that operate in different ways. The most convincing evidence of gang effects, above and beyond the influence of perceived peer delinquency, is for violent behavior and by extension police arrest. Our findings contribute to developmental research and provide information that informs future gang control efforts.

Prospective Childhood Risk Factors for Gang Involvement among North American Indigenous Adolescents

The purpose of the study was to examine prospective childhood risk factors for gang involvement across the course of adolescence among a large eight-year longitudinal sample of 646 Indigenous (i.e., American Indian and Canadian First Nations) youth residing on reservation/reserve land in the Midwest of the United States and Canada. Risk factors at the first wave of the study (ages 10-12) were used to predict gang involvement (i.e., gang membership and initiation) in subsequent waves (ages 11-18). A total of 6.7% of the participants reported gang membership and 9.1% reported gang initiation during the study. Risk factors were distributed across developmental domains (e.g., family, school, peer, and individual) with those in the early delinquency domain having the strongest and most consistent effects. Moreover, the results indicate that the cumulative number of risk factors in childhood increases the probability of subsequent gang involvement. Culturally relevant implications and prevention/intervention strategies are discussed.

Gang membership of California middle school students: behaviors and attitudes as mediators of school violence

Empirical evidence examining how risk and protective behaviors may possibly mediate the association between gang membership and school violence is limited. This study utilizes a statewide representative sample of 152 023 Latino, Black and White seventh graders from California to examine a theoretical model of how school risk (e.g. truancy, school substance use and risky peer approval) and protective (e.g. connectedness, support and safety) behaviors and attitudes mediate the effects of gang membership on school violence behaviors. The dataset was collected in the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 academic school years using the ongoing large-scale California Healthy Kids Survey conducted by WestEd for the State of California. Approximately 9.5% of the sample considered themselves to be a member of a gang. The findings indicate that school risk behaviors and attitudes mediate the association between gang membership and school violence behaviors. Although the direct negative association between gang membership and school violence perpetration is weak, the positive indirect effect mediated by school risks behaviors and attitudes is strong. This indicates that when gang members engage in school risk behaviors, they are much more likely to be school violence perpetrators. Implications for further research, theory and practice for both gang and school violence researchers are discussed.

The neurocognition of conduct disorder behaviors: specificity to physical aggression and theft after controlling for ADHD symptoms

There is growing evidence that among the different conduct disorder (CD) behaviors, physical aggression, but not theft, links to low neurocognitive abilities. Specifically, physical aggression has consistently been found to be negatively related to neurocognitive abilities, whereas theft has been shown to be either positively or not related to neurocognition. The specificity of these links needs further examination because attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) links to both physical aggression and neurocognitive variation. The development of self-reported physical aggression and theft, from age 11 to 17 years, was studied in a prospective at-risk male cohort via a dual process latent growth curve model. Seven neurocognitive tests at age 20 were regressed on the growth parameters of physical aggression and theft. The links between neurocognition and the growth parameters of physical aggression and theft were adjusted for ADHD symptoms at ages 11 and 15 (parent, child and teacher reports). Results indicated that verbal abilities were negatively related to physical aggression while they were positively associated with theft. However, inductive reasoning was negatively associated with increases in theft across adolescence. Symptoms of ADHD accounted for part of the neurocognitive test links with physical aggression but did not account for the associations with theft. These differences emphasize the importance of examining specific CD behaviors to better understand their neurodevelopmental mechanisms. They also suggest that youth who engage in different levels of physical aggression or theft behaviors may require different preventive and corrective interventions.

Cascading peer dynamics underlying the progression from problem behavior to violence in early to late adolescence

This study examined the peer dynamics linking early adolescent problem behavior, school marginalization, and low academic performance to multiple indices of late adolescent violence (arrests, parent report, and youth report) in an ethnically diverse sample of 998 males and females. A cascade model was proposed in which early adolescent risk factors assessed at age 11 to 12 predict gang involvement at age 13 to 14, which in turn, predicts deviancy training with friends at age 16 to 17, which then predicts violence by age 18 to 19. Each construct in the model was assessed with multiple measures and methods. Structural equation modeling revealed that the cascade model fit the data well, with problem behavior, school marginalization, and low academic performance significantly predicting gang involvement 2 years later. Gang involvement, in turn, predicted deviancy training with a friend, which predicted violence. The best fitting model included an indirect and direct path between early adolescent gang involvement and later violence. These findings suggest the need to carefully consider peer clustering into gangs in efforts to prevent individual and aggregate levels of violence, especially in youths who may be disengaged, marginalized, or academically unsuccessful in the public school context.

Similarities and Differences in Risk Factors for Violent Offending and Gang Membership

Prior research has established that there is a cumulative effect of risk factors on both youth violence and gang membership and that risk factors in multiple domains increase the probability of youth violence and gang involvement. In this article we expand upon this risk factor approach to the study of youth violence by addressing two questions concerning youth violence: (1) What are the effects of cumulative risk, including risk in multiple domains, on youth violence and gang membership and to what extent are the patterns similar or different for youth violence and gang membership? (2) To what extent do risk factors exert independent effects when other factors are controlled in multivariate analyses, and are the risk factors for youth violence similar to or different from those for gang membership? We utilise survey data from a sample of 5,395 8th grade students in 11 cities across the United States to examine these issues.

Predicting early adolescent gang involvement from middle school adaptation

This study examined the role of adaptation in the first year of middle school (Grade 6, age 11) to affiliation with gangs by the last year of middle school (Grade 8, age 13). The sample consisted of 714 European American (EA) and African American (AA) boys and girls. Specifically, academic grades, reports of antisocial behavior, and peer relations in 6th grade were used to predict multiple measures of gang involvement by 8th grade. The multiple measures of gang involvement included self-, peer, teacher, and counselor reports. Unexpectedly, self-report measures of gang involvement did not correlate highly with peer and school staff reports. The results, however, were similar for other and self-report measures of gang involvement. Mean level analyses revealed statistically reliable differences in 8th-grade gang involvement as a function of the youth gender and ethnicity. Structural equation prediction models revealed that peer nominations of rejection, acceptance, academic failure, and antisocial behavior were predictive of gang involvement for most youth. These findings suggest that the youth level of problem behavior and the school ecology (e.g., peer rejection, school failure) require attention in the design of interventions to prevent the formation of gangs among high-risk young adolescents.

Delinquency and substance use among gang-involved youth: the moderating role of parenting practices

This study uses longitudinal data from an ethnically diverse sample of 300 ninth grade students to examine the moderating effect of parenting practices upon the relationship between gang involvement and adolescent problem behavior. Results of hierarchical linear modeling indicate that gang involvement is a highly significant positive predictor of each of three categories of problem behavior (minor delinquency, major delinquency, and substance use). Three of the four parenting variables (behavioral control, psychological control, parent-adolescent conflict, and warmth) are found to moderate the relationship between gang involvement and problem behavior, with the most consistent effects found for behavioral control and warmth. These findings indicate that intervention efforts aimed at reducing the impact of gang involvement on adolescent development should consider factors that may decrease the deleterious behavioral outcomes associated with youth gangs.