Homicide is the third leading cause of death for Americans between the age of 10-24, and the leading cause of death for Black and African-American youth.
Youth violence has continued to skyrocket these past years and these issues have begun to leak into schools and threaten the safety of students. Rangeview High School along with other Aurora high schools has seen an increase in fights and other violent incidents both in school and activities outside of school. Fights break out nearly every single day at Rangeview, for a variety of reasons, but a lot of the instigation before the incident occurs outside of school.
Violence among teenagers and young adults has increased everywhere across the United States. From physical confrontation, gang involvement, bullying and even gun violence the spectrum of youth violence is vast.
Most of the time, they are not perpetuating the violence for no reason, there are typically common root issues that are causing them to act out in such a manner. A lot of the time the kids that are engaging in violence don’t have good pro-social activities in their life or pro-social adults. They don’t have an adult that they can trust, whether that’s at home, within their family, at school, or in the community.
Additionally, this violence is often derived from a lack of resources. Kids from underserved communities aren’t receiving the support they need from the government and therefore violence becomes an outlet to get those resources.
Early intervention is possibly the only way to get ahead of the issue and prevent violence from striking again. A youth violence prevention program was introduced to Aurora as a response to the rising number of acts of violence throughout the community.
The SAVE program was founded a year ago and they have already done immense things for the community. The objective of the program is to implement an initiative called the “group intervention strategy” which is a model being used by the SAVE program in multiple cities across the country. This strategy has proven to be extremely effective in the cities it has been implemented for a couple of years already.
SAVE begins with identifying “at risk” youth and marking them as candidates for the program. These kids are selected by the research team as they are likely to be the next ones to “pull the trigger” according to their data. This then marks the beginning of the intervention strategy.
Captain Mike Hanifin, Law Enforcement Lead from the Aurora Police Department stated, “We let them know we know who you are, we know what you’re doing, we know the group affiliations and the community is not going to tolerate the violence anymore. But if you let us, we will help you.”
The purpose of the program is to provide these candidates with the resources they need to get out of the violent situations they find themselves in. The program wants to prevent the amount of young adults, typically of color from entering the judicial system.
“This, this program, this strategy is a marathon, not a sprint, because you have to build relationships and you have to stay engaged, right, and what our message to them and what we demonstrate is, there are no strings attached, you may mess up, and we’re not going to abandon you. We’ll still be there for you.”
SAVE wants to provide a safe space for these kids to feel comfortable with opening up about the situations they are finding themselves in. By strengthening this relationship, they can get a better understanding of why so many young people are getting involved in violence and connect more deeply with them.
Courtney Lange, SAVE Support and Outreach Lead explained, “This strategy is all about providing that offering of those concrete services and demonstrating that there’s community support for these individuals.”
The issue of youth violence is so complex that it cannot be tackled from one perspective. Every kid’s situation is so unique that everybody from the community needs to come together and provide the necessary support.
Hanfin stated, “It’s just about every facet of the community is represented in the program as a partner, either on the law enforcement side or the support and outreach side, which is important because what we know to be true about the violent crime is none of us can solve this alone.”
This strategy is about providing the offering of concrete services and demonstrating that there’s community support for these individuals.
The SAVE program was also recently granted $2 million dollars to further their research and implement more resources for their kids. They are extremely excited to have the opportunity to broaden the scope of their impact on the community.
Despite overwhelming consensus about the increasing danger of Aurora, initiatives are being put into place by leaders such as the SAVE staff that truly care about the well-being and safety of our youth.
The cycle of violence steals the future of kids who were never allowed to thrive. This cycle can no longer be tolerated.
