Family, School, Community, and Economic Factors Associated with Juvenile Crime in North Carolina: a System Impact Assessment

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Nature and Extent of the Juvenile Crime Problem
Rarely does an evening pass in which the locally televised nightly news does not provide coverage of at least one shocking and disturbing act of criminal violence involving juveniles. Nightly reports of drive-by shootings, teens as young as 14 being remanded to adult court to stand trial for murder, gang initiation ceremonies involving sadistic and brutal acts of rape, and caches of drugs and weapons being confiscated from elementary school lockers have permeated the mass media at an alarming and accelerated rate. Unfortunately, these media portrayals are not always anomalies or isolated incidents of shock journalism. Disturbingly these reports can be heard on any big city newscast or read in any small town newspaper. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that an even greater number of less sensationalistic, yet nonetheless equally violent, juvenile crimes never make the headlines or front page at all.
A large proportion of this juvenile violence is being perpetrated upon the offenders ' own classmates, neighbors, and members of their own age cohort. Snyder and Sickmund (1995) report that results from the 1991 National Crime Victimization Survey reveal that nearly half of the juvenile violent crime victims were attacked by another juvenile. Violence has infiltrated the Nation 's youth subculture with teens often preying upon each other as a means of simply understanding, surviving, and coping with the stress, tension, and anxiety that often accompany the troubled period of adolescence.
As Elliott (1993) notes, the most pronounced difference between the youth crime of today, and juvenile crime of the prior decade, is its lethality. Adolescent homicide rates have doubled since 1988 and in 1991 homicide became the second leading cause of fatal injuries among youth under the age of 20 (Elliott, 1993; Snyder and Sickmund, 1995).
The increase in youth violence has

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