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Schools, Neighborhoods, and Adolescent Conflicts: A SituationalExamination of Reciprocal DynamicsRod K. Brunson; Jody Miller

To cite this Article Brunson, Rod K. and Miller, Jody(2009) 'Schools, Neighborhoods, and Adolescent Conflicts: ASituational Examination of Reciprocal Dynamics', Justice Quarterly, 26: 2, 183 — 210To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/07418820802245060URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07418820802245060

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JUSTICE QUARTERLY VOLUME 26 NUMBER 2 (JUNE 2009)

ISSN 0741-8825 print/1745-9109 online/09/020183-28© 2009 Academy of Criminal Justice SciencesDOI: 10.1080/07418820802245060

Schools, Neighborhoods, and Adolescent Conflicts: A Situational Examination of Reciprocal Dynamics

Rod K. Brunson and Jody MillerTaylor and FrancisRJQY_A_324673.sgm10.1080/07418820802245060Justice Quarterly0741-8825 (print)/1745-9109 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis00000000002008Professor [email protected]

Youths’ exposure to school violence is ecologically patterned, occurring dispro-portionately in public schools located in urban disadvantaged communities. Weknow less, however, about how situational processes and environmental contextsshape school violence. In addition, limited research has examined the reciprocalnature of school and neighborhood conflicts. Here we draw from a qualitativestudy of violence in the lives of African American youths from a disadvantagedinner-city community to examine young men’s experiences with school-basedviolence. Specifically, we investigate two questions: (1) how conflicts are shapedby the school setting, and (2) how and when such conflicts unfold and spill overbetween neighborhoods and schools. Our findings highlight the importance ofexamining the situational and ecological contexts of youth violence to furtherilluminate its causes and consequences.

Keywords African American youth; interpersonal violence; school disorder;urban disadvantage

Introduction

While “young people continue to be the victims of serious violent crime lessoften in school than away from school,” just over a third of serious violent

Rod K. Brunson is Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency, and Correc-tions at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research examines youths’ experiences inneighborhood contexts, with a specific focus on the interactions of race, class, and gender, andtheir relationship to criminal justice practices. His articles appear in the British Journal of Criminol-ogy, Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, Gender & Society, Sociological Quarterly, UrbanAffairs Review, and the Journal of Crime and Justice. Jody Miller is Professor of Criminology &Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is the author of Getting Played: AfricanAmerican Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (NYU Press) and One of the Guys: Girls,Gangs, and Gender (Oxford University Press). Correspondence to: Rod K. Brunson, Southern IllinoisUniversity at Carbondale, Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections, 1000 FanerHall, Mail Code 4504, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Downloaded At: 02:14 23 April 2011

184 BRUNSON AND MILLER

incidents among juveniles occur either at or on the way to and from school(Gottfredson, Gottfredson, Payne, & Gottfredson, 2005, p. 413; see also DeVoe,Peter, Noonan, Snyder, & Baum, 2005). In addition, youths’ exposure to schoolviolence is ecologically patterned. It occurs disproportionately in public schoolslocated in urban disadvantaged settings, where neighborhood and communityviolence is also disproportionately high (Gottfredson, 2001; Hellman & Beaton,1986; Snyder & Sickmund, 1999).

Researchers have sought a number of explanations for these patterns, exam-ining the roles of individual and compositional, school context, and communitysetting effects (see, for example, Gottfredson et al., 2005; Payne, Gottfredson,& Gottfredson, 2003; Stewart, 2003; Welsh, Stokes, & Greene, 2000). However,because most research on the topic has been quantitative, scholars have hadlimited opportunities to thoroughly investigate situational and interactionalfeatures of school violence. As Hagan, Hirschfield, and Shedd (2002, p. 220)argue, to better understand the nature and causes of school violence in urbansettings, we need a “meaningful consideration of social context” (see alsoShort, 1998).

Recent research utilizing such approaches has been particularly fruitful inilluminating those features of schools’ physical and social environment thatcontribute to school-based conflicts and violence (see Anderson, 1999; Astor &Meyer, 2001; Astor, Meyer, & Behre, 1999; Felson, Liska, South, & McNulty,1994; Lockwood, 1997). Even more promising is recent scholarship that alsoexamines how school violence is situated within, and overlaps with, neighbor-hood violence among adolescents (see Hagan et al., 2002; Hellman & Beaton,1986; Mateu-Gelabert, 2000; Sullivan, 2002). This work is particularly importantsince survey measures of school violence often merge events that occur inschool with those that occur on the way to and from school. In fact, Snyder andSickmund (1999, p. 65) report that “19 percent of all juvenile violent crimesoccur in the 4 hours between 3pm and 7pm on school days (i.e., 4 hours on one-half of the days of the year).” This suggests important dynamics present in theoverlap between schools and neighborhoods.

Here we build from this emerging research on the situational contexts of schoolviolence and its relationship to youths’ conflicts in the community. Drawing fromin-depth interviews with 38 African American adolescent boys in a disadvantagedurban community, we investigate the interplay of school and communitycontexts, analyzing how youth violence unfolds across time and space and spillsover between schools and neighborhoods. We examine situational and interac-tional facets of youths’ conflicts (see Short, 1998) in order to capture the dynamicprocesses at play within and across settings.

School Violence and Ecological Context

Youths are 70 times more likely to be victims of homicide away from school thanin school, and rates of serious violent victimization in school are half that of


SCHOOLS, NEIGHBORHOODS, AND ADOLESCENT CONFLICTS 185

serious violent victimization among adolescents elsewhere (DeVoe et al., 2005).Nonetheless, “youths are at elevated risks for victimization when they are inschool” (Gottfredson et al., 2005, p. 413). In fact, recent analyses of theNational Crime Victimization Survey reveal that half of youths’ experiences withviolent victimization occur at or on the way to and from school. Such school-based victimization is higher for males than females, for younger as comparedto older adolescents, and for urban as compared to suburban and rural youths(DeVoe et al., 2005).

In addition, urban minority youth in public schools are more likely thanyouths in other racial groups and settings to report the presence of gangs intheir schools, and are more likely to report being fearful of an attack at or onthe way to or from school1 (DeVoe et al., 2005; Mijanovich & Weitzman,2003). Findings from the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk BehaviorSurvey reveal that around a third of all high school students reported partici-pating in a physical fight in the last 12 months, with a substantial minority ofthese occurring on school property (DeVoe et al., 2005). Again, these reportsare higher for males as compared to females, urban as compared to ruralstudents, and, for in-school fights, African American as compared to Whitestudents. Finally, among schools, the highest incidence of serious violence isreported in urban high schools, those with high minority enrollment, andlarger proportions of students who are free lunch eligible (DeVoe et al.,2005).

These findings are indicative of important ecological patterns in schoolviolence. As Gottfredson (2001, p. 63) explains, “Schools are embedded withincommunities, and, in many ways, reflect larger community-level processes….Schools in urban, poor, disorganized communities experience much moreviolence and other forms of disorder than do schools in rural or suburban, afflu-ent, organized communities.” Scholars have sought a number of explanationsfor these patterns, examining the impact of compositional effects and commu-nity factors on student and school characteristics and processes, includingstudent bonding; normative peer culture; economic, human and socialresources; school climate; and school organization, including size, educationaland disciplinary practices (Felson et al., 1994; Gottfredson, 2001; Gottfredsonet al., 2005; Mijanovich & Weitzman, 2003; Payne et al., 2003; Stewart, 2003;Welsh, 2001; Welsh et al., 2000).

On the whole, this research suggests that a complex array of factors contributeto these patterns of violence and school disorder. While “community character-istics and school structural characteristics … account for the lion’s share of predict-able between-school variance in disorder” (Gottfredson et al., 2005, p. 418), moremalleable features of school organization are also significant. Schools in disad-vantaged urban communities—which have fewer resources, difficulties in staffrecruitment and retention, and limited community support—are “less likely to

1. Not surprisingly, research suggests that students in schools where gangs, drugs, and weapons arepresent face higher risks for victimization (see Ferguson, 2003).



include a system of shared values, a clear mission, high expectations, meaningfulsocial interactions, collegial relations among adults, and extended teacher roles”(Gottfredson, 2001, pp. 82–3), and are also more likely to be inconsistent in enforc-ing rules and communicating expectations for student behavior (Gottfredsonet al., 2005).

Compositional effects and normative student culture are also significant.Numerous studies suggest that students’ social bonds to school affect their like-lihood of participating in violence and other forms of disruptive behavior (Payneet al., 2003; Stewart, 2003; Welsh, 2001). Moreover, rather than simply anindividual-level phenomenon, these findings reflect the impact of group normsor student subcultures. Felson and his colleagues (1994, p. 168) found consis-tent evidence that “a boy’s violence and delinquency are related to the valuesprevalent in his school, independent of his own values…. [Thus] delinquencyinvolves public compliance and impression management.” As Welsh (2001,p. 940) summarizes:

Conventional values may be a liability in large urban school districts. In theabsence of strong school support for good behavior, and without effective disci-pline for bad behavior, students will reduce their risk of victimization throughmeans of their own intervention. Unfortunately the defensive strategies theyadopt may only fuel a vicious circle whereby aggressive postures adopted forself defense convert all too easily to higher incidence of aggressive behavior.

Welsh’s argument, based on his interpretation of quantitative findings, iscertainly suggestive of the importance of investigating the situational processesat play in creating high rates of violence in and around schools in urban disad-vantaged communities. As we describe in the next section, there has been apromising growth of research in this area in recent years.

Situational Analyses of School Violence

Over the last decades, criminological research has increasingly investigatedthe situational dynamics that surround violent events. This work has identi-fied broader subcultural patterns that heighten the use of or need for violentresponse and their roots in disadvantaged ecological contexts (Anderson,1999; Baumer, Horney, Felson, & Lauritsen, 2003; Bernard, 1990; Stewart,Schreck, & Simons, 2006). It has also highlighted the physical and social prop-erties of settings that are productive of violence—including the location ofthe conflict, presence and behavior of third parties, access to weapons, andrelationship between event participants—and has identified stages associatedwith the culmination of a dispute to violence (Baron, Kennedy, & Forde,2001; Deibert & Meithe, 2003; Felson & Steadman, 1983; Luckenbill & Doyle,1989). While most of this research has focused on street crime, several schol-ars have also used situational theoretical frameworks to examine violence inschools.



To begin with, numerous studies suggest that structural dislocations associ-ated with urban disadvantage produce “aggressive regulative rules” thatencourage individuals to resolve conflicts with violence (Baron et al., 2001,p. 726). According to Anderson (1999), this is a prominent feature of the “streetcode,” which spills over into the school environment. Anderson (1999, p. 22)observes that “the hallways of the school are in many ways an extension of thestreet,” and provide youths the opportunity to establish and display personasthat can result in the acquisition and maintenance of respect (see alsoLockwood, 1997; Welsh et al., 2000).

In addition, numerous studies have examined the situational dynamics ofschool violence and the impact of schools’ ecological environments. Thisresearch suggests that both social and physical features of schools cancontribute to youths’ violence. Astor et al. (1999; see also Astor & Meyer,2001) found important temporal and spatial patterns to school violence: it ismost likely to occur during transitions between classes or lunch, or before andafter school, and most often occurs in spatial “hot spots” such as hallways,bathrooms, parking lots, stairwells and cafeterias.2 Astor and his colleaguessuggest that these places and times represent “undefined public spaces” inwhich teachers are both less likely to be present and more likely to define theareas as beyond their realm of responsibilities (2001, p. 384; see also Welshet al., 2000).

Mulvey and Cauffman (2001, p. 798) note that “violent events in schools arepart of a chain of actions and reactions, often among numerous other individuals… [with] bystanders … a critical component of the escalation of disputes intoviolence.” Lockwood (1997, p. 1) reports that school fights can emerge as theresult of what outsiders may perceive as “minor slights and teasing.” In addition,research consistently demonstrates the significance of third parties in escalatingviolence. This may be heightened in the school setting as the result of the largenumbers of youths brought into continuous contact with one another (Lauritsenand Quinet, 1995), the presence of numerous sites of “unowned” spaces inschools (Astor & Meyer, 2001), and “age-grad[ed] … identity building via violentperformances” among adolescents (Wilkinson, 2001, p. 254). In fact, Lockwood(1997) found that peers were present in the majority of high school fights, andmost often encouraged the violence or joined in. Based on an analysis of250 violent school incidents, he reports that peers attempted to mediate in lessthan 5 percent of cases.

In addition, the “school environment brings rival gang members in closeproximity to one another and blurs haphazard turf lines, which leads to confron-tations and challenges within school, on school property and on the streetssurrounding schools” (Knox, 1992, p. 242; Trump, 2001). Thus, not surprisingly,Mateu-Gelabert (2000) found that the majority of conflicts that arose in the

2. Lockwood (1997), on the other hand, found that the “opening moves” of school conflicts-thoseinteractional sequences that trigger an impending fight-most often start in the classroom, evenwhen they are ultimately resolved elsewhere.



urban school he investigated were best classified as gang or “proto-gang”-related.3 In addition, and likely related to the prevalence of adolescent gangs indisadvantaged urban communities, Hellman and Beaton (1986, p. 123) note that“the ‘intruder’ problem appears to be a significant one in large urban schools.”Specifically, youths from the surrounding community are more likely to trespassin these schools and facilitate conflicts on school grounds. Moreover, as Welshet al. (2000, p. 270) note, “students must travel through the local community …to get to and from school. Their perceived exposure to risk may cause them tocarry weapons, avoid certain places, or engage in aggressive behaviors thatreduce their sense of danger.”

These findings point to the importance of school/neighborhood overlaps inadolescent violence. However, as Mateu-Gelabert (2000, p. 2) surmises, the“literature hints at the existence of a bi-directional flow of violence betweenschools and neighborhoods but has yet described the process by which thisphenomenon takes place.” His ethnographic investigation of school violencerevealed that 39 percent of students’ fights involved some kind of carryoverbetween the school and community, including 18 percent of incidents thatbegan in school and escalated to the neighborhood and 21 percent that began inthe neighborhood and were brought into the school (see also Lockwood, 1997).The majority of these were gang-related, but also included what he calls“staged fights”—conflicts that began in school but were purposely scheduled byyouths to be resolved off school grounds. Often, Mateu-Gelabert (2000) notes,these staged fights included “backup” youths who joined in from participants’neighborhoods.

Our goal in this study is to further investigate both the situational contexts ofschool-based violence, and the reciprocal nature of school and neighborhoodconflicts in disadvantaged urban settings. Previous research highlights some ofthe important situational processes and environmental factors at play, but fewstudies have explicitly attended to school and neighborhood overlaps. We drawfrom qualitative interviews with 38 African American young men from disadvan-taged neighborhoods in St. Louis, Missouri to examine the dynamic processes atplay within and across these settings.

Methodology

Data for this investigation come from a larger study of Black urban youths’experiences with interpersonal violence. The current examination utilizessurvey and qualitative in-depth interviews with 38 African American male high

3. Like Knox (1992), Mateu-Gelabert (2000) suggests this is because youths from rival groups andneighborhoods are brought together in school and thus are unable to avoid one another. Though seri-ous gang violence is much more common in neighborhood settings, there is evidence that youths canbetter avoid rival gang members, when they choose to, by limiting their mobility outside theirimmediate neighborhood boundaries (see Cobbina, Miller, & Brunson, 2008).



school students residing in St. Louis, Missouri.4 Study participants were 13 to 19years old, with a mean age of 16. The interviews were conducted betweenspring 1999 and spring 2000. Participation in the project was voluntary, andrespondents were paid twenty dollars and promised confidentiality.5

Young men were recruited for the project with the assistance of several orga-nizations working with both “at-risk” and delinquent youths. These includedtwo alternative St. Louis public high schools and one neighborhood-based orga-nization. The schools served students who had been expelled from mainstreampublic schools for a variety of rule violations, including in-school disorderlyconduct and violence. The neighborhood-based agency operated within a recre-ation center for youths on St. Louis’ north side. School counselors and centerstaff were asked to identify youths for participation in the research when theywere known to reside in disadvantaged St. Louis neighborhoods. Interviews wereconducted in unoccupied classrooms or private areas at each site.

Sampling was purposive in nature. We selected African American youths fromdistressed neighborhoods in St. Louis given our interest in the impact of urbandisadvantage on youth violence. These are precisely the ecological contextsresearchers have associated with disproportionate rates of interpersonalviolence in both neighborhoods and schools (Anderson, 1999; Gottfredson,2001). We interviewed young men at risk or involved in delinquency6, all ofwhom had experience with male-on-male violence as perpetrators (89 percent),victims (87 percent), and/or witnesses (100 percent). Data collection beganwith the administration of a survey, and youths were then asked to participatein an audiotaped in-depth interview that was typically completed on the sameday. The tapes from those interviews were later transcribed, and serve as theprimary data for this contextual examination.

Young men’s responses in the survey were used to help guide the conversa-tion in the in-depth interviews. Specifically, the survey supplied baseline infor-mation about the extent of young men’s exposure to violence. They were askedwhether they had hit someone with the idea of hurting them, and whether theyhad attacked someone with a weapon or with the intent to seriously injurethem. In addition, they were asked whether they had been hit, jumped orbeaten up, stabbed, or shot, and whether they had seen people hit, attacked,stabbed or shot. They were also asked to provide basic contextual information

4. A primary focus of the larger project is violence against young women. It also includes interviewswith 35 female study participants, who are excluded from the analysis here. We limit our focus toyoung men because research has identified them as disproportionately involved in serious violenceacross the social settings of schools and neighborhoods. Here we have also excluded two young menincluded in the original project: one who completed the survey but not the in-depth interview, andthe second because he was the only young man in the sample who was in middle school. For more onthe study methodology and data collection process, see (Miller, 2008).5. Pseudonyms are used throughout the manuscript, both for young men and for the schools andneighborhoods they occasionally name.6. See the Appendix for detailed information on the extent of respondents’ delinquency and gangexposure.



about the most recent of each of these events, including who did it and where ithappened.

Primary contextual and perceptual information was collected during the in-depth interviews. These were semistructured, with open-ended questions thatallowed for considerable probing. Our goal was to gather data that couldprovide a relatively holistic assessment of the nature of young men’s violence,situated in the context of boys’ perceptions of adolescent male violence,general patterns of male-on-male conflicts, and the features and motivesbehind specific arguments and violent events.7 Young men were first askedabout the nature of conflicts between boys and to describe recent examples,including those they had participated in or witnessed. They were then asked fordetails about these incidents, including the circumstances leading up to theconflict; whether, when, where and how it escalated to violence; what actuallyhappened; how third parties responded; and the consequences of the events.Finally, when they described fights that took place at school, young men wereasked their perceptions of school officials’ responses to these incidents.

Young men’s accounts revealed important information about the situationalcontexts of such violence, including how some altercations began in one settingbut spilled over into another.8 In-depth interviewing provided a means of under-standing the social world from the points of view of the study participants.Rigorous examination of such accounts offers a means of “arriving at meaningsor culturally embedded normative explanations [for behavior, as they] repre-sent ways in which people organize views of themselves, of others, and of theirsocial worlds” (Orbuch, 1997, p. 455).

In the analysis, we took care to ensure that the concepts developed and illus-trations provided typified the most common patterns in young men’s accounts.Internal validity was achieved using grounded theory analytic techniques,including the search for and explication of deviant cases (Strauss, 1987). Reli-ability was strengthened through triangulated data collection techniques, byasking respondents about their reports at multiple points across two interviews,and asking for detailed accounts during the in-depth interviews. Nonetheless,the study is not generalizable. The nature of our sample and the locales fromwhich it was drawn means we are unable to address whether and how non-delin-quent young men can utilize school-based and other resources to disrupt oravoid exposure to violence. Moreover, our focus on youths’ conflicts means wecannot speak, more broadly, to how young men negotiate school life (seeMateu-Gelabert & Lune, 2007). Nonetheless, we believe the study raises signifi-cant issues that may guide future inquiries into the contexts of school conflicts,

7. Our use of the term conflict in the analyses that follow includes incidents that escalate toviolence as well as those that do not. We use the term fight when specifically referencing incidentsthat involve physical violence.8. The location where respondents said the violent episode took place determined whether we clas-sified it as a school or neighborhood incident. If a physical altercation took place anywhere onschool property, for our purposes, it was designated as a school violence incident. Alternatively, if ittook place off school grounds-including in the immediate neighborhood of the school-it was classi-fied as a neighborhood incident.



and the sometimes bidirectional nature of young men’s school and communityviolence.

Study Setting

St. Louis typifies the highly distressed urban city. It includes large concentra-tions of extreme disadvantage that result in social isolation, limited resources,and high levels of violence (Baybeck & Jones, 2004). All of the young men in oursample lived in St. Louis, with the vast majority living in neighborhoods charac-terized by intense racial segregation; disproportionate rates of poverty, unem-ployment and female-headed families; and high rates of crime. In addition, allattended schools situated in neighborhoods with these characteristics.9 In fact,as seen in Table 1—which compares youths’ residential and school neighbor-hoods with St. Louis city and county—young men’s schools were situated inneighborhoods even more racially segregated and economically distressed thantheir home communities.10

As noted earlier, research demonstrates that schools are strongly affected bythe larger social processes, resources, and characteristics of the communities inwhich they are embedded. This is exemplified in the St. Louis Public School

9. Welsh et al. (2000, p. 247) stress the importance of examining both “the community surroundingthe school and the communities from which students are drawn,” particularly in the case of highschools since they are more likely to draw students from larger community areas. They found thatboth local and imported community poverty negatively affected school stability, which in turnincreased rates of school disorder.10. To ensure anonymity, we did not obtain young men’s addresses. Instead, we asked them toprovide the names of two cross streets near to where they live. Residential neighborhood data inTable 1 come from census block data from these cross streets. Thus, it is not a precise measure, butdoes provide a rough match for their neighborhoods. We were unable to obtain this information fromfour young men in our sample, because the street names they gave us were parallel. Zip code leveldata for two of these was comparable for block level characteristics, though it is not included inTable 1. We used school addresses to obtain census tract data for the schools to provide a compositepicture of the neighborhoods in which they were embedded. One additional note on Table 1: thefigures for St. Louis county do not include those of the city, as the city is its own county.

Table 1 Select neighborhood characteristics

Respondents’ neighborhoods

Respondents’ schools

St. Louis City

St. Louis County

Percent African American 82.6% 91.3% 51.2% 18.9%Percent poverty 33.8% 50.5% 24.6% 6.9%Percent Unemployment 18.0% 19.4% 11.3% 4.6%Percent female-headedFamilies with children 43.1% 53.6% 28.8% 10.7%Median family income $24,806 $17,587 $32,585 $61,680

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2000).



District, which has been under threat of a state takeover as a result of consistentlypoor student test performances, low attendance and graduation rates, high drop-out rates, serious fiscal problems, and accusations of political patronage. It hasbeen characterized as “crumbling,” “failing,” “in crisis,” “in decline and decay,”“perpetually unstable,” and “underperforming [and] violence-plagued” (see, insequence, Carroll, 1998a, p. 12; St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1998, p. C20; Pierce,1998, p. B1; Dobbs, 2004, p. A3; Giegerich, 2006a, p. C4; Giegerich, 2006b, p. A1).

In addition, the city school district has suffered from decades of fallingenrollments (Howard & Kumar, 2004). It continues to face chronic problemswith teacher hiring and retention, and must rely on a large population of substi-tutes. During the period of our study, nearly eight percent of the district’steaching positions remained vacant, and a similar proportion did “not haveproper state certification” (Pierce, 1999a, p. B3). Discipline problems rank asone of the “top concerns” of the teacher’s union, and the School Board hasconvened multiple task forces in an attempt to address violence and otherdisciplinary concerns (Clubb, 2006; Howard & Shinkle, 2005). Each of thedistrict’s middle and high schools has metal detectors and uniformed securityofficers, in addition to the district’s mobile security unit (Pierce, 1999c).

These problems are epitomized in the schools the young men in our sampleattended. The vast majority (32 of 38) were interviewed in one of two alterna-tive high schools in the St. Louis Public School District. These schools, whichserviced youths expelled from mainstream public schools, had the highest drop-out rates in the region (82 percent), with a graduation rate of just 6.5 percent11

(St. Louis Post Dispatch, 2003, p. 14). From 1998 to 2002, not a single student atthese schools finished at or above the state standard in test performances. Thestudent body was more than 90 percent African American and around 70 percentlow income. One of these schools, described by state evaluators as having“cracked walls and ceilings, broken windows, asbestos problems and dim light-ing,” was slated for renovation prior to its closure (Carroll, 1998a, p. 12). Andjust prior to our research, the principal was one of four in the district termi-nated after a St. Louis Post Dispatch inquiry revealed their lack of certification(Carroll, 1998b).

The six young men in our sample interviewed at a local community center alsoattended a St. Louis public school with poor outcome measures, though not quiteas severe as those at the alternative schools. This school was 100 percent AfricanAmerican and 99 percent low income, with a dropout rate of 7.5 percent andgraduation rate of 43 percent. The proportion of youths who performed at orabove the state testing standards was just zero to three percent (St. Louis PostDispatch, 2003, p. 14). In addition, it was in such infrastructural disrepair at thetime of our research that it was later rebuilt on a new site in the early 2000s,

11. This dropout rate is striking, even by St. Louis public school standards. In 1999, District’saverage dropout rate was 16.2 percent, compared to the state average of 5.3 percent (Pierce,1999b). Both alternative schools we interviewed in were among a large number of St. Louis publicschools closed down in 2003 as part of a controversial reorganization effort to address a $90 milliondeficit (see Harris, 2003a, 2003b).



though its gang problems and “reputation as an academic abyss” continued(Hinman, 2006).

While we might expect compositional effects to create higher levels of inter-personal violence in the alternative schools, as compared to the mainstreamschool, respondents’ accounts revealed few systematic differences in thenature of violence across sites. Perhaps this is because the concentration ofpreviously expelled students was offset by the considerably smaller size of thealternative schools, each with approximately 50 students as compared to the1,000 plus at the mainstream school some young men in our sample attended(St. Louis Post Dispatch, 2003, p. 14). In addition, as we describe below, someyoung men recognized alternative schools as their last resort, and describedtailoring their behaviors accordingly.

Study Findings

All of our study participants were exposed to violence as perpetrators(89 percent), victims (87 percent) and/or witnesses (100 percent)12. Notsurprisingly, the more serious the violence they reported, the more likely it wasto have occurred in neighborhood, as opposed to school contexts. For example,when young men responded affirmatively to having been victimized orwitnessed violence, we asked where it happened. Of incidents in which theydescribed having been slapped, punched, kicked or hit, 43 percent werereported as having occurred in school, and 49 percent in neighborhoods. Whenyoung men described having been jumped or beaten up, 30 percent of incidentswere described as occurring in school, compared to 63 percent in neighbor-hoods. In contrast, the four young men who were stabbed, and four of the fivewho had been shot, reported that these assaults occurred in neighborhoods.Just one had been shot outside of school. The same patterns held for witnessingviolence.

These findings are in keeping with research that consistently shows young menare at greater risk for serious violence away from school than at school (DeVoeet al., 2005; Gottfredson et al., 2005). Our primary interest here is to examinehow these school and neighborhood contexts reciprocally influence young men’sparticipation in and exposure to such violence. We begin with a brief overviewof the nature of young men’s conflicts, including what they describe as the prox-imate triggers of fights: individual reputational challenges, “flo’ showing” (e.g.,showing off), and gang-related disputes. We next examine young men’s accounts

12. To determine violence perpetration, young men were asked during the survey whether they hadever hit someone with the idea of hurting them (84 percent) or attacked someone with a weapon orwith the intent to seriously hurt them (39 percent). Violent victimization included being “slapped,punched, kicked or hit” (74 percent), being “jumped or beaten up” (66 percent), being stabbed(11 percent) or shot (13 percent). Finally, young men were classified as having witnessed violencewhen they described seeing “someone else get slapped, punched, hit or kicked” (89 percent), seensomeone else get “jumped or beaten up” (97 percent), seen a stabbing (53 percent), seen someoneget shot (71 percent), or seen someone killed (50 percent).



of school-based fights, paying particular attention to their descriptions of whyand where fights occur at school, and their perceptions of how the school contextcompares to neighborhood settings. Finally, we analyze the overlaps of schooland neighborhood conflicts, examining how school disputes are heightened dueto neighborhood spillover effects, how school conflicts sometimes carry over intoneighborhoods, and ongoing reciprocal conflicts across sites.

The Nature of Boys’ Conflicts

Young men described their conflicts as emanating from both individual disputesand gang rivalries. Notably, when asked initially about boys’ conflicts, studyparticipants characterized them as uniform across settings, tied to young men’snature and their interactions with one another. Ronald surmised, “everywhereyou go, you gonna see some boys. And somebody gonna say something to youand end up fightin.’” And Shaun explained, “you are what you are. You might begoing to the store and somebody see you, they get to trippin’ and you all startfighting. Or could be at a club or something, somebody start trippin,’ be fight-ing. At school, anywhere.”

Individual conflicts between young men were multifaceted, but primarilycentered on their attempts to maintain or elevate their social positions. Youngmen noted that conflicts between boys typically occurred during rathermundane interactions, tended to be spontaneous, and generally stemmed frompublic tests of one another’s willingness to stand up for themselves. One of themost critical challenges to young men’s reputations resulted from being calledor treated like a “punk.” For instance, Tyrell said boys get into conflicts whenthey’re “just trying to prove theyselves to other people, [trying to show] theyain’t no punk or whatever.” Maurice noted, “if one boy say something toanother boy that he don’t like, they’ll fight…. Like, ‘you a punk, you a punk.’”Asked why someone would be called a “punk,” he elaborated:

If you lose a fight, you a punk. If somebody straight talkin’ about, “what’s up,you wanna fight?” Push you or hit you or something and you don’t do nuttin,’you a punk…. If you don’t defend yourself when [that happens], you a punk…. Itdon’t, punk don’t necessarily mean lose a fight, ‘cause a punk can be tough,punk can whoop. A punk just in his heart, he’s scared to fight.

Thus, there were consequences for young men of having others think of themas soft or weak, and this helped shape their interactions across contexts. Someboys worked to communicate to others that they were tough or hard by presentingthemselves as ever ready to fight. Young men referred to these displays as “flo’[floor] showing,” or showing off, and believed they contributed to violence. Leoncomplained of boys who were “loud, obnoxious or something, that’s always tryin’to get something started, fights and stuff,” and Dwayne surmised, “when peopleshow off, they be getting whooped.” Shaun explained, “if you can talk, then youmight as well be able to back it up. ‘Lot of cats talk too much [and] we get to fighting



and stuff.” Young men said onlookers played an important role in these events,both by encouraging fights, and, in the case of friends, by providing the added secu-rity of having backup. Darnell remarked, “People like to show off around theyfriends. You know, ‘cause they think they friends is gonna really have they back.”

In addition to conflicts resulting from efforts to defend their personal reputa-tions, young men emphasized that gangs had a considerable presence in theirneighborhoods and schools, and thus defense of group status also fueled manyboys’ disputes. Terence said conflicts between boys were “mainly about gangsand stuff, colors.” Thus, group identity concerns created and exacerbatedtensions between factions of young men. These were often prompted by verbalexchanges between rival gang members, during which they disparaged oneanother’s argot, colors, and symbols. As with interpersonal disputes, young meninitially characterized these as consistent problems across settings. Eugenenoted, “every day, somebody don’t like somebody because of gang colors…. [It]happen at school, happen when I go other places. ‘Cause sometimes it is hard togo somewhere and you wear a certain color.” Eric said, “one person will saysomething about the other person[’s] color, and they get mad and they’ll startarguing from there, and they’ll fight.”

In addition to colors, young men in gangs used mundane symbols and codewords to antagonize rival gang members. Andrew noted that “they could have[one] pants leg pulled up and the other one down, and that’s disrespectful [to aparticular gang].” Leon said, “it’s names for the gangs, but it’s [also] a namethat you could use to dis’ [disrespect] ’em. Sometimes they might say this[name] … so they gon’ want to get on them, fight ’em. It’s like if you’re a SixDeuce and somebody say ‘Dookie,’ they don’t like that at all, that’s disrespect-ful.” Likewise, Wayne explained that rival gang members insulted one anotherby “like deforming of words…. Like instead of red they might say dead. Insteadof blue, they might say flu. You know what I’m saying, it be like, ‘Look at thisdude with all this flu on!’ He’ll be like, ‘this straight TRUE BLUE!’ And they’rejust getting it all started right from there.”

Conflicts in Schools

Despite their general descriptions of the causes of conflicts between youngmen, study participants’ accounts of these incidents also shed light on thesituational contexts surrounding them. Young men described a combination offactors specific to the school setting that resulted in the nature of conflictsthere: the impact of students’ continuous contact with one another, includingtheir unavoidable proximity to rival gang members13 or others with whom they

13. Gangs are perhaps the quintessential example by which to examine the reciprocal dynamics ofneighborhood and school conflicts. In St. Louis, they are clearly demarcated neighborhood-based groups(see Decker & Van Winkle, 1996; Miller, 2001) that are thus “imported” into the school. At the sametime, as we will see, gang conflicts routinely spill over from school back into the community. In thissection, we will focus specifically on facets of the school setting that contribute to gang conflicts.



have a problem, and group processes in school that encourage fights; selectioneffects resulting from the behaviors of “troublemakers”; and schools’ physicaland supervisory environments.

Ricky’s description of the causes of boys’ fights encapsulates these themes:

You can sit in the classroom with somebody you don’t like for like, two hours. Imean, and if it’s hot and you already got an attitude and you gotta look at thisguy for two hours—a lot of times a fight’ll break out ‘cause you around thisperson for so long. You already know what you wanna do to him but you tryin’ tobe cool and you just sit up with this guy for two hours…. and you done hear hispeople done punched yo’ grandmomma [laughs] in the face or something orrobbed yo’ sister while she was comin’ home from work or something. I mean,[laughs] you not just gone sit there for two hours and look this man in his face. Imean, if you got that street mentality you not.

As he noted, young men’s conflicts may result from knowledge or rumors abouttheir behavior in neighborhoods (though Ricky used exaggerated genderedexamples), but are exacerbated by their close and lengthy proximity to oneanother in school. Terence likewise noted that “up in here everybody got a gangthat they pump, or they trying to be a part of a gang that everybody else pump.So, you know, when two gangs get together, it ain’t never gon’ be nothin’ nice”[our emphasis]. In fact, young men typically described multiple rival gangsinteracting in their schools, which contributed to ongoing conflicts.14 Frankexplained:

Most of ’em [at this school] from Six-O’s, but some of ’em ain’t Six-O’s, but theycool with the Six-O’s. Like One-9’s, they cool. Uh, and the dookies [Six Deuces]and the Bloods, they cool up there…. Bloods, they wear red, dookies, they wearblue and orange. Six-O’s, we wear blue and gold. One-9’s, they wear blue andgray…. Six-O’s diss the Bloods, ‘cause they wear red.

Thus, it’s not surprising that young men believed most fights were about, asWayne put it, “all this represent[ing] different gangs…. [fights over] colors andplaces where they from.”

Ricky also made reference to the temperature in his comments above. Asdescribed earlier, the schools our study participants attended were in poorinfrastructural condition, making it easy to assume this includes poor climatecontrol—the lack of air conditioning as well as outdated boiler heating, both ofwhich result in extreme classroom temperatures. In addition, he clarified thatsome young men’s “street mentality” further contributed to the likelihood ofschool fights. He continued:

If you care and you think about the situation and what the consequences are,nine times out of ten you won’t hear about the situation until lunchtime or after

14. For young men in the large mainstream school, this was the result of the 1,000 student plusenrollment, drawing from numerous neighborhoods around north St. Louis. Similarly, young men inthe alternative schools were placed there for infractions from schools throughout the city.



school…. See the smart ones know when to react and when not to. Them theones that wanna be there. You got some that come to school just so a fightcould kick off, just so they can fight…. You got people that do that, or come toschool just to be there. Just to see if he can get a dice game goin’ or just to seeif he could sell some weed or something…. I mean, those mainly the type of guysthat have fights. But you got people like me that go [to this school], like a Caverage student, I mean, you might see us in the hall every now and then, oryou might see us at two lunches, but the majority of the time we somewheretryin’ to get somewhere, tryin’ to work…. You got a lot of people at school thatwant to be something.

Likewise, Wayne said most fights involved “just a small group that want to beknown,” and Darnell noted, “some guys come here just to fight and I guess forlunch, you know.” Doug believed such conflicts were over “like who runs it, likeyou know, who’s dominant between everybody.” He surmised, “a lot of kids justwant attention, that’s all…. It’s like a showcase here, you know, a lot of people,they just want people to watch ’em … [so] they try to make theyself look hard.”As his comments suggest, it isn’t just the presence of attention-seekers, but alsohow the grouping of youths in school provides a “showcase” for their behaviors.

While some young men focused on the selection effects of certain peers—those gang-involved and with a “street mentality,” they also focused on thebroader student culture in school, including the impact of youths spreadingrumors about one another, instigating conflicts for entertainment purposes, and“amping up” those conflicts in order to see fights. Again, these behaviors werealso exacerbated by setting effects. Darnell explained, “you can [over]hearanother conversation, [people] talking in the lunchroom or something. Like theytalking about what happened today and things like that, like conflicts, you knowwhat I’m saying, between other people.” Once rumors began to spread, “it’slike they just start getting out of line, getting mad … and be like, whatever, youknow, like they wanna fight.” Ronald described a “conflict that’s going on[now]” that began when another boy’s “friend told me, ‘this person wants tofight you.’” Travis surmised, “a lot of kids like to instigate stuff to see things …somebody say something to start off [a] little [tension] and [it] start getting to abigger issue.”

Once a fight began, young men consistently described student bystanders’efforts to escalate it further. Jamal explained, “people will start crowdingaround … [egg] stuff on, probably get souped up or into the heat of themoment.” Leon said bystanders get “all rowdy, screaming and hollering, stand-ing around just watching.” Asked whether anyone ever tried to intervene, hecontinued, “nobody I’ve seen. It’s like everybody crowd around cheerin’ it on,that’s how I look at it.” Similarly, Doug said students “cheer [it] on. Be like,‘man, you let him whoop you like that? Get up and hit him back!’ You know,they’ll promote ’em.” Tomme explained, “I know it’s a fight when it be a wholelot of people coming around…. It be too many people, I can’t even hardly beseein’!”

Features of schools’ environmental layout were also significant. RecallDarnell’s comment about the cafeteria as a site where gossip was transmitted. A



number of young men described fights taking place in this setting. Terencedescribed a recent incident:

We was all in the lunchroom eating lunch, and dude was staring at some otherguy[’s] girlfriend or whatever. And then he saw him looking at her so he walkedover and was like, “don’t do that man, don’t do that!” and he was like, “manwho is you?” and then ole’ boy just smacked [the guy]…. He just smacked him,upped and smacked him. Then the other dude got up, he smacked him back.Before you knew it, they was just fightin’ up in the corner. Then that’s whensecurity and everybody came and broke it up.15

Frank described “this one fight in the lunchroom. I was fighting, I was helping.”He continued, “it was this one big dude, we kept messing with him ‘cause wewanted to fight him, we kept messing with him.” The “big dude” they weremessing with “told the security guard” who:

Didn’t do nuttin’ … told him to go to the office ‘cause he was cussin’ and stufflike that. Then when he went to walk out the lunchroom, somebody said some-thing, he turned around, grabbed one of my little partners by they neck,slammed they head against the table. I jumped up, just banged him right there.

One reason the cafeteria seemed a common site for fights to break out—inaddition to the large numbers of students who congregated there at lunchtime—was that it provided ready-made props for young men to “mess with” other boys.Marcus said “somebody get a spoon or something, and they flip [food with] it,and somebody jump up and say, ‘you hit me!.’ … Pow, he hit him.” And Carlosdescribed “people throwing cookies, throwing juice, chips … just to do something[to] mess with somebody.” Several young men from one of the alternativeschools described an incident the previous week that began over a thrown cookieand escalated. According to Lamont:

They funny … ‘cause when they fight, I mean they throw chairs at each otherand smack each other with [cafeteria] trays, bust each other eyes…. It’s justlike [a] recent fight, they was throwing cookies, dude threw a [cookie], thendude threw another cookie, then dude stole [punched] him and the other dudegot up, stole him in the [face], then he knocked the table over.

Other locations were common sites of conflict as well. Like cafeterias, hall-ways often contained groups of unsupervised youths. Darryl surmised, “theteachers probably [could do a better job to] make sure the students get to theyclasses on time. ‘Cause they be just sittin’ in the hallways talkin,’ conversatingwhen the bell rings for class.” Thus, Ricky noted that “most of the fights reallykick off in the hallways…. You might find a group of guys standing somewhereand they just feel like they want to cause some trouble. And that’s usually whenthat happens.”

15. Notably, Terence clarified, “that’s the only fight I done seen over a gal. Other than that, it’smainly colors.”



In addition, young men described numerous secluded places in their schoolsthat boys selected for fights. Tommie, who attended the large mainstreamschool, noted, “the cafeteria is all the way on the top floor … and then theschool is real big and … it’s a whole lot of vacant parts of the school where youcan just go. Ain’t no teachers … just empty classrooms and stuff.” Doug, in oneof the alternative schools, said when boys fight they go “to the basement wherethere’s nothing but two classes, and sometimes … teachers don’t even be inthere most of the time…. So they won’t get caught … they say, ‘we gonna goback here where there’s no teachers or nothing there, no police, no nothing.Dudes just fight all day, that’s how they’ll do it.” These sites represent whatAstor and his colleagues (1999; Astor & Meyer, 2001) describe as undefinedpublic space, where fights can take place beyond the purview of teachers’perceived responsibilities.

Secluded spots in the school were also used for other illicit activities, whichthemselves sometimes resulted in fights. Tyrell described a recent incident inthe basement of his alternative school, where boys had gathered to shootdice:

This one dude, they had a bet—like they make side bets, like say if your point isten, you can bet somebody else [that] you gonna hit the ten. You supposed todrop the money down, if the money ain’t there [then] that bet [is] off. But thedude didn’t drop the money all the way [down]. He picked his money back up‘cause the other dude had hit the ten…. Then they start arguing and they even-tually start fighting…. [Even though it was only over a dollar], if you let some-body cheat you one time, they keep cheating you over and over.

Here, the reputational trigger for boys’ fights described earlier coalesced withyoung men’s unsupervised activities in the school and resulted in violence.

The physical layout of boys’ schools also caused concerns about youths’ abil-ity to bring weapons into school. Darnell felt secure at his alternative school“because you got securities. There ain’t no doors open that you can get in. Thegym door stay locked and the other doors you can’t get out or come in ‘cept thefront door.” He contrasted this with the situation at his previous school, whichhad “about seven or eight doors around you, and you can go out any one of ’em.Some of ’em had chains on ’em and some of ’em didn’t.” Likewise, of the main-stream school he attended, Tommie explained:

The people in the [nearby housing project], if they want to for real, they couldbring weapons and stuff from there…. They got metal detectors and everythingbut if it’s lunchtime or something, where most of the security guards upstairs [inthe cafeteria], some of the [project] people can run downstairs, open up a sidedoor or somethin,’ put a pencil or somethin’ in the door run out there and getsomethin’ and come back in ‘cause all the security guards’ll be upstairs butthey’ll be spreaded out still but they won’t be around like [at every entry point].

Unlike Darnell, Travis and Ronnie were skeptical of the security metal detectorsprovided. Travis noted:



I’ve been to schools to where they have metal detectors and kids still get gunsin the school. It’s bad to the point where you don’t feel safe in school. In a way,it just make you think like, what is the system doing? I mean, they spend all thismoney on metal detectors and here kids still walk up through the metal detec-tors with guns but they don’t find ’em.

Of his alternative school, Ronald lamented, “this school is not safe. People bring… knives in school. [I] know somebody with an ink pen, but it’s a knife…. Wewear boxers, [but] you put on some Fruit of the Looms on under ’em, you canget anything in school.”

Nonetheless, some young men at the two alternative schools described lessconflict there than in their schools of origin. Darryl and Travis attributed this toyouths’ recognition of their placement as a “last resort.” Darryl explained, “atthis school, it’s not really like fightin,’ it’s like people trying to get back toregular school…. If somebody gets put out at this school … they can’t go to noother schools. I think they just drop out.”16 And Travis surmised:

This [is the] last resort for a school…. In St. Louis this means that you’ve donesomething at another school and you got kicked out of all St. Louis publicschools so this is your last resort. If you get kicked out, you ain’t got no choicebut GED school. So when people come here to [school] they ain’t got no otherchoice but to go to GED school I mean, they ain’t got no choice but to straightenup.

Tyrell, on the other hand, attributed fewer fights to his school’s size:

It’s so small you gotta try to get along with people, other gangs…. Ain’t nobodyhere trip off [gang] stuff like that. Like if you go somewhere like [another St.Louis school], it would be different. Like you … probably be fighting all thetime, probably waiting by the door with Bloods and all that kinda stuff waitingon you to come outside. But up here, they ain’t even like that.

Finally, regardless of the school they attended, young men were in agree-ment that school violence was less serious than neighborhood violence. Forinstance, Marvin noted, “they argue [at school] but it never lead to fightin.’ …[The other day] they was talkin’ and one [boy] just called this [other] boy adookie and the boy got real mad. Then they just kept arguin,’ sayin’ what theywas gonna do to each other, but [it] never came to it. They just like man ‘forgetit.’” Likewise, describing gang fights, Andrew said he had “only seen one reallyup here [at school]. Out there on the streets I see a lot of fights.” And Walterexplained that fights:

Happen often. I seen a whole bunch of dudes jump one dude and then a coupledays later the dude see one of the dudes who he jumped and if he got hisfriends with him he’ll go back and jump him…. [But] it ain’t happening in

16. In fact, as noted earlier, these schools had an 82 percent dropout rate, suggesting this was morecommon than Travis assumed.



school. I ain’t ever seen no dude fighting in school, it’s really outside school….Well, some dudes will fight [at school] if they hate each other…. Like if a dudego here and then they find out that the dude don’t like him—’cause you saysomething to somebody that you think you real cool with and he won’t go backand tell that person [but he does]—and then that’s how most of the stuff start.

In addition, though most young men did describe fights they had witnessed inschool, their accounts of neighborhood violence were more brutal and ofteninvolved the threat or use of firearms. For instance, recall Tyrell’s descriptionof the school fight that emerged as a result of a young man’s cheating at dice.In contrast, Curtis described what happened when he “seen a dude get shot” inhis neighborhood:

They was in a dice game, shooting dice and the dude got to cheatin’ so he toldthe dude, he said “man keep on cheatin,’ I’m gonna kill you.” So he kept oncheatin’ so he pult out his gun and then got to shootin’ at everybody. And thatdude that was cheatin,’ he got shot five times, no three times. And he had, and,he shot at his friends too.

And Travis noted:

I seen some brutal fist fights to where it’s like 20 people against 30 people orsomething to where it’s just, they ain’t shooting or nothing, but they mighthave a board they hitting somebody with, but it’s just a big fight. But usuallythose fights do lead to other things. And sometimes those things can last for along time. Years. Not the fights, just you having static with somebody else. Likewe don’t get along with their hood.

In that sense, schools can be seen as providing relative sanctuary from risks forserious violence in the community. However, as we will see in the next section,the relationship between school and neighborhood conflicts was actually morecomplex.

The Reciprocal Dynamics of School and Neighborhood Conflict

Young men described multiple ways in which school and neighborhood conflictscould overlap. Tommie, for example, described the risks he faced crossing rivalgang territory in order to get to and from his school:

I walk past a whole lotta different projects, that’s a whole lot of differentgangs…. My school, see I’m from [one housing project]. That’s a whole differentproject. And [my school] is inside [these other] projects. And that’s a wholedifferent project that don’t like each other. And we go to that school. So wejust gotta go to that school. We walk to school and we walk back.

He said “early in the mornin’ when we goin’ to school” it was safer because“don’t be nobody out.” But later in the day, it was “a whole different story‘cause everybody out of school and outside.”



In addition, young men reported that when there were neighborhood tensions,due to a particular violent incident or longstanding feud, these often fueledconflicts at school. Ricky explained:

Well, say like the night before it might have been a shooting on somebodystreet, right. And this particular gang might think that this gang did it. Andwhen they get to school, it’s a lot of tension. Or it might be a fight at a mall orsomething, or at a store or something. And they bring it to school, you know….You could have a normal conflict and you wouldn’t hear about it at school, butas far as the gang activity—they can carry that far.

Young men’s gang affiliations, or even their neighborhoods’ reputations, couldcarry over into school and cause conflicts. Leon’s neighborhood gang was wellknown around the community, which he described affecting him both in thecommunity and at school, despite his own avoidance of gang activities:

They might ask me where I’m from and I’ll be like, ‘I stay over there on [thisstreet]’ or whatever and they’ll be like, ‘yeah, you be with them ole Sixty Crabass niggas,’ or something like that. They say that type of stuff…. They may belike, ‘oh, he from [this block], we goin’ to beat him up after school.’ They mayfeel like that towards me. I try not to keep it like that…. I guess they just betalkin,’ tryin’ to act tough…. I haven’t actually tried to fight nobody. I try tokeep to myself, ‘cause I ain’t tryin’ to get put out of school right now.

Most often, when youths described conflicts coming to school from theneighborhood, they said tensions escalating during school hours through furtherinstigation, but with violent resolutions deliberately occurring just after schoolended. Raymond provided a recent example:

[I] came to school one morning, dude came up to me saying uh, “you and youraunt had fought my cousin.” I was like “no, I fought your cousin, he got what hedeserved.” So he was like “oh,” so I had stepped in his face. He was like “whyyou off the locker17?” I was like “why you think I’m off the locker?” So he wastalking about it and stuff, going around school like, “yeah he gonna get it afterschool. I’m gonna whoop him after school!” So all his partners came up here andthere wasn’t nothing but like me and two of my partners. So I was gonna fighthim then, but … the security guard came over and broke it up so we had hoppedin the car … and we went down the street so. Then my other two partners hadcame … so I hopped in the car with them … went down there and fought ’em.

In addition, some conflicts that began at school were intentionally diverteduntil after school ended, and school hours were used to threaten and buildhype. Dwayne said when young men tried to fight with him at school, “I tell’em, ‘I ain’t gonna fight you at school.’ I tell ’em to meet me outside, some-thing like that…. I be getting into fights after school though. I don’t like to fightat school, ‘cause I don’t wan’ get suspended.”

17. “Why you off the locker?” was a school-specific reference to Raymond’s confrontational bodylanguage, meaning he was leaning toward the young man, who interpreted it as a challenge to fight,rather than leaning back against a locker in a more deferential or at least less challenging way.



Though Kevin noted that “you can find any reason to fight … especially in thisschool,” he clarified, “they usually don’t fight at school though, they’ll wait andgo in the park after school or something.” Bobby said “after school, like whenschool is out at two, you see most of the fights going on right at the bus stop,going on at bus catching time.” And Cooper described that he “heard rumors” atschool in advance of a recent fight in which the young men “met up after schooland fought about a block away.” These consistent findings shed situational lighton Snyder and Sickmund’s (1999) report that nearly 20 percent of adolescentviolence occurs in the four hours immediately following school on weekdays.Such violence is closely coupled with school conflicts and their deliberatespillover into neighborhoods.

In addition, boys said after-school fights typically involved additional combat-ants—either because one participant purposely called on his partners outside ofschool for backup, or because a fight emerged spontaneously when rival groupmembers came to school to pick up their friends. Doug explained:

Like say for instance you get into it with somebody in here [at school] … from a[rival] gang with each other. And [one guy] leave, but he ain’t just left thatday—he’s coming back after school with some more of his partners. They gonnacome and get him. And it’s always some more people out here, it’s always acrowd of people outside when school’s out. Always, and they don’t even gohere.

Leon described witnessing a fight just after school in which “it was a group, I’dsay it was about seven males jumpin’ on this one person…. He in a gang, but theycaught him by hisself. They Six Deuces and I think they said he was a GangstaDisciple…. After he … got beat up, he brought his group or whatever and they metup with that group.” Likewise, Travis emphasized how the school setting contrib-uted to escalating conflicts, which were then re-broadened to include non-schoolparticipants:

From the schools that I’ve done been to, most of the fights that I’ve done seen[are] from gang-bangers…. [They get into it at school] because, I guess, it’s howthey [class] schedule are. You know, one neighborhood don’t get along with thenext, and it’s a Blood [in] one class and it’s a Crip, and they all in the sameclassroom. One say something to one of ’em, and they friends tell they otherfriends from the neighborhood, and it become just a big ol,’ just a big clash,calamity, violence that just happens.

Travis noted that large group fights happened quite often around schoolbecause one combatant’s “friend or his neighborhood wanna jump in, and[then] the other person’s neighborhood wanna jump in, [and] it become biggerthan you thought.” Likewise, Leon surmised that young men were often scaredto “fight one-on-one, they need a group.”

Finally, James described an incident that occurred spontaneously when “mycousin and my partners came up there” at the end of the school day andresulted in a neighborhood fight:



They came to pick … all of us up at school and we was fina go somewhere….Dudes [in the school’s neighborhood] didn’t like what they had on…. My partner… told ’em, he wear what he want to and … only one way they gonna get it upoff of him was to beat it up off of him. He’s like ‘cause can’t nobody tell himwhat to wear unless they buy it for him…. And the dude was like well, whatever,so they walked away. [But] they went and got some of [their] partners orwhatever and they came back…. They kept on following us. So we stopped … thecar. And I was talking to some female, and the dude started saying something tomy cousin, talking to him crazy and he … tried to spit on him or whatever. So mycousin hit him … got to fighting. They all rushed him, him and all my partnersand all them, so I went down to help them out.

Thus, while both schools and neighborhoods each have internal dynamics thatcontribute to young men’s conflicts, there also appear to be significant recipro-cal dynamics in the overlap between schools and neighborhoods in disadvan-taged communities that heighten boys’ conflicts and precipitate violence withinand across these settings.

Discussion

Quantitative research reveals important temporal and spatial patterns inadolescent violence. Youths’ exposure to violence occurs disproportionately indisadvantaged urban settings, and just over a third of serious violent incidentsoccur at or on the way to and from school (Gottfredson, 2001; Gottfredsonet al., 2005). In fact, nearly 20 percent of such violence occurs during weekdaysof the school year, between the hours of 3 pm and 7 pm (Snyder & Sickmund,1999). Despite these patterns, only a small number of scholars have examinedthe situational dynamics of such violence, including features of the physical andsocial environments of schools that contribute to conflicts (Astor & Meyer, 2001;Astor et al., 1999; Lockwood, 1997), and the reciprocal nature of neighborhoodand school settings (Hagan et al., 2002; Hellman & Beaton, 1986; Mateu-Gelabert, 2000). Our goal in this analysis has been to build from these studies tofurther illuminate the situational contexts of school violence and the significantschool/neighborhood interaction effects that contribute to adolescent violence.

Not surprisingly, the young men in our study described boys’ conflicts asemerging from both interpersonal disputes over reputational concerns (see alsoAnderson, 1999) and from gang rivalries that were fueled by the strongly territo-rial nature of St. Louis neighborhood gangs (see Decker & Van Winkle, 1996;Miller, 2001). Notably, young men attributed the vast majority of seriousviolence—in school and in their neighborhoods—to gangs. In fact, they describedindividual disputes sometimes morphing into group fights as a result of youngmen routinely calling their gang-involved partners to participate in after schoolfights. Thus, Ferguson’s (2003) finding that youths are more likely to be victim-ized in schools where gangs are present makes sense in light of these patterns.

Features of the school setting also contributed to young men’s fights. Inkeeping with survey research on the correlates of school violence, young men



pointed to compositional or selection effects—noting that gang members andother boys with a “street mentality” were often most responsible for instigatingconflicts. Gottfredson (2001, p. 82) argues that “the higher the concentration ofeducationally and socially disadvantaged students in the school, the poorer theoutcomes for individual students in the school, regardless of their own level ofdisadvantage.” As our findings show, these poor outcomes include exposure toboth school and school/neighborhood-based violence.

In addition, these compositional effects have been linked to normative peercultures in schools (Felson et al., 1994; Gottfredson, 2001). Beyond individualcontributions to violence, young men pointed to important group processes intheir schools—including the role of gossip and rumors, and the entertainmentvalue of fights in settings characterized by boredom—that heightened tensionsand encouraged conflicts.18 Notably, both the impoverished, unstimulatingeducational environment often found in disadvantaged urban schools (Gottfred-son, 2001), and young men’s continuous contact with one another in school,contributed to these dynamics. Boys described problems created by rival gangmembers or others with interpersonal disputes sitting in classes with oneanother, as well as how time spent in large groups in the cafeteria and hallways,functioned to fuel boys’ animosities.

Finally, young men linked the physical and supervisory environment in theirschools to the situational contexts of their fights. Lunchtime, for example, notonly resulted in the congregation of large numbers of youths in an enclosedspace, but also provided props—cafeteria trays, food—that could be used to“mess with” other young men and escalate conflicts. Boys also made note ofisolated areas in their schools that remained unmonitored and thus could beused for fights or other illicit activities, and also complained of the dangersposed by unmonitored school entrances that could be used to bring in weaponsor intruders. As Astor and his colleagues (1999, Astor & Meyer, 2001) point out,these represent spatial hotspots for violence in schools precisely because theyrepresent undefined public spaces which teachers tend to see as beyond thepurview of their responsibilities. And such definitions are particularly likely tooccur in disadvantaged urban schools, like those in St. Louis, that are under-funded, serve students with “greater social and emotional needs” (Gottfredson,2001, p. 65), are unable to consistently recruit and retain talented, dedicatedteachers, and are “less likely to include … a shared mission … and extendedteacher roles” (Gottfredson, 2001, p. 83).

Turning to the overlap of school and neighborhood interactions, our findingssuggest the critical importance of decoupling measures of school violence todistinguish between those events that occur in school from those that occur onthe way to and from school. The young men in our investigation consistentlyargued that the most serious incidents of school-related violence took place

18. It is important to note, however, that youths do not simply accept and conform to normsfavoring violence in schools where high rates of violence are present (see Anderson, 1999; Mateu-Gelabert & Lune, 2007). It is beyond the scope of our research to examine these processes in detail.



beyond the school grounds and immediately following school hours. Despiteoccurring in neighborhood settings, such violence was tied to the school setting.Most obviously, because high schools draw students from a larger communityarea than elementary or middle schools, young men from a variety of neighbor-hoods—each with strong territorial identities—came into contact with oneanother entering and exiting school grounds. And the schools themselves werelocated in neighborhoods with their own gangs.

Welsh and his colleagues (2000) found that poor socioeconomic conditions inboth schools’ neighborhoods and those of their pupils negatively affected schoolstability, and thus school disorder. Our situational analyses suggest that theoverlap of these two—i.e., the effects of bringing similarly situated studentsfrom across neighborhood territories together—also contributes to violence inthe vicinity of schools. Specifically, young men in our study said that most fightswere purposely planned to occur after school, and often involved other youngmen from the immediate neighborhood and the partners of students who cameto the school from other neighborhoods. This is in keeping with Hellman andBeaton’s (1986) finding that urban schools have the most problem with “intrud-ers” coming to schools other than their own and contributing to conflicts there.

In addition, the school setting could exacerbate neighborhood conflicts.Neighborhood tensions, most notably rival gang conflicts and incidents ofviolence, were brought into the school, where these tensions escalated furtheras a result of youths’ proximity to one another, and further escalations resultingfrom gossip, rumors, and attempts to “amp up” feuds. While we cannot saywhether such conflicts would have escalated to violence regardless of youths’school contacts with one another, our findings shed additional light on theimportance of examining both the situational contexts of school violence andthe reciprocal dynamics of school and neighborhood conflicts.

Our study, however, is not without important limitations. The sampling framewe utilized means our findings are not generalizable. In particular, our oversam-pling of youths in alternative schools that served as students’ last resort prior toexpulsion from St. Louis Public Schools, suggests important contextual effects—including student composition and school size—that likely affect the nature ofour findings. We found few systematic differences in young men’s descriptionsof school violence across settings, but those we found were notable nonethe-less. In addition, some research suggests that rates of school violence are higherin middle schools than high schools (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Thus, thedynamics across these settings might also be significantly different.

Moreover, because our research questions were limited to incidents ofviolence, we cannot speak to the important question of when and how youngmen avoid violence, and what role school attachments might play in this process(see Mateu-Gelabert & Lune, 2007). Relatedly, our research suggests that someconflicts were temporally truncated (for instance, in-school conflicts whichescalated to violence immediately after school the same day), while othersappeared to play out for days, weeks, or even months. Future research shouldinvestigate these temporal processes with more precision than we were able to



here, as each type raises unique challenges for school security, supervision, andprevention.

Despite these limitations, our study adds credence to the recent call forresearch that attends to the social contexts and situational dynamics of schoolviolence, as well as the importance of reciprocal dynamics between school andneighborhood settings (Hagan et al., 2002; Mateu-Gelabert, 2000). We suggestthat comparative qualitative investigations are a fruitful means for betterunderstanding these phenomena.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research funded by the National Consortium on ViolenceResearch. The authors would like to thank Richard Tewksbury and the anony-mous reviewers at Justice Quarterly for their comments on the manuscript. Wealso thank Norm White, co-PI on the project, and Toya Like, Dennis Mares,Jenna St. Cyr, and Iris Foster for their research assistance.

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Appendix A. Study Participants (N = 38)

Name Age Delinquencya Exposure to gangs

Andrew 17 Non-serious only Former gang memberArthur 16 Serious—ever Friends are gang membersBobby 17 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberCarlos 13 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberCooper 18 Serious—ever Former gang member; friends are gang

membersCurtis 14 Serious—last 6 months Former gang memberDarnell 17 Serious—last 6 months Former gang memberDarryl 15 Serious—last 6 months NoneDoug 17 Serious—ever NoneDwayne 17 Non-serious only Present in neighborhoodEric 17 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberEugene 19 Non-serious only Friends are a gangFrank 13 Serious—ever Current gang memberGary 18 Serious—ever Present in neighborhoodJamal 19 Non-serious only Present in neighborhoodJames 17 Non-serious only Present in neighborhoodJermaine 15 Serious—ever Present in neighborhoodKenny 14 Serious—last 6 months Friends are a gangKevin 16 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberLamont 13 Serious—ever Friends are gang membersLarry 18 Serious—ever Former gang memberLeon 18 Serious—last 6 months Friends are gang membersMarcus 16 Non-serious only Friends are gang membersMarvin 17 Serious—last 6 months Present in neighborhoodMaurice 14 Serious—ever Friends are gang membersRaymond 17 Non-serious only Present in neighborhoodRicky 17 Serious—ever Former gang member; friends are gang

membersRobert 16 Serious—ever Former gang memberRonald 15 Serious—last 6 months Present in neighborhoodShaun 16 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberTerence 18 Serious—ever Present in neighborhoodTommie 15 Non-serious only Present in neighborhoodTony 15 Non-serious only NoneTravis 16 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberTyrell 17 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberWalter 15 Non-serious only Former gang member; friends are a gangWayne 16 Serious—last 6 months Current gang memberWilliam 15 Serious—last 6 months Former gang member

aYouths’ delinquency is classified as serious if they responded affirmatively to any of the following survey items: stole between $50 and $100; stole over $100; stole a motor vehicle; attacked someone with a weapon or with the intent of seriously injuring them; committed a robbery; sold marijuana, crack cocaine or other drugs. We do not include carrying a hidden weapon, as this confounds behaviors adopted for protection with those indicative of broader participation in delinquency.


las escuelas, los barrios, y los conflictos adolescentes. un examen de la situación de la dinámica...

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