On a porch where a 9-year-old girl used to play sits a mound of stuffed animals, angels, and balloons. Chastity Turner of Englewood, Illinois was bathing the family’s pit-bull terriers with her father when she became victim to a drive-by shooting on June 24. Within the days following the murder, neighbors, friends, and concerned citizens dropped by items at the front porch of the family’s home to offer support.

“I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve seen the balloons [from memorials]. You wonder how anybody could cut down a 5-, 6-, [or] 9-year-old," the grandmother, Tanya Turner, told the Chicago Tribune. "Little kids die every day. It’s somebody’s grandchild, every day."

Sadly, these memorials are becoming increasingly common in low-income Chicago neighborhoods where killings have taken the lives of dozens of youth. Last school year, 500 school children were involved in shooting incidents, and at least 36 were killed.

The summer months are already known for recording increased levels of violence, but when the damaging effects of a recession are combined with the added freedoms of summer, what appears to result are the perfect breeding grounds for youth violence. Criminologists use numerous factors to explain why youth turn to violence, such as poor family relationships, poor grades in school, economic conditions in the community, or drug, alcohol, and tobacco use; however, experts point out that it is difficult to pin-point the cause of a rise in youth violence to one specific variable.

“Youth violence, specifically homicide, seems to move in waves, and social scientists have not been very good at predicting these waves. The recession is one reason why we should expect youth crime to increase, but many other factors, such as what’s happening with drug markets also matter,” says David Hemmenway, Harvard University professor of health policy and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Youth Violence Prevention Center.

According to the Center for Disease Control, homicide remains the second leading cause of death for young people ages 10- to 24-years-old, and among African American youth, is the leading cause of death. With increased unemployment and fewer opportunities for youth, some experts claim that the economic condition of the country will affect the youth violence issue by making it difficult for youth violence-prevention programs to efficiently operate.

Elliot Currie, professor of criminology, law, and society at University of California-Irvine, says “like most crime generally, youth violence is affected more by long-term economic conditions [such as being raised in poverty] than short-term fluctuations—like recessions.”

“To some extent the crime rate among youth in these really difficult economic conditions is relatively unaffected by short-term economic changes—because those changes don’t really change much in their lives,” says Currie. “But you can’t take that point too far, because a recession, if it goes on for a long time, will create unfortunate changes—by reducing budgets for school programs and youth social services, or youth job programs, that could intervene constructively with kids at risk of violence—and by even further restricting their already narrow economic opportunities.”

Afterschool Alliance, a group that advocates for afterschool programs, released a report called “Uncertain Times 2009: Recession Imperiling Afterschool Programs and the Children They Serve.” The report found that nearly nine in ten afterschool program leaders expect the recession to affect their programs in the 2009-2010 school year, and more than one-third expect the recession to affect them very much.

In Chicago the need for youth programs couldn’t be direr. Diane Latiker, a mother of eight, created a youth outreach program known as Kids off the Block in 2003 to take kids and teens off the streets and place them into programs that focus on drama, sports, music and tutoring.

When asked about the recent surge of youth violence in Chicago, Latiker says she thinks “the youth violence is worse. We are letting the youth fall right through the cracks. We simply are not targeting the troubled youth— the youth who are on the verge of dropping out and joining gangs. These are the kids who end up being the shooters and the source of much of the violence in the neighborhoods.”

Latiker says that like other non-profits feeling the crunch in an economic recession, Kids off the Block has encountered funding obstacles during this last year, but that they will simply have to accomplish more with less resources. She is simply not willing to “eliminate vital programs just because funding is scarce.”

Kids off the Block, in partnership with the National Block Club University (NBCU), an organization that focuses on 167 high-crime neighborhoods, regularly sends a group of Chicago teens to impoverished neighborhoods across the nation to do service and maintenance work, leadership building activities, and to promote healthy living to members of the communities.

NBCU establishes territories or ‘villages’ in high crime neighborhoods throughout the country. Each ‘village’ establishes its own governing body with the desire to bring unity to the neighborhoods. Based on their interests, members of each village are placed in various ‘career clubs’ where they are matched up with professionals in their desired career field. Experts say that career guidance can be used to battle youth violence by giving youth goals and dreams to work towards.

According to Syron Smith, founder and CEO of National Block Club University, it costs around $100 to send each teen on one of the service trips. NBCU only asks them to provide $20 and they will cover the rest.

Neighborhoods sell bathroom tissue— a “recession-proof product”— to raise money for youth trips, while simultaneously giving the teens a job. In Smith’s May video update last year on YouTube, he stated that NBCU raised $3,000 in tissue sales since January.

“People laugh at that and say that’s not a lot, but think about this: That’s $3,000 that we were able to redirect that would’ve went to entities and businesses that could care less about the killing in our neighborhood, instead went to us and put people to work in various neighborhoods,” Smith said in the video.

National Block Club University has raised more money so far this year than last year at this time. However, Smith notes that even though they are raising more money “the morale is lower.”

“People have a lot of things to pay for as it is already, such as mortgages, cars, gas, and phones. They have their own personal struggles to deal with, and it becomes more difficult to give,” Smith says.

A recent piece of legislation in the House has brought some media attention to youth violence prevention reform. Re-introduced by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) this February, the Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education Act (PROMISE) would work to decrease juvenile crime in urban areas throughout the nation.

“All the credible research and evidence shows that a continuum of evidenced-based prevention and intervention programs for at-risk youth will greatly reduce crime and save much more than they cost,” Scott says.

An example of a successful “evidence-based prevention” program can be seen in Boston where, “They had been having a juvenile murder a month for years. They put one of these into effect, and they went three years without a single juvenile murder,” Scott told the Daily Press. To date, there are 225 cosponsors on the bill.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors Workforce Development Council says that there are numerous successful youth violence prevention programs that have been implemented, such as Peacebuilders in Hartford, Building Futures in Seattle, gang prevention in San Diego, and the After School Matters program in Baltimore. But because of the economic recession, many successful youth violence-prevention programs might teeter on the verge of disbandment during a time when they are needed most.

“These outreach programs are a matter of life and death,” Latiker, founder of Kids Off the Block, says. “If we manage to support adequate youth programs throughout neighborhoods across the nation, millions of kids and teens will have a more positive source of support … these programs can teach our youth to help their communities instead of destroying them.”

Rachel Krause is a student at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

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