By james art 
In the Engelwood neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Nearly 100 People were shot last year and many of the young people who live there will tell you that violence weighs on them.
“It affects me like a young black man, as walking down the street with his friends, you have to worry,” Oh, watch this car. Oh, watch this alley, “says the 17-year-old I am
“You get used to it. It doesn’t even make sense. Even when they shoot, I still sit there in bed and watch TV,” says DB, too.
NPR refers to these students through their initials to protect them from the stigma they can encounter to talk about their experience.
These reactions – a feeling of tingling or hyper signal – are signs of chronic stress, and adults in high school have taken into account. Last year, they were eavesdropped for a youth program that showed promising results to reduce violence. It relies in part on a concept borrowed from poker.
“On Tilt with rifles”
Choose to change is a six -month program that focuses on young people who are already fighting: many of them have been arrested or have had gaps in school enrollment. Some of them may be connected to bands or are of probation for minors.
The students in the program are coupled with mentors and attend weekly group therapy, where clinicians use cognitive -behavioral therapy or CBT to help change their mental models – especially around traumatic experiences.
“What we are trying to do is make them look at these cases differently. As, consider yourself surviving,” says program director Chris Sutton. “We are just trying to get them to get involved in some of those victories that you don’t give credit for.”
Last fall released the Chicago Crime Laboratory Research on the effects of the program over time. The teenagers who participated were almost 40% less likely to be arrested for violence compared to students who were not in the program. These results are held up to two years later.
This is part of the growing evidence That this type of therapy can be a powerful tool for reducing violence. On the east coast you can see another program using CBT called Roca similar results: In Massachusetts, almost every young person who has stayed with the program for more than two years – most of whom have had a criminal history – there were no new arrests.
Jens Ludwig, director of the Crime Laboratory at Chicago University, says that when it comes to what causes violence, people tend to give one of the two answers: that some people are immoral and are not afraid of consequences or that they are economic Desperate.
“The interesting thing about both conventional wisdom is that they implicitly agree to some level for what causes crime and violence, which is people who participate in some weighed pros and cons before they act,” he says.
But Ludwig says many violent crimes are impulsive, not rational. There are even a phrase poker players who use to let your emotions make the best of you: to be inclined.
“I think violence with a gun as a major problem that people are tilted with weapons,” Ludwig says. “After presenting the problem this way, it changes your thinking about what you can do about it.”
He warns that these interventions are not a substitute for the control of the pistol – but a way to make progress without it.
“If we have 400 million cannons in America and soon they don’t go anywhere,” he says, “Then how do we make people be less likely to use weapons against each other?”
“I finally had whom to talk to”
Young people have more difficult time to manage the emotions of adults and traumas can do this even more difficultS The children exposed to violence are more likely To become the perpetrators later.
“When children are exposed to these things on a rather constant regular basis on a daily basis, it influences them emotionally, behavioral, how they look at the world, how they react to things right now,” says Dan Flaneni, who studies the prevention of violence at Case University Western Reserve. “When you enter into a conflict or dispute, how do you resolve it? What do you expose yourself to your own families around how things are processed?”
Cognitive behavioral therapy has potential in substance brain redirectionFacilitating things like moving away from beef, not revenge. But the researchers warn that doing well with this type of work is resource and there is no approach of one size.
“You can’t put the same program in ten different schools that are very different and you expect it to work the same way,” Flaneni says. “You need an adult, a mentor, the coach, the teacher who was interested in you and provided the opportunity or protection at the right time, which is why it is so difficult to say,” Hey, if we did these three things, everything would be more – – Okay. ”
But in Chicago, choose to change, as it first started 10 years ago. In 2018, the city and school districts began to fund the program so that more students could participate. Today, employees of public schools in Chicago believe that more than 4,000 students have participated.
Jadin Chow, who was until earlier this month, the head of safety and security of the area, says that when she took work more than a decade ago, the dominant thinking was that the school’s domain expanded only to his walls.
“While students do not bring situations into the building, whatever they did outside the building, it is not a concern for someone,” she says. “But we know this is not useful. This is not enough … We have to look at this whole picture.”
The students in Englwood ended the program last September.
“I was bad. I will not lie. I was fighting and I was a lot of steps,” says AU. “Finally, I had someone to talk about it. And yes, that made it better.”
“I was so accumulated last year that I didn’t go out, but I pulled it out,” Am says. “I’m more in tune with the school now.”
While in the program, these students participated in a youth competition for the design of a violence program. They won third place on a national scale.
“I’m tired of seeing the community repeating itself, repeating the same cycle on both and on,” says Am. “I have to do what I have to do to improve.”
He says he feels as if he had received a hand, but he deserves it.
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