National Youth Violence Prevention Week

The National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) is a founding partner of National Youth Violence Prevention Week. The good news is that homicides and suicides in youth are going down. The bad news is that violence remains the greatest threat to the lives of our youth, especially to racial and ethnic minorities.

• The homicide rate for black male teens (55 per 100,000) is 16 x higher than that of white male teens (3.3 per 100,00)
  
• For Latino male teens: 24 per 100,000, 15 per 100,000 for Native Americans, 7 per 100,000 for Asian male teens
• The homicide rate for black teen girls is 8 per 100, 000, 5 per 100, 000 for Native Americans, 3 per 100, 000 for Latina teen girls, 2 per 100,000 for white female teens, 1 per 100, 000 for Asian teen girls.

Firearms were the cause of death in the majority of the homicides of our youth. Philadelphia has responded to this crisis with an aggressive program, the Youth Violence Reduction Program (YVRP), funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The core of the program is identifying at-risk youth - a group of chronic violent offenders - and monitor them in their homes, schools and neighborhoods. It is expensive to implement and run, but it has saved lives. It is a multi-agency task force whose goal is simple - that each child identified as high risk will reach his or her 25th birthday. Life expectancy in the US is 78 years. Children and teens should be afforded the protections to live a full life and die a natural death. As a society, we must go the extra mile to protect our youth from violence.

Thank you carf for use of photo Urban Art.