Framing violence among youth
With funding from The California Wellness Foundation, Prevention Institute commissioned Berkeley Media Studies Group to write a paper summarizing what is known about how to best frame violence among youth.
Framing analysis
Frames are mental structures that help people understand the world, based on particular cues from outside themselves that activate assumptions and values they hold within themselves. The question Prevention Institute asked BMSG to investigate is: What is known about how people frame issues related to youth violence? And how can that knowledge help advocates do a better job explaining the value of prevention? To answer the questions, BMSG collected, summarized and synthesized the work that has been done to date on framing youth and violence. The starting point for this work is BMSG’s paper with the Justice Policy Institute, Off Balance: Youth, Race & Crime in the News, prepared for Building Blocks for Youth. Key issues the paper explores are: how youth and violence have been portrayed in the news; how the issue of race complicates depictions about youth and violence; and how public attitudes about government can inhibit public support for violence prevention. [view the report] [download appendix]
The paper was written to inform Prevention Institute’s work with Urban Network to Increase Thriving Youth Trough Violence Prevention, known as UNITY. UNITY is a national initiative designed to strengthen and support cities in preventing violence before it occurs and to help sustain those efforts. UNITY’s National Consortium includes city representatives, local and state health departments, school districts, elected officials, community-based organizations, and law enforcement, as well as foundations, universities, state coalitions, and national organizations. UNITY is supported by a cooperative agreement from the Center of Diease Control and Prevention to Prevention Institute and funded in part by a grant from The California Wellness Foundation.
Related publications
Moving from them to us: Challenges in reframing violence among youth