What works to prevent youth violence: evidence summary

Mentoring and alternative activities

Classification: Promising

Mentoring

Background

The promising nature of mentoring in relation to preventing and reducing violence has been highlighted in the Scottish Government report What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls: A Summary of the Evidence (2020). Within the context of youth violence, mentoring involves an older peer or adult(s) acting as a positive role model for a young person, and mentors often provide social, emotional and/or academic guidance (Bellis, 2017). These programmes can be Universal or Targeted interventions (i.e. aimed at youth who are considered to be at higher risk of becoming involved in violence). However, knowledge about “what works” remains limited and is predominantly based on programmes and evaluation research that have been implemented within the USA (Bellis et al., 2012). Therefore, building an evidence base within a UK context is an important next step.

Available Evidence

As well as taking a bystander approach to youth violence prevention, the Mentors in Violence programme also incorporates mentoring. Through a peer-to-peer learning approach, MVP involves training peer mentors to deliver sessions. Within this context, peer mentors are young people who are “older or more senior from the same peer group” as the mentees Williams and Neville (2017:4) highlight:

The fact that ‘mentors’ are in the same social group as ‘mentees’ (i.e. high school pupils) is designed to qualify them as representative of prototypical group norms , and therefore credible messengers of information regarding how to feel and act.

As noted previously in this report, international evaluations of the Universal Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) programme have shown positive effects with regards to changing pupils’ attitudes^[27] and behaviours in relation to gender-based violence (Eriksen, 2015; Powell, 2011; Williams & Neville, 2017).

There is some promising evidence for the impact of other mentoring programmes on involvement in other types of violence (Bellis et al., 2017). For example, Big Brothers Big Sisters is one example of an intensive community and school-based one-to-one mentoring programme for “at-risk” young people. The CDC Comprehensive Technical Package for the Prevention of Youth Violence and Associated Risk Behaviors highlight that “An evaluation of the community-based BBBS mentoring program found positive impacts on a number of problem behaviors (Grossman & Tierney, 1998). At the 18-month follow-up, mentored youth had skipped half as many days of school as youth who did not have a mentor. In addition, they were 46% less likely to have started using illegal drugs and 27% less likely to have started consuming alcohol, which are important risk factors for youth violence. Mentored youth were also 32% less likely to have engaged in a physical fight” (David-Ferdon, 2016: 26).

Moderating factors

Potential facilitators

Advice for Those Commissioning Mentoring Programmes, from the Early Intervention Foundation (2015) highlights that “mentoring can be a valuable part of preventative work” and there is promising evidence to suggest that it can have positive impacts if delivered in the right way. This guidance notes that the positive effects of mentoring tend to be stronger when programmes have the following characteristics:

• emotional support is a key part of the mentoring provision
• mentors are motivated to participate as part of their own professional development rather than just wanting to volunteer
• mentors and mentees meet at least once a week and spend more time together at each meeting
• the mentoring takes place over a prolonged period: studies suggest that the benefits of mentoring are less likely to be maintained after the mentoring ends
• the mentoring is part of a wider suite of interventions: mentoring on its own may not reduce re-offending
• the programme is well-run with effective training and support for mentors and careful monitoring of contact

Potential barriers

Further, the Preventing Youth Violence and Gang Involvement report from the Home Office (2013:23) notes that “caution should be taken when implementing mentoring programmes. Poorly implemented mentoring programmes (for example, unstructured mentoring, or with unmotivated or otherwise unsuitable mentors) can make things worse”.

Classification: Mixed

Out of school activities

Out of school activities can include after-school provision and activities that are provided separately from education (e.g. music, sports, or volunteering) and can be implemented in school and community settings. These programmes “provide opportunities for youth to strengthen their social and academic skills and become involved in school and community activities to expand their prosocial experiences and relationships. These approaches also address key risk and protective factors for youth violence by helping to provide supervision during critical times of the day, such as from 3pm to 6pm when youth crime and violence peak” (David-Ferdon, 2016:25). Evidence from evaluations that investigate the effectiveness of these programmes in preventing youth violence are limited and findings to date are mixed. There is often substantial variation across the characteristics of these programmes making it difficult to form clear conclusions about the effectiveness of this approach.

Both the Los Angeles Better Educated Students for Tomorrow (LA’s BEST) and After School Matters programmes have been shown to have a promising impact on young people’s involvement in gangs^[28] and perpetration of violence^[29] (Public Health England, 2019). LA’s BEST “seeks to provide a safe haven for at-risk young people in neighbourhoods where gang violence, drugs, and other types of anti-social behaviours are common” (Goldschmidt and Huang, 2007). A range of education and recreational enrichment activities are offered to young people, with the goal of supporting their intellectual, social, and emotional development within a safe, supervised, and nurturing environment. A longitudinal evaluation of this programme demonstrated reductions in young people’s arrests for both violence and crime.

However, it has been noted that some evaluations of other programmes that take this approach have demonstrated negative effects and that “bringing together high-risk youths may have adverse effects” (WHO, 2015; 38).

Research evaluating the effectiveness of out-of-school activities on youth violence outcomes within the UK is limited. The Early Intervention Foundation note that the impact of 11 sports-based programmes in London, which aimed to prevent youth violence and crime, was mixed (McMahon & Belur, 2013). These findings were limited by small sample sizes and a lack of control groups^[30]. As such, further research is necessary to better understand the effectiveness of out-of-school activities in relation to the prevention of youth violence.

Moderating factors

Potential facilitators

As noted has been suggested that these mixed effects are likely due a range of moderating factors including differences in programme model, duration, programme structure, staff, and diversity of participants (David-Ferdon, 2016). The Home Office report on Preventing Youth Violence and Gang Involvement notes that it is not clear whether any particular activities are more or less effective than others. The authors highlight that: “Whatever the specific activities, the research suggests that programmes should be comprehensive (addressing a range of risk factors for violence, for example, social skills, behavioural control and peer networks), age/development appropriate, long term, and that they should attract, retain and build good relationships with young people who are genuinely at risk of offending” (2018: 27).

Specific to LA’s BEST it was noted that those who attended the after-school programme at least ten days a month and had significant adult contact benefited most (Goldschmidt and Huang, 2007)

Potential barriers

This Home Office (2018:27) report also cautions that “some studies suggest that loosely structured activities may actually make things worse”. This may be the case due to peer contagion effects (Dishion, 1999) – whereby any positive impact of an intervention for youth might be offset by processes of peer influence that occur when youths who are at risk of (or already are) engaging in violence are given the opportunity to interact with each other in groups (Petrosino, et al., 2013).

The World Health Organisation report Preventing Youth Violence: An Overview of the Evidence (2015: 38) note that “Barriers to participation include programme costs, specifically fees and transportation costs or costs for equipment. Some programmes fail to reach out to communities at particular risk of violence, and a lack of awareness of these programmes may reduce levels of participation on the part of youths at high risk of violence”. To ensure that these interventions reach those most at need, the authors encourage practitioners to make effort to remove these barriers, particularly where young people are living in low socioeconomic areas or are at an increased risk of violence.