Youth murder rates at 30-year low, CDC reports

There has been a decrease in total violence and murder rates. The decrease in lead pollution is a plausible reason for at least some of this decrease.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/youth-murder-rates-30-year-low-cdc-reports-6C10604586

Maggie Fox, NBC News
June 11, 2013

Murder rates for children, teens and young adults hit a 30-year-low in 2010 – but just barely, government health officials reported on Thursday. At least one violence expert said the findings offer "real signs of hope" that violence prevention works.

After a sharp rise in the late '80s and early '90s, homicide rates for 10- to 24-year-olds have been falling since 2000, the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

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The causes are fairly well understood, the CDC said. “Previous research has linked the rise and subsequent decline in homicide and violent crime in this population to changes in drug use and drug-related crime, shifting community demographics, community-based and problem-oriented policing (i.e., identification and analysis of a specific type of crime to develop customized, coordinated, and improved community response strategies), and varying economic conditions,” the researchers wrote.

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“The CDC other researchers and partners over time have evaluated different approaches to reducing risk for violence. These types of approaches do reduce risk for violence,” she said. “There is no one reason a young person gets involved with violence. There is no one prevention approach that solves this problem.”

Programs that have been shown to work give youngster better communication skills, encourage parents to be more involved in what their children are doing, and discourage violence in general. Not all programs do work, Ferdon noted. “What we have seen is there is a lot of variablility in these programs,” she said.

She said the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado outlines some, which include intensive family counseling such as parent-child interaction therapy; multisystemic therapy aimed at homes, schools and neighborhoods; and cognitive-behavioral group therapy.

CDC also funds the Prevention Institute’s UNITY program, which targets cities, families, communities and schools with after-school programs, neighborhood-based mentoring programs, mental health services and parenting skills classes.

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