Gang Prevention

Broad Topic: Youth Gangs Narrow Topic: The Prevention of Gangs in Los Angeles Thesis Statement: The Mass Media Influences on Youth Joing Gangs I. Introduction A. Is our youth and teens being influenced by the mass media to join gangs? B. Is the media becoming more violent? C. What options do youth and teens have to prevent joing gangs? II. Body A. Behavior 1. The mass media portrays gang member behavior. 2. Language and dress code are taught to kids at a young age. B. Effects 1. Execution of gang members 2. Getting away without being caught

Conclusion A. Community-chosen programs to lure youth, keep them busy and happy, and even motivate them to change their ways. B. The local social conditions in which our youth are raised in larger cultural generate great numbers of violence in individuals. Q1. “Most cities trying to reduce gang violence deny that they specifically target at-risk kids. As Nanette Smejkal, director of El Paso’s parks and recreation department, says, “From our perspective, all kids are at risk. That’s why they need positive programs”(Weintraub).

This shows how youth gang prevention provived by the city during the summer to all its recreation centers and parks for kids under the age of 17. Waiving the annual membership fee that proved onerous for many poorer youngsters. Q2. “It is guns, it is poverty, it is overcrowding, and it is the uniquely American problem of a culture that is infatuated with violence. We love it, we glamorize it, we teach it to our children”(Surette). This demonstrates that our youth and armed aggression is not an American cultural right,and will determine the media’s ultimate relationship to youth and violence.

We must as a society address everything we can, such as economic inequities, the gun culture, and the glamorization of violence. And, by a slow, painful, generational process of moral leadership and example, we must work to modify the individual, family, and neighborhood factors that violently predispose youth. Q3. “The debasement of our culture, of which gangsta rap is a big part, has coarsened children in general and put high-risk kids in a dangerous place. Taking drugs,carrying uns, and disrespecting human beings is now not only socially acceptable in many situations, it is downright glamorous”(O’Reilly). This shows how we as a society can reduce one aspect of violence in a violent society and expect real results. Youth violence will not be seriously reduced without violence in other aspects of our culture being addressed. In the same vein, modifying media violence alone will not have much effect but to ignore it will make efforts on other fronts less successful.

Despite the fact that the media have limited independent effects on youth violence, we need to expand the focus on them. P1. “Gangs are violating our children and our community how these kids walk around with these guns,” said Harlem Mothers SAVE co-founder Jackie Rowe-Adams. “We have to go after these laws on the federal level and go after the NRA and the ATE”(Adams). P2. “We are in a very dangerous situation because this was right outside of a school and kids were outside in the play area.

What we are seeing now is not what we are used to seeing, which is a new phenomenon with conflict between groups from different neighborhoods”(Perkins). P3. “Kids join [gangs] for various reasons,” Donahue says. “But I also believe it’s a breakdown of the family, and I know everybody paints that picture. But if they were getting that support at home, they wouldn’t join the gangs. (Lozada7-14). Title:New weapons in the fight against gangs

Source:Parks and Recreation Author:Boris Weintraub Publication Date: November 2009