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Red flags: youth at-risk and the making of gender-based violence prevention

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Red flags: youth at-risk and the making of gender-based violence prevention

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RED FLAGS: YOUTH AT-RISK AND THE MAKING OF GENDER-BASED
VIOLENCE PREVENTION

Max Greenberg

A Dissertation Presented to
the Faculty of the USC Graduate School
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEGREE
(SOCIOLOGY)

August 2015

ii
DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to the youth of Los Angeles. I hope you see yourselves in it.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Dissertations are often written in a state of social disconnection, far from the
department, the university and the fieldsite. This dissertation is in many ways about that
disconnection and the ways to get away from it. I have a lot of people to thank for being
my escape artists over the course of these long last few years – getting me out of the
house and out of my head.
I owe my greatest thanks to my mentor Mike Messner. Mike is caring, generous
and always knew what I needed to hear. This is all thanks to him. Sharon Hays’
fingerprints are pressed into the concrete foundation of my theory and writing. Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, who set me on this path during my second year, picked up the baton
without missing a step. Kim Buchanan and Avelardo Valdez stretched this dissertation in
ways that I hadn’t seen and it is better for it. Shari Dworkin, Paul Lichterman and Nina
Eliasoph have being there in ways large and small along the way.
Graduate school is a team sport, the victories sweetened and defeats softened
because they are done with friends at your side. Jeff Sacha showed me the value of
saying kind things out loud and is, simply, family. Caitlin Myers is there for a long talk,
whether it is a rant or theory and always makes me feel like we are in this together.
Michela Musto is a seemingly bottomless double shot of energy and a real pro in a way
that I will never be. Brady Potts calls me on my crap and gets giddy when I have a good
idea that lets me know I am on to something. Megan Carroll thinks deeply about life in a
way that always reveals something to me that I had missed. Tal Peretz was my
counterpoint and coauthor, who always made me better. Mike’s dissertation group - we
really must give ourselves a name - was a reliable place to be challenged, supported and
iv
well fed. Louis Marquis, Jess Butler, Chelsea Johnson, Nathaniel Burke, Jazmin Muro,
Demetri Psihopaidas, Kushan Dasgupta, Kristen Barber, Sandra Florian, Hyeyoung
Kwon, Brad Nabors, Edson Rodriguez Cruz, it has been an honor to be colleagues and
friends. I look forward to seeing you all for years to come.
During my first year, the sociology department staff nicknamed me Sam after the
character from The Lord of the Rings, and I couldn’t have asked for a finer fellowship
than them. Stachelle Overland, Amber Thomas, Melissa Hernandez and Lisa Losorelli
never ceased to amaze me with their grace, humor and superhuman reliability. Their
support has been precious.
My safety net is large and well woven. I learned how to think constructively from
my mother, Lisa Greenberg, over long conversations around our kitchen table. My father,
Steve Greenberg, taught me that everyone as family, you just don’t know it yet. Judy
Norsigian gave me her home and her support without blinking. My Waban Hill family
picked up my slack and kept me going: Elizabeth Cooper, Benoit Aubertin Geneva
Cooper, Dan Emerson, Craig Norberg-Bohm. Felix, you were the best distraction I could
ever hope for.
Kyra Norsigian has been my steady drum, my informant, my sounding board, and
my heart when I was too pounded down by words and data to feel much. She reminded
me why I do this. Thank you isn’t enough, but it will have to do.
The people I met at POV and in the work of violence prevention were relentlessly
kind, vibrant and passionate. I studied violence prevention because I saw, and still see, a
great deal to value and be hopeful for in the work even as I turn it over in the light and
v
see how it works. In no small part, this is because the people who do this work have
earned my respect and my admiration.
Lastly, I am indebted to the young men and women who talked with me, who
brought their bright eyes and eager words even after long days and hard weeks. It was a
pleasure and it was a privilege to get to know you all.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
ABSTRACT vii
CHAPTER 1: SNAPSHOTS 1
CHAPTER 2: HOW VIOLENCE BECAME PREVENTABLE 31
CHAPTER 3: THE IMPLEMENTERS 57
CHAPTER 4: WHAT IS AN AT-RISK YOUTH? 89
CHAPTER 5: THE CURRICULUM 138
CHAPTER 6: TO DISCIPLINE & EMPOWER 169
CHAPTER 7: WHERE WE’VE BEEN 220
APPENDIX A: PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION 253
BIBLIOGRAPHY 255

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ABSTRACT

Curricular programs for youth have shown success at changing attitudes and
behaviors around a range of risk factors and this promise has led policymakers and
funders to make change programs a regular part of many young people’s lives. In this
dissertation, I provide a textured account of the experiences of youth deemed at-risk,
most of whom are young men and women of color, and the programs that meet them in a
context of harsh school discipline and the dismantling of social support. Contrary to the
disciplinary institutions that shape much of the lives of young people of color in
marginalized communities, change programs represent an alternative means of social
control, one which is premised on notions of choice, health and empowerment. This
dissertation examines how these ideas are turned into concrete programs, the ways those
programs are shaped by institutional contexts and the unexpected outcomes for youth's
relationships, identities, and place in society.
This dissertation draws on four years of participant observation in 40-year-old
antiviolence nonprofit and in-school programs across Los Angeles, as well as upon
interviews with implementers and youth participants. Using this organization as a case
study, I show how, since the 1970s, the marketization of the nonprofit sector, tough on
crime policies and the rise of public health rationalization transformed feminist
consciousness raising strategies into evidence-based change programs. Today, these
programs are sifted through the practical concerns and social justice values of
implementers. In their daily work, implementers face a parade of youth who have been
pulled in to the at-risk complex, which constructs and ascribes an at-risk label and sorts
youth into programs designed to change them. As programs set out to change a universal
viii
audience and rigorously gauge effectiveness, they invisiblize the gendered, raced and
classed social contexts of youth lives, and ultimately teach young people to distrust social
institutions.
There are inherent contradictions at the heart of change programs: they emphasize
empowerment in disciplined places, try to change youth's future without talking about
their past, and encourage healthy relationships while ignoring the institutionally-
structured social distance from teachers, administrators and police officers which define
young people’s lives. The contradictions and alignments between disciplinary power and
empowerment illustrate that, in this context, disciplinary institutions constrain and enable
neoliberal forms of social control found in change programs and can ultimately obscure
and reproduce inequality. In response to these contradictions youth and implementers
developed a range of strategies. Implementers informally established a training process
that fills in many of the gaps in the formal training. Youth, instead of focusing on risk
and protective factors, told alternative life histories which provide a way to situate their
challenges within social context. Together, youth and implementers challenged the
decontextualization built in to change program curricula and actively recontextualized the
messages of the curriculum, an approach which echoes the consciousness-raising roots of
the programs. Taken together, these strategies inform what I call an infrastructure for
empathy.

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CHAPTER 1: SNAPSHOTS
Not long after I started in the field I watched Eleanor
1
, a lively and engaging
female implementer working a coed class through a healthy relationship curricula. On the
first day a Black female student, maybe 16, with her backpack on and arms folded, was
“not having it” as Eleanor put it. The next week the student didn’t say anything at all. By
the fifth week she laughed at a bad joke. And by week 9, she told the class, with no
pretense, that she was abused and she cried for a second and Eleanor thanked her for
sharing. After week 12, I never saw her again, but I often wondered about her.
After the first sessions of another program implementation Michael, 17, Latino,
who always had white headphones tucked behind his ears, gave me a hearty pat on the
back and a big smile as he walked out. Every week, he was engaged, and he often tried to
poke holes in the program even as he seemed to really appreciate it. A few weeks in, he
pushed back against the descriptions of consent given in the class, not rudely, but
earnestly, saying that while he understood the law, “that’s not how it works” in regular
teenage relationships. He was pulled aside by his teacher, maybe because she thought he
was out of line. Then he didn’t show up weeks 6, 7, and 8. When I saw him again in week
9 and asked where he had been, he was cold and explained that he “just didn’t feel like
coming to class.”
These two stories are not particularly noteworthy in the world of prevention
programs. They have the hallmarks of the work – brief spikes of emotion and connection,
tempered by distance, confusion, and uncertainty. Implementation happens in snapshots
along the jagged course of youth lives. This isn’t an accident: it is how the whole system

1
All names are pseudonyms

2
In 2011, more than 707,000 young people ages 10-24 were treated in emergency departments for injuries
sustained from violence (CDC, 2012). According to the FBI, in 2009 approximately 86,000 adolescents
were arrested for violent crimes (Puzzanchera & Adams, 2011).
3
See Appendix A for demographic details on implementers
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of programmatic intervention into youth lives is designed to work: short-term, tightly
structured attempts to change the attitudes and behaviors of youth deemed at-risk.
Scattered, temporary, and embedded in systems of harsh discipline - it is no
wonder that these programs rarely show up in academic scholarship. However, scholars
and public figures alike increasingly describe these programs as the best option to prevent
interpersonal violence and a growing number of organizations are developing them. I call
these change programs, because they are defined on one hand by the cultural logic of
change, which seeks to prevent risks by transforming attitudes and behaviors, and on the
other, by the temporary, embedded and progressive structure of programs. The goal of
this study is to explore how change programs construct and transform at-risk youth
within social context. My findings illustrate that nonprofit marketization and disciplinary
regimes constrain and enable the forms of social control rooted in health and
empowerment exemplified by change programs. In this context, change programs
decontextualize the raced, classed and gendered institutional pressures on young men and
women of color, converting systemic inequalities into individual problems and erasing
lived experience. However, implementers and youth do not passively absorb these
messages, instead they actively recontexualize interpersonal violence. Their strategies
provide meaningful alternatives to the current system.
It is impossible to make sense of the youth in violence prevention programs, and
change programs broadly, without understanding the social contexts in which these
programs take place. During my time in the Los Angeles Public Schools, I heard similar
stories over and over from teachers and implementers. For example, a young man, or on
occasion a young woman, who had shown some “red flags” at school: they “acted out” or
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always chatted with friends during lessons, or often came in late or not at all. In some
cases, things got out of hand and they flipped a desk or threw a Gatorade bottle or pushed
another student or yelled at a teacher. In the worst cases, a teacher or an administrator or
a campus police officer restrained the student or pulled them aside to take deep breaths.
Teachers or a counselor, if there was one and they had time, talked to him about his
behavior and how it hurt others and gave him detention or if there was funding, got him
counseling. Later, they said the boy couldn’t help it: he had a hard time at home or he
was just different. If it happened a lot or one bad time, he was put in a special program.
The teacher called home and told the parent or grandparent or guardian what happened
and they said that they trusted the school to handle it or that they would punish the boy
themselves. And the teacher didn’t know what happened next, but they worried and they
looked for signs of trouble at home or out of the home or with a bully or a girlfriend or
boyfriend. And they worried more if they saw or heard something that left them no
choice but to report, because they didn’t trust what happened next. And eventually things
seemed to get better for some reason or they got worse and the boy stopped coming to
school, moved or transferred or no one knew.
This story arc is common in urban schools. After violence or aggression or the
perception of such a threat, a young person is bounced between social control institutions
until something changes. The influence of these institutions is increasingly fractured and
temporary. These aren’t the “total institutions” which sociologists wrote about in the
previous century – they are loosely connected and temporary. For many young people of
color, school discipline and hyperpolicing in their communities represent the most
significant form of social control in their lives, working together to produce a “youth
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control complex” (Rios, 2011; Ferguson, 2001). However, in the lives of youth, the youth
control complex is just one institutional regime among many. Education, therapeutic
counseling, behavioral interventions, medication, foster care and so on are significant
regimes of social control in the lives of young people. If we are going to build a system
that doesn’t rely on harsh and unequal school discipline, we must understand how to deal
with the troubles of youth in other ways.
Recently, Los Angeles has seen a spark of movement organizing to end harsh
policing and school discipline, particularly through the work of the Coalition to End
Sheriff Violence. Even as they were winning changes in policy, the voices of this
organization and the large movement it is part of were rarely echoed by the youth I
interviewed. However, the history and present of radical uprising and protest in Los
Angeles formed the backdrop against the questions of power and empowerment played
out.
Violence prevention programs promise to step in at the first “red flag” and change
the story. The draw of this approach is backed up by the fact that these programs have
quietly become ubiquitous. Sixty-five percent of youth in the United States have gone
through violence prevention programming focused on teen dating violence, sexual assault,
bullying, or gang violence (Finkelhor et al, 2014). These programs, alongside changes to
healthcare and schooling more broadly, show support consolidating around a system of
prevention and health as the viable alternative to deal with violence and aggression
among youth instead of strict school discipline or counseling. The result is that alongside
disciplinary regimes, young people are increasingly met by programs that set out to teach
them how to lead healthy, empowered, violence-free lives. These programs represent a
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diametrically opposed view of the way violence is dealt with in many schools in Los
Angeles. They are preventive, not reactive; empowering not disciplinary; about health not
disorder. In doing so, they may offer ways for young men of color to avoid being seen
only in a disciplinary light and for young women of color to be seen as more than victims,
instead focusing on “healthy masculinity” and “girls’ empowerment.” But for all the
potential benefits of prevention and the concepts of health and empowerment it promotes,
it is vital to ask how prevention accomplishes these tasks and how it may act as a form of
social control in its own right.
In Los Angeles schools, I found teachers, administrators and implementers who
often saw “red flags” in their students. Technically, red flags are researched and defined
risk factors described in prevention programs. Some describe personality qualities, while
others are based on environmental and demographic attributes. However, the words were
used as a shorthand way to talk about how an individual’s behaviors are part of larger
patterns of warning signs that a young person may be the perpetrator or victim of
violence in their future. I thought they were easy to see too. But by the end of my
research I came to see a different meaning in red flags: they are the way that public health
turns massive inequalities - a failing social safety net, hyperpolicing, surveillance, mass
incarceration - into personal problems.
The promises made by violence prevention are, what Eliasoph calls, morally
magnetic in that they are nearly impossible to contest (2011): to avoid violence and the
subsequent pain and hardship by way of empowerment. On the best days, violence
prevention lived up to the letter of those promises, however it did so in ways that were at
times troubling. At POV and at most violence prevention organizations, the work of
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prevention is described as “norms-change,” “culture-change” or “health promotion.” But
how does one turn culture, norms and health into action on the ground? What happens to
lived experience and social structure?
Each year, nearly two-thirds of under-18 year-olds in the United States witness or
experience violence in their homes, schools or communities and the repercussions are felt
in hospitals, the criminal justice system, and other social institutions (Dept. of Justice,
2012).
2
But public health has also pointed to the ways that violence leaves its mark in
sustained, personal and less visible ways, such as post-traumatic stress disorder,
depression, a sense of powerlessness, disruptive behavior, guilt, and hyper-vigilance
(Dept. of Justice, 2012). These consequences are even more dramatic in poor and
working class urban “hot spots” across Los Angeles, where 90 percent of the 120,000
youth living in the most violent neighborhoods will be directly impacted by violence
(Rice, 2007). Still, reports of violent crime have dropped dramatically across the country,
and Los Angeles is no different. The public perception is that changes in policing have
done their job. However, social scientists have pointed out that the strategies used --
increases in “quality of life” policing, like stop and frisk, surveillance, alongside the
escalation of zero tolerance policies in urban schools -- have had collateral consequences,
often criminalizing young men of color, pushing them out of the labor market and into
the criminal justice system (Rios, 2011; Goffman 2014).
I argue that the hidden consequences that are attributed to violence are in fact the
byproducts of violence when it is enacted within a system that emphasizes criminal social
control over young men of color and individualization instead of social support and

2
In 2011, more than 707,000 young people ages 10-24 were treated in emergency departments for injuries
sustained from violence (CDC, 2012). According to the FBI, in 2009 approximately 86,000 adolescents
were arrested for violent crimes (Puzzanchera & Adams, 2011).
Greenberg Dissertation
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rehabilitation. That is: the consequences of violence are in fact consequences of the ways
in which we deal with violence.

Gender Violence And Institutions
Violence and by extension, violence policy, is gendered, raced and classed
(Messner, 1992; Robinson and Ryder, 2014; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005; Anderson, 1999).
Men’s violence can be mapped onto a triad, with corners for violence against other men,
violence against women and violence against oneself (Kaufman, 1987; Messner, 2005).
The majority of changes to policing and criminal sentencing over the last several decades
have focused on one corner, decreasing violence between men, often called street, gang
or drug violence. The multiplication of new policing tactics, largely aimed at policing the
public actions of young men of color, has built on widespread distrust of police and other
social institutions (Rios 2011; Brooks and Manza, 2013). This narrow and harsh focus on
public violence between men has had little measurable impact on rates of interpersonal
and self-inflicted violence. Police can arrest perpetrators if they receive the call, but in
shockingly high numbers, they don’t receive calls (Hlavka, 2014). Instead, it seems that
young women and men avoid institutions and deal with violence and its consequences on
their own.
Against this backdrop, public health prevention has come to the fore as a parallel,
if not alternative response to the other corners of the triad of men’s violence. Prevention
⁠
programs set out to deter interpersonal violence and violence against oneself by changing
the underlying cultural causes, and, it would appear, leaves institutions out of it. Within
this framework, earlier intervention in schools is a priority. These programs are
Greenberg Dissertation
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universalized, easily replicated, cost-effective and enjoy broad political and public
support. These programs lack ways to think about structural problems outside of clear-cut
rationalized risks and outcomes. Alternatively, I situate violence in the lives of youth and
within social structures.

Youth Discipline in Schools and Communities
Young men of color and poor and working class men navigate a field of structural
inequality, institutional violence and masculinity challenges while systematically
deprived of hegemonic markers of masculinity. They, like high-status men, at times use
aggression and violence as means of maintaining power and status between men and over
women (Messner 1992; Messerschmidt 2000; Mayeda & Pasko, 2011; Alcade, 2010;
Anderson, 1999). However, these young men consistently face significantly greater
consequences, including extra-judicial violence, from teachers, administrators and police
that has led them to be dramatically overrepresented in every aspect of the criminal
justice system (Kupchik 2006; Leiber 2002).
Youth in urban communities are often not only familiar with violence, but with
attempts to counter and control that violence through disciplinary interventions into their
lives, in particular through schools and in communities. Whereas a “code of the street”
shapes violence in communities with a weak police presence (Anderson 1999; Jones,
2009), recent changes in policing and surveillance have led to an era of hyperpolicing of
Black and brown youth in many urban communities (Goffman, 2014; Rios 2011). These
changes take a range of forms, including situational crime prevention, quality of life
policing, “broken windows” policing, and stop and frisk policies (Rojek, Rosenfeld, and
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9
Decker 2012; Weitzer and Tuch 2002). At the same time, they are bolstered by an
explosion of data collected on crime and youth through cameras, police officers and
school administrators (Simon, 2007; Desmond & Valdez, 2012; Merry 2008; Coleman
2004). The collective impact of these forces can disenfranchise and disconnect youth
from social institutions (Harding, 2010; Kohler-Hausmann 2013). This occurs alongside
underfunded city schools and educational programs, which track youth of color and
working class youth into the school to prison pipeline. Schools and criminal justice, along
with healthcare, private security and others work together to construct a “youth control
complex” that degrades and criminalizes them daily (Rios 2011).
These measures have significant collateral consequences as young people in poor
and working-class communities, specifically young men, struggle to avoid being caught
up in an ever-present criminal justice system and a society which views them as
constantly suspect (Giroux 2009; Rios, 2011; Goffman, 2009). Rios highlights how
young people may enact small acts of resistance, such as stealing a bag of potato chips, in
response to their punitive surroundings. These actions can confuse or anger authority
figures, including teachers, administrators, employers and the police. In impoverished
and violent neighborhoods, young people struggle to stay safe, finding a group of older
male friends or staying inside and further disconnecting from work and educational
options (Harding 2010). Young men with warrants out for their arrest distance
themselves from aspects of community life, such as girlfriends, hospitals and formal
work (Goffman 2014). Even formerly incarcerated men trying to re-enter society are kept
out as they are marked as convicts (Pager 2007). People who have been “stopped by
police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling
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institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions”
(Brayne 2014). While multiple processes of disconnection rooted in responses to the
expansion of criminal justice have been examined, little research has explored how this
distancing impacts the work of helping agencies and nonprofits.
Women in these communities experience policing differently. Instead of
surveillance and policing, they are largely ignored by the system (Miller, 2008) and when
they are engaged, it is largely as informants (Goffman, 2014). Domestic violence, child
abuse, sexual assault, bullying, and emotional abuse are historically underreported and
difficult to prosecute. These forms of violence in particular impact young women,
especially young women of color and poor or working class women, who more often lack
a significant institutional support system (Miller, 2008; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005; Hays,
2003; Brush, 2011). A distrust of the criminal justice system along with a cultural focus
on compulsory heterosexuality and personal responsibility leads young women to rarely
report sexual violence (Hlavka 2014; 2013). When they do receive institutional messages,
they are predominantly individualized, encouraging them to “respect” and “protect”
themselves (Garcia, 2013). In the face of these obstacles, young women navigate
dangerous contexts of violence in schools, communities and relationships by largely on
their own and together, but without institutional support (Miller 2008; Jones 2009). In
response, some women and girls take on masculine styles of toughness and aggression
(Rios, 2011). Of the relatively small number of women who are violent, many do so in
response to persistent abuse and others are dismissed. If they get caught up in the
criminal justice system, they are more likely to end up in community corrections. Haney,
in her study of two community corrections facilities for women, provides one of the few
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examinations of the ways that neoliberal messages of empowerment and individualism
are used in disciplinary environments (Haney, 2010).
However, hyper policing and surveillance isn’t the full story. In many underserved
communities there is a world of institutionalized support through agencies, nonprofits and
faith organizations that we have little scholarship on in the context of hyperpolicing.
Among these supports, there are wide ranging attempts to geographically and
behaviorally shift men away from violence and aggressive masculinities, some of which
work better than others. For example, in juvenile detention young men may struggle to
reconcile the “outsider masculinity” which provided status on the streets and the “insider
masculinity” enforced by guards and administrators (Reich 2010). Instead, Alternative to
Incarceration programs can succeed by providing a social “survival kit” (Milton 2012).
Flores and Hondagneu-Sotelo found, in their study of religious and therapeutic
rehabilitation for Chicano male gang members, that men can move away from a
destructive masculinity if programs promote “new ideals of masculinity and rules of
discursive interaction” (2013, 488). Similarly, in the urban boxing gym “trainers prepare
amateurs for competition and help their boxers develop masculine identities” (Trimbur
2011, 335; see also Wacquant 2004). Understanding the way that nonprofits and other
forms of support fit within these communities is crucial, particularly as neoliberalism
disrupts the role of the state and it increasingly works through nonprofits.
The ways that schools, criminal justice and communities collaborate or contradict
to control or protect youth deserves further research (Rios, 2011). On a strictly numerical
basis, public education, even more than the criminal justice system, is the most
significant institution in which young people experience and learn about their role in the
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state (Justice and Meares, 2013). However, on a cultural level, the logic of criminal
justice has crept into schools. Alongside the hyperpolicing of urban communities,
underfunded urban schools, often populated by youth of color, have seen a dramatic
change in disciplinary policies in ways that differ from and outpace those at majority-
white schools (Hirschfield, 2008; Kupchik & Ward, 2014). These include punishments
for “willful defiance” policies, which are disproportionately applied to young men of
color, as well as surveillance cameras, school-resource officers, truancy tickets, zero-
tolerance policies and other rules that bring police into schools for otherwise non-
criminal actions (Ferguson, 2001; Nolan, 2011; Kupchick, 2012). In the aftermath of
Columbine, the fear of school shootings and the connected concern over bullying have
dramatically impacted school policies around violence, increasing security, instituting
threat protocols and at times increasing counseling and intervention programs (Klein,
2012; Henry, 2009). Young men in these schools often come to distrust teacher and
administrators, while school trouble can ripple out into tensions in families. Non-
suspended students also suffer academically in such environments (Perry and Morris,
2014). We are just beginning to understand these collateral consequences of school
discipline on students who aren’t disciplined.
Discipline is just one way in which schools often reproduce inequalities through
institutionalized hidden curricula (Lopez, 2003; Pascoe, 2012). High school is a gendered
context, where women are caught between postfeminist logics, which prioritize
individual autonomy, and the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, which normalize
sexual harassment and coercion (Hlavka 2014). Young male students perform “contrived
carelessness,” toughness, and distrust formal authority, while they strive for athletic and
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heterosexual success (Morris 2012; Willis, 1977). In many cases, the same is true of other
education contexts, such as afterschool programs or nonprofits, which are increasingly
involved in the lives of youth in urban settings (Hartmann, 2001, 2012; Curran, 2010;
Swift & Callahan, 2009). However, young people do not automatically take up the
messages of their surroundings, instead these make up the raw materials with which they
construct their identities (Garcia, 2012). Changes in discipline and empowerment in
schools will likely provide new raw materials, which will play out in gendered, racialized
and classed ways.

Governing through Health
Policing and school discipline together represent the disciplinary system and the
significant forms it takes in the lives of youth of color in urban communities in the United
States. However, the U.S. appears at the edge of a move away from discipline and
punishment and towards the governing of the health of populations by promoting self-
regulation (Castel, 1991; Foucault, 2003; Foucault, 2009). This shift comes on the heels
the dismantling of welfare and the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism encourages
individuals to act rationally and responsibly, in ways that align with the goals of the
market (Rose, 1999; Soss et al, 2011). Under neoliberalism, the state is more and more
engaged in "governing at a distance," deploying technologies – memos, reports,
regulations, training manuals – that connect and outline the shape of government from
centralized locations out into a huge array of locales (Rose 1999). According to Foucault,
we will continue to move from a society that controls through discipline and punishment
to one of neoliberal self-regulation.
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Under neoliberalism, behavioral programs have become a central technique to
reshape troublesome populations. In the 1950s, setting out against psychoanalysis,
behavioral theory constructed human actions as measurable, learned, and malleable
through a range of techniques of self-monitoring, desensitization, and conditioning (Rose,
1999). The study of “health-related behaviors” connected everyday activities like eating,
drinking, moving, driving, sleeping to health problem (Armstrong 2009). For those in
social work and other caring professions this marked a transition in the character of their
work, as everyday behavior became their site of intervention, giving rise to “preventative
strategies,” surveillance, and “risk reduction” (Castel, 1991). As a result, health was no
longer simply the absence of noticeable disease, but a consistently precarious “at-risk”
state. In order to promote health, programs targeted the most fragile and marginalized
through temporary acute interventions which promote neoliberal discourses, behaviors
and practices (Merry, 2001; Fox, 1999; Kaye 2012, Merry 2001, Esacove 2012). Along
side their individualizing forces, neoliberal projects reflect underlying gender and racial
ideologies, at times relying on “gendered notions of autonomy” (Brush, 2003; McKim,
2008). While we have a good understanding the discourses of these programs, few
studies have explored how they are produced, set in motion in the course of daily life,
shaped by social location, or their consequences are played out.
Public health programs have a long history in schools in the form of regular
check-ups, daily exercise, mental health and sexual education (Montez de Oca, 2005;
Armstrong 1995). Sex education in particular has been a battleground for debates about
race, class, gender and sexualities in schools (Fields, 2008; Luker, 2007). Healthy
masculinity programs, while largely uncontested, have been critiqued for reinscribing
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15
“heterosexual masculinity within a very familiar and limiting frame” (Murphy 2009, 15;
Masters 2010). Many health promotion programs have struggled to balance universal
accessibility with culturally relevant empowerment for specific groups and communities
(Lupton 1995).
While healthcare and medicine have been critiqued as a means of social control
since the late 1970s (Conrad, 2007; Conrad and Schneider, 1980), health has become a
powerful vehicle for neoliberal messages (Lupton, 1997). In practice, public health
institutions can lead to both formal and informal mechanisms of social control (Hoppe,
2013), such as the surveillance and control of HIV-positive patients. In addition to
institutional forms of control, the “moral imperative of health,” unlike sickness, takes
place outside the regular purview of doctors and hospitals and therefore has enabled an
extension of the medical establishment through public health into realms of habits, diet,
marketing, sex and more (Lupton, 1995). Health, as a collection of “technologies of the
self,” shapes the way we "understand, think and talk about and live our bodies" in ways
that reinforce gender difference, class status and productive citizenship (Lupton 1995;
Dworkin & Wachs, 2009; Foucault, Burchell and Gordon, 1991; Rose 1990; Crawford
1994). Through self-monitoring and internalized guilt, health shifts responsibility onto
the individual for the maintenance of health (Rose 2007; Moore 2010). At the same time,
the imperatives that comes out of public health campaigns are insufficient to overcome
the structural forces within which people engage in “unhealthy” and “risky” behaviors
(Lewis and Russell, 2012). What public health understands as “risk-taking” can only be
made sense of within relationships and financial entanglements (Mojola, 2014; Molina,
2006; Shah, 2001).
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Research Questions
At this moment and in this place, change programs and disciplinary contexts
occupy the same space. This dissertation sets out to understand the tensions and
possibilities of violence prevention work, not as it was described on grant proposals, but
on the ground, within the unequal and disciplinary contexts in which they were enacted.
With this in mind, I pursued three research questions:
1) How are public health theories turned into concrete practices of violence
prevention programs for youth deemed at-risk? It is never straightforward to turn a
theory into practice. Theories have built in assumptions and logics that are both replicated
and contested in action as their messengers and or targets resist or remix them. In setting
out to understand the concrete practices of prevention, I focused on a qualitative analysis
of the work of prevention, its tools and tensions. This enabled me to ground neoliberalism
in the contexts people navigated daily. Because the tools of prevention are so highly
rationalized, evidence based and discursive, it was invaluable to step outside the
quantitative framework. However, wider angle, quantitative research could explore the
distribution of violence prevention money across geographic, class, and racial lines in
contrast to other forms of youth programs and educational resources.
2) What patterns of school discipline and behavioral health do young men and
women in these programs experience? The ways that young people experience and
navigate these starkly different forms of social control can reveal the spaces where
alternatives bubble up and what they look like at gendered, raced and classed social
locations. Because these forces often work through their hegemonic, accepted power, I
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17
felt that participant observation was the most reliable means to access these techniques.
3) What effects do these patterns have on the meanings that young people create
about themselves and their obstacles, opportunities and future aspirations? It is possible
that these programs did everything they set out to do - that they dramatically changed
young people and their behaviors in ways that prevented violence and set them on a
healthier path. However, no one I met expected such a clear-cut victory. Alternatively,
they could have done nothing but provide funding to pacify would-be activists. It became
clear immediately that the reality was more complicated. At times youth resisted or
challenged what seemed to be meaningful and productive ideas. Chances for meaningful
change were fleeting, and hard to predict.

Welcome To The New P.O.V.
This dissertation uses a case study of Peace Over Violence (P.O.V.) as a window
into the contested terrain of anti-violence and transformations in the shape of state power.
Change programs represent a novel phenomenon, and this study sets out to map the
tensions and contours of it. The long history, well-established structure and widely-used
programs at P.O.V. make it a fitting case study. In its tight focus, this study builds on a
rich history of organizational research. In particular, it builds on feminist scholars, who
showed how feminist organizations resisted as they and their principles were
incorporated into the mainstream (Johnson 1981, Martin, 1990, Fried 1994, Markowitz &
Tice, 2002). It also builds on scholarship that has shown how the growth of nonprofit
organizations comes with new market pressures on organizations (Smith & Lipsky 1993,
Marwell 2004, Eliasoph 2009, Jakimow 2011, Lashaw 2012, Krause 2014).
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My first day at POV was one of the last at their office on 4
th
street. They were
moving to a custom built space - bigger, more open, closer to the urban core of Los
Angeles. There were boxes everywhere but since the move was delayed and staffers need
materials, files, flyers, pins - the artifacts of 35 years of work - were spilling out of them.
Peace Over Violence (POV) is a Los Angeles based anti-violence nonprofit. While
it was established as a feminist crisis hotline over forty years ago, when I conducted my
research, POV had grown on the back of private and public funding into a three-million
dollar annual budget, with 35 full-time employees and hundreds of volunteers. They
came to consider themselves “feminist-inspired” with multiple approaches – “public
health” “social justice” “trauma-informed.” Their crisis counseling and advocacy has
continued steadily and is a central aspect of their mission. They have a 24-hour hotline,
as well as domestic violence and sexual assault response teams that works alongside the
police and legal advocates.
The funding base and moral core of POV have shifted. While work with survivors -
which is increasingly built around the discourse of trauma makes up the reliable
foundation of their work, their public face and the closest thing to a movement, is their
work in prevention. They have cultivated a national awareness campaign called Denim
Day along with an intensive summer institute for young people and an annual national
“violence free teens” conference. They sell their in-house curricula, In Touch With Teens,
and apply for prevention implementation grants in schools and communities across Los
Angeles. All together, POV provides thousands of youth with violence prevention
programs at schools and community centers each year.

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When I first contacted Peace Over Violence I didn’t receive a reply. I left messages
with the receptionist and on answering machines, sent a dozen emails and showed up in
person but left after nearly an hour in the waiting room. Feeling locked out, I asked my
advisor, Mike Messner, for help. He introduced me to Jackson Katz, a well-known figure
in men’s anti-violence, who connected me with a staffer at POV. Then and occasionally
since, my connection to Jackson, however weak, has served as a badge of legitimacy. For
the first several months, I felt like I was on a trial period and staffers at POV would often
ask about my work and what I was doing there. However, after three months, I began to
be seen as a trustworthy volunteer and have since been asked to assist in a variety of
organizational tasks including interviewing new volunteers. As a straight white man in an
organization made up of 30 women and 5 men, it is likely that I was treated differently.
This is a central aspect of prevention work - because the prevention department included
a higher ratio of men, during the majority of data collection, I was rarely the only man in
the room.

Participant Observation in Nonprofits and Educational Contexts in Los Angeles
During the course of four years of research, at trainings, at conferences, and in
schools, I spent a lot of my time with a tag on my chest saying who I was and that I was
allowed to be there. I was at turns a graduate student from USC and a volunteer from
POV. I always though, had to be from somewhere. I had to sign in. I had to enter the
institution through locked doors and be vouched for and accountable, which certainly
insulated me against concerns about my presence. But even with the evidence stuck to
my shirt pocket, I rarely felt like I was part of big institutions it felt like small, close-up,
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20
one-on-one work, or at times like political organizing work, but just as often it felt
isolating and disconnecting.
I conducted participant observation in two types of contexts: First, nonprofits,
mainly POV, but also two other nonprofits in Los Angeles where the work and
accounting of violence prevention was central. Second, were youth spaces, mostly public
schools, where communications with and between young people were the primary focus.
While the majority of my fieldwork was done through POV, this regularly put me in
other spaces that dealt with gender-based and youth violence in Los Angeles including
Violence Prevention Coalition meetings, awards galas, trainings, webinars, conferences,
and more.
In total, I observed over 2,000 students enrolled in violence prevention programs in
the course of this research. During my time in the field, I sat in on nearly 60
implementations. This included what are, in public health language, referred to 10-12
session “multiple-dose” programs and what implementers called “one-shot deals.” I spent
over 160 hours in 20 different contexts throughout Los Angeles including large public
high schools, a continuation program for “troubled” students, a wealthy suburban school,
children’s court, afterschool programs and more, sitting in on programs and at-times
implementing them myself. For the most part these young people were not gang-
involved nor had they been in any major trouble for violence. These programs were
implemented across the city often in partnership with city government, the Los Angeles
Police Department and a network of nonprofits and foundations.
While the audiences for violence prevention programming are disproportionately
Blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles, the variation in demographic make-up of the
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21
audiences for programming allowed me to observe a wide range of configurations of race,
class and gender. In the course of my ethnographic research, I conducted dozens of
informal interviews with youth and with various participants in the world of violence
prevention in Los Angeles, including campus police, teachers, and guidance counselors. I
carried a notebook with me in the field and jotted down notes consistently. On the
occasions that I was acting as a facilitator, I took notes during the breaks between classes.
After completing fieldwork for the day I would return home and spend several hours to
write up detailed fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995) in order to capture “thick
description” of violence prevention on the ground (Geertz, 1973). Fieldnotes and
interviews were coded with Dedoose for emerging themes in line with the extended case
method. I set out to use my long-term ethnographic research to revise existing theory on
public health, social control and neoliberalism and connect local events in Los Angeles to
macro-level social transformations (Burawoy 2009).
Implementers implemented these programs to rooms full of youth who had little
or no choice in attending. Race, class, age, gender and other power differences likely
prevented some youth from sharing their thoughts and experiences during the class
sessions.
3
At the start of a program, some youth acted suspicious of implementers or
questioned their authority. Many students explained that, as one young man put it: “there
is nothing different between you two other than skin color” when talking about a Black
student and myself. While students readily and often convincingly spoke in the language
colorblind racial ideologies, it is also likely that this was a skill, not a belief. White
implementers were more likely to be approached cautiously. On three occasions I
witnessed students ask Rob, who was white and tall with close-cropped hair, if he was a

3
See Appendix A for demographic details on implementers
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22
police officer. I, in contrast, didn’t experience this perception, however, I was asked a
few times if I was a social worker or psychologist. A Latino young man walked out of the
first day of programming and later told his teacher that he “didn’t want a bunch of white
people telling us how to live our lives.” He returned the following week, but did not
engage much in the class. In order to narrow these gaps in power and social location, as
well as recruit young men into the organization, implementers used several strategies. For
example, implementers discussed successful past work and friendships with youth,
recounted personal and relationship challenges, and revealed shared political alignments
such as distrust of police. Clear instances of mistrust became less perceptible after three
weeks of programming and ultimately most youth appeared eager to voice their thoughts
and feelings. Still, youth understand that a white person saying they fear the police isn’t
the same thing as if one of their friends say it and the classroom dynamic could be
different when facilitators were Black or Latino and possibly would have been more so if
I had not been in the room. Performances of race, gender, and class were crucial to the
ways that youth made sense of prevention messages. The role of race, class, gender,
sexuality and appearance figured centrally into the way I came to understand prevention
contexts as more complicated than the universalized curriculum present them. However,
the role of authority, expertise and institutional power was also significant across
implementers’ social location.
In the course of this multi-site participant observation research, I collected and
analyzed hundreds of pages of documents that define violence in Los Angeles: police
conduct policies, health department reports, violence prevention conferences, school rules
and budgets, youth surveys, grant proposals, and other materials. Most significantly, I
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23
analyzed violence prevention curricula that nonprofit organizations used to direct their
work. During the course of my fieldwork, the organization was funded to facilitate on
five distinct curricula: Safe Dates, My Strength is Not for Hurting, In Touch with Teens,
Close to Home, and Be Strong. In addition, implementers freely pulled from curricula
they had used in the past or at other organizations for exercises, worksheets and lessons.

Interviews with Adults and Youth
In the second year of fieldwork, I began conducting semi-structured interviews,
ultimately conducting 32. The shortest, 24 minutes was with Joe Moses, a tall Black
fifteen year old with three strings of rosaries dotted with the Virgin Mary around his neck.
I interviewed Joe at a lunch table outside at his school. He kept his eyes narrow through
the whole interview and bit his lip when he smiled. He had burn marks and scars on his
arms and a small stud beneath his lower lip. The longest, at 75 minutes, I conducted in a
private room at the back of POV. I had intended to interview two students, a quiet Latino
young man name Al and a boisterous Latino woman named Sandra, but Sandra was
crying and asked her friend, Bonnie, a slightly older African American women to join.
These four young people are a fairly accurate representation of the range of youth I
interviewed: predominantly Latino (19 in total, including one “Hispanic” and two
“Mexican”) and Black (9 in total, including a young women who is mixed race but is
“read as Black”). I also interviewed a woman who identified as Chinese and a man as
Filipino, as well as two Bangladeshi women. The interviewees were 16 young men and
16 young women, ranging in age from 15-20, with a mean age of 17. Nineteen of them
were recruited through ongoing programs at 5 schools and 15 from 4 outside of school
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24
programs. I believe that the interviewee demographics are an accurate reflection of the
youth targeted for violence prevention in Los Angeles. While I did ask about sexuality,
several youth expressed confusion about what I was asking and some seemed
uncomfortable with the question. I adapted the question and continued to try to get
answers, but I have very little confidence in the answers they provided. No youth
identified as gay, lesbian or as one youth suggested I phrase it “only dating the same,” but
3 women and 1 man did identify as bisexual or “dating both.”
When I asked for youth volunteers to be interviewed, I described my project as an
opportunity for youth to make their voices heard on issues that matter to them. I was
often able to build up a foundation of trust and legitimacy through my presentations and
extended presence in their classrooms, or through ongoing collaboration with youth in
long-term outside of school programs. I offered a $20 gift card as compensation for
respondents’ participation. While these factors likely helped in recruiting some youth,
many stated that they chose to participate out of curiosity or for practice interviewing that
may help them in a job interview. Interviews were conducted in empty classrooms,
breakout rooms at the nonprofit and coffee shops. I recorded them and later transcribed
them. While most of the interviews were one-on-on, later in the process, I became
interested in conducting focus groups to supplement my data. I conducted 4 focus group
style interviews, 3 with two participants and one with three participants. All interviews
focused on two broad series of questions. The first concerned their reception of the
program and how they made sense of it in the context of their daily experiences. The
second explored the institutional pressures they felt - at school, home, in their community.

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Much like the participant observation I conducted during programming, I hold no
pretense that I was able to capture some objective reality of youth experience. Instead, the
methods and presentation of data from youth interviews mirrors the world I entered.
Youth were often friendly, engaging and eager to talk. Some were skilled at giving vague
and upbeat answers and others became emotional. Rather than understand these as
fundamentally different types of young people, I came to believe that most youth can
open up under the right circumstances, however they learn how not to. This became one
of the central arguments of this dissertation.
During the third year of participant observation I conducted semi-structured
interviews with 12 implementers and 2 volunteers and one teacher who had experience
with violence prevention outside of their work with POV. These interviews ran between
half an hour and two and a half hours. In total, my interviews with implementers included
10 women: 3 Latina, 2 Black or African American, 3 white, and 2 Asian Americans, as
well as 5 men: 2 Black or African American, 2 Latino, and 1 white. These demographics
allowed me a window into the ways that prevention is shaped by and navigated by
implementers of different social locations. These interviews included all of the
implementers working at POV while I conducted my interviews. But other implementers
were present during participant observation research, and on several occasions,
volunteers who were not interviewed conducted presentations that are part of the
fieldwork - in particular one white man in his thirties and a white woman in her late
twenties, who both were consistent volunteers. Many of these interviewees began, left or
were promoted during my time at POV. In fact, most of the people I got to know at POV
when I first arrived moved on by the conclusion of my research four years later, often to
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26
other anti-violence organizations. Those I have spoken to about this agree that high
turnover is common in this and other similar organizations. The high turnover not only
allowed me access to several first and last days, but a larger number of participants, as
well as allowing me to see the stability of the operations I describe, even with shifting
individuals.
In addition, I interviewed 10 employees working in various other departments in
the organization about their connection to prevention as well as the interactions with
youth and funders. These interviewees had all worked for POV for at least one year. I
met each interviewee at a location of their choosing, often in and around the POV office
and recorded the interview on a digital recorder. I also interviewed Billie Weiss over the
phone as background for the 2
nd
chapter. The demographics for this group can be found
in Appendix B.
This study of a single organization in a single city is limited in how much it can say
about violence prevention programs writ large. While evidence from national conferences
and webinars suggest that the push and pull of funders and social justice exist in many
organizations and among implementers, they likely play out differently across geographic
locations, audiences, funding support and political orientations. Because POV is more
social justice-oriented than the average organization, it is likely that at other
organizations, these conflicts wouldn’t have bubbled up to the surface in the same way.
In addition, I only worked with five curricula, and as there are dozens it is difficult to
make sweeping assessments of the field.
The in-context participant observation largely took place within classrooms, but
failed to provide the kind of long-term observation data usually associated with school
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27
ethnography. In order to fill this gap, it relies on the testimonies of youth. Interviews are
skewed, of course, to students interested in being interviewed. This is more significant
perhaps in this study, which puts forth an argument about young people talking to
outsiders about their lives.

Organization of the Dissertation
In Chapter two, I map the historical forces that transformed a grassroots group
into 3-million dollar a year nonprofit and feminist consciousness-raising into violence
prevention programming. I show how change programs were constructed through a
particular trajectory of social forces - marketization, criminalization and rationalization -
which in turn encourages a competitive nonprofits field, pushed rehabilitation for
violence off the table and promoted evidence based and reproducible curricula.
Chapter three explores what happens as the program market dramatically extends
the reach of movement organizations while it formalizes their approaches. In the first half
of the chapter, I explore how the rigid structure of the program market constrains and
enables the daily work of implementers at Peace Over Violence, an anti-violence
nonprofit, as they navigate the formal mechanisms of social control they experience from
the market and the state - grant deliverables, extensive training, program evaluations. In
the second half of the chapter, I examine how implementers balance social movement
goals - empowerment, equality, connection - while also fulfilling the seemingly
contradictory requirements of the program market. I argue that implementation is not, as
some scholars argue, a form of cooptation, nor is it a clear-cut form of empowerment.
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Instead, it is a form of neoliberal performance, which manages to “do both” the
movement and the market, however ultimately reaffirming the market model.
In Chapter four, I examine the social and institutional contexts which surround the
participants in change programs, at-risk youth. While scholars have largely described the
at-risk label as an extension of school discipline and hyper policing, I use interpersonal
violence programs as a case study in order to show that the complex of nonprofits,
funders and service agencies that constructs and ascribes the at-risk label and sorts young
people into programming is a defined system for organizing resources and bodies with
distinct mechanisms and outcomes. I refer to this system as the at-risk complex, a
loosely-connected, grant-funded matrix of organizations and institutions that uses risk
data to enroll young people and to create programs to intervene into their lives. The at-
risk complex decontextualizes and universalizes experiences into risk factors, erasing the
variety and social embeddedness of interpersonal violence within lived experience. Next,
I explore how risk factors are applied on the ground to construct a status group of at-risk
youth, who were unaware of their status. I conclude the chapter by using five alternative
histories with youth to map alternative understandings of risk.
Chapter 5 applies critical education theory to public health curricula in order to
explain the process whereby gendered, raced and classed social context is obscured. This
novel theoretical approach reveals how what is described as the “hidden curricula" in
traditional education - how cultural norms are reified - is not only visible in public health,
but is explicit. Using prominent teen dating violence curricula as case studies, I unpack
the visible curriculum that uses discourse and performance to change knowledge,
attitudes and behaviors and a shadow curriculum, which invisiblizes social context.
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However, youth and implementers actively challenge the shadow curricula and
recontextualize the messages of the curriculum.
The scholarly literature on school discipline has not adequately examined the way
young people form relationships within and against school structure. In Chapter six, I
show how the organization of power in schools is experienced interpersonally by youth
as caring counselors, unfair administrators, controlling teachers, and harsh campus police.
In the scattered context of Los Angeles public schools youth learn to build relationships
in the cracks and gaps in the institutional structure. In the empowerment rooms where
change programs take place, the practices of empowerment used by program
implementers allows for more democratic forms of informal control. However, the harsh
discipline still shapes the possibilities for change, as it forecloses youth leadership and
honest conversation. I found that empowerment, when enacted within disciplinary
contexts, can cause youth to develop an individualized worldview that distrusts the
institutions that hope to support them.
Chapter seven explores the unexpected outcomes of the interconnected system of
nonprofits, school personnel, foundations and media that set out to empower youth within
the gendered disciplinary context and structural gaps in support from for youth in Los
Angeles. In this context, young men creatively used empowerment talk as a way to avoid
oversight and discipline from school authorities and young women used it to avoid the
stigma of dependency. In both cases, empowerment talk, while useful for individual
young people, increased social disconnection from vital social institutions. In conclusion,
I discuss how meaningful outcomes arose through contextually-situated dialogue and
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suggest structural reforms that would provide an infrastructure for empathy and social
connection.

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CHAPTER 2: HOW VIOLENCE BECAME PREVENTABLE

In 1972, with a phone line at the Westside Women’s Center, a group of feminist
women, predominantly white, began the first rape crisis hotline in Los Angeles. The
“Anti-Rape Squad,” as they called themselves, had bubbled up out of their ongoing
political work, which included both organizing consciousness-raising groups in the
community and “guerilla tactics” such as “going after rapists and confronting them” and
publicly calling out police for failing to respond to rapes (Matthews, 1994). In addition to

The Violence Prevention Coalition’s Statement of Commitment to a Public Health Approach to
Preventing Violence
1

We believe that a public health approach strengthens any plan for addressing violence by:

1. Relying on factual, verifiable data for describing and monitoring the magnitude, scope,
characteristics, and consequences of violence at the local, state and national level.

2. Identifying the many, complex economic, social and political conditions that are likely to increase or
decrease the risk of violence.

3. Valuing and incorporating the views, ideas and experiences of individuals and communities,
particularly but not limited to those most affected by violence.

4. Designing and implementing strategies and programs for preventing violence based on the facts,
findings and conditions described by the data.

5. Using proven methods to evaluate the results of strategies and programs.

6. Disseminating what has been learned about promising and evidence-based practices with the aim of
assuring adoption of new knowledge and insight by the greatest possible number of individuals,
community leaders, organizations and institutions.

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providing counseling and guidance to callers, the hotline provided the group with a
method for informal data collection. The voices on the line told stories and they came to
see that those stories revealed patterns of systemic failures, cycles of abuse, and
successful strategies for avoiding violence. Together, the hotline and the community
education provided a foundation for situating women’s individual traumas and
experiences as more than incomprehensible individual acts, but as byproducts of a system
of inequality and patriarchy.
In 1973, as part of a plan to turn this loose collective into a task force for the city,
the group took on an official title: the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against
Women (LACAAW) and received $600 from the City of Los Angeles to fund their work
for a year. Although the agreement with the city fell through not long after, the name
remained for another 33 years, an artifact of the ethos of the time - women were central
and organizations were local.
Forty years later, the same organization signed on to the above pledge – alongside
over-100 other members of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles
(VPC) – which frames violence in starkly different terms. The public health approach to
violence championed by VPC diverges from the grassroots model in four vital,
interlocking ways. First, anti-violence organizations went from informally using stories
as data, to using formalized evidence-based surveys as data. Second, on-the-ground
interventions moved away from a local consciousness-raising model, towards grant-
funded, universalized norms-change programs. Third, the predominant framing of men’s
violence in anti-violence organizations moved away from a radical critique of systemic
inequality to a public health model of risk and health, largely stripped of gender, race and
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class. Fourth, organizations, which once pushed for the state to reform its policies, came
to view the state as fundamentally unreliable and sought to act outside of it. In the
chapters that follow, I show the challenges and possibilities of these shifts for ending
gender-based violence among youth.
In this chapter, I examine what happened between the first light of the feminist anti-
violence movement and the programmatic approach that dominates the field today. I take
LACAAW as a case study for the complex and contested terrain of social and
institutional changes that have swept through anti-violence work between 1971 and 2015
(Messner, Greenberg & Peretz, 2015). I argue that the shifting responses to gender-based
youth violence in Los Angeles follows a trajectory of approaches to social problems that
has moved from radical social action and consciousness-raising into a system of data-
driven change programming.
I trace these changes across three time periods. During the 1980s LACAAW
learned to compete in the nonprofit sector and patch together funding for the hotline and
counseling, predominantly from state criminal justice agencies, to sustain and grow as a
nonprofit. Throughout the 1990s a dismantling of the social safety net and fears of crime
made crime control a top public priority that was articulated largely through racialized
fears of young black men (Cuklanz, 1996; Glassner, 1999). This contributed to the rise of
mass incarceration at the same time that it pushed out funding for rehabilitation, setting
the stage for prevention to expand. As crime subsided in the 2000s, evaluation and
evidence became central concerns for the organization as competitive funding steadily
flowed in from public health organizations along with new forms of rationalization. I
argue that in the U.S. these shifts worked together to produce a particular response to
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violence, and to social problems more broadly – the prevention program.

Patchwork Funding (1979-1991)
As the 1970s came to a close, without the momentum of a grassroots movement to
sustain it and in the face of a contraction of government funding, the remaining members
of LACAAW seriously considered disbanding the organization. A grant from the
National Institute for Mental Health had run out and there was no sign of further funding.
At the time, much of the financial support for rape crisis organizations came out of
Federal law enforcement agencies. This funding required organizations to collect data on
the calls they received and LACAAW had long objected to this, as they feared that
authorities could use the hotline data against callers. With seemingly no options left, the
interim director, Judy Ravitz, set out to save the organization by formalizing it:
establishing an executive board, repairing relations with law enforcement and
emphasizing prevention. Not long after these changes took hold, the organization
received $50,000 from a newly established program out of the California Office of
Criminal Justice Planning (OCJP) for direct services to survivors and training for District
Attorneys and law enforcement (Matthews, 1994). The funding from OCJP marked a new
era for LACAAW, one that was echoed across the U.S. as short-term funding overtook
grassroots organizing as the driving force behind feminist anti-violence organizations.
Alongside the rush of funding, this formalization came with new strings. The
organization was opened up to the oversight and uncertainties of the grant funding market
and, as a 501c(3), was restricted in its political actions.

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The ebbing back of grassroots activism was in part an outcome of feminist victories.
Feminist activism had successfully shown that violence was dramatically under-reported,
was part of a pattern and held long-term consequences for survivors. This enabled
medical institutions to frame violence as a medical problem. In 1979, the landmark
Healthy People report stated that violence, defined as intentional injury, was not only a
legal issue, but a public health problem on a national scale. By 1983, the Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) established the Violence Epidemiology Branch and two years
later the Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Black and Minority Health identified
interpersonal violence, and homicide in particular, as major contributors to health
disparities among African-Americans. In 1990, the CDC established The Youth Risk
Behavior Surveillance System to monitor priority health risk behaviors among
adolescents, including violence-related behaviors. These extensions of public health were
a small part of a larger expansion of medical authority into previously separate realms, a
process they defined as “medicalization” (Conrad, 2007). Scholars argued that
medicalization narrowed the institutional focus to treating individual pathologies and
obscured the role of larger institutions in producing health and disease (Zola, 1972;
McKinlay, 1979).
These first incursions of public health research into violence made little difference
to the women working on the ground at LACAAW. They were busy refiguring their
approach in the wake of a broad backlash against the advances eked out by feminists over
the previous decades (Faludi, 1991). As the feminist movement lost standing in the
cultural imagination, violence against women gained legitimacy as a focus of public
health research, albeit now mostly stripped of feminist discourse and couched instead
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within discourses of health and criminal justice. The assistant director of LACAAW,
Cathy Friedman, who began writing grant proposals for LACAAW while finishing her
Masters in Public Health during this time, explained that the medical literature she was
reading at the time contained, “nothing on violence, nothing on women’s health. And
then there was an AMA journal, I might even still have a copy, on domestic violence. All
of a sudden I was like, ‘Hey, this is interesting. There’s some domestic violence showing
up. Violence against women is showing up…Finally, this issue I’ve been immersed in for
years is starting to come up in Public Health.” With the medical literature behind them,
feminist agencies were increasingly able to make their case to funders, but without the
political ideology.
Up until this point, there had been almost no dedicated Federal funding for work on
violence against women. The “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s had largely dismantled
Federal programs across the board. Instead, LACAAW and organizations like it learned
to scrape by on small donations, volunteers and peripheral grants from State and city
agencies. When George Bush took office in 1989, he described this approach as “a
thousand points of light” - a vast sea of charitable, volunteer and nonprofit organizations
- as an alternative to governmental intervention. With the thousand points came Federal
grant funding and by the end of the 1980s, the budget at LACAAW had grown to
$800,000, largely thanks to increases in government funding. While some of these grants
sustained or expanded ongoing programs, many sent LACAAW into new directions.
It was one such grant that allowed LACAAW to create and implement one of the
first in-school prevention programs in the country, however that was short-lived. Leah
Aldridge, who had recently started as a hotline volunteer at the time, explained: “We did
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a child abuse prevention program through OCAP, in Office of Child Abuse Prevention, in
third grade, sixth grade, in a number of schools, and then [Governor George] Deukmejian
cut that out of the budget in the late 80s so we lost that.” While LACAAW had received
significant funding for dealing with crisis and counseling, the organization struggled to
sustain funding for prevention. At the time, California only funded one grant, 50,000
dollars, to prevent domestic violence across the state. During these years, it wasn’t clear
if or how anyone would fund prevention work.
In the 1990s, LACAAW found a way to fund prevention and began to refine the
consciousness-raising strategies of the movement years to work within the growing field
of health education. Leah Aldridge went on staff full-time in 1990 as a community
education coordinator, a position that was funded out of a small grant from the Office of
Criminal Justice Planning (OCJP) for the State of California. She saw her position as
echoing the community education of grassroots feminism:
We have been laying the foundation for almost 30 years, moving sexual and
domestic violence out of the shadows into the public sphere, if you will, not
making it okay to talk about it but making it appropriate to, to increase people's
knowledge about this stuff. We have been doing that, just saying, ‘This is what
life is. This is who it happens to. These are some of the myths and realities of life.’
At the same time, under the aegis of the OCJP, community education lacked the political
implications of consciousness-raising. The de-politicized community education approach
also ushered in other challenges, Aldridge explained:
Because they were not outcomes-oriented and they wanted just counting heads
mostly, we always had certain numbers that we had to deliver and they were very
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high; and the numbers changed, there was a formula, and the numbers changed
according to population. In Los Angeles, we had some very high numbers. It was
universal, I guess you can call it, or primary prevention at the time, which is,
again, nobody was using this language. I had to go where I knew there were large
populations of people — schools…In addition to wanting to change the world,
there was a practicality in our approach.
As LACAAW’s consciousness-raising approach ran up against the pressure from OCJP
to deliver a high volume of youth with broadly accessible “universal” programming, they
adapted their tactics, developing “a practicality approach,” to reach a wider audience. To
do so, they drew on their existing relationships with organizations and institutions serving
marginalized youth across Los Angeles.
As she spent time with youth across Los Angeles, Aldridge realized that the
organization could do more. Cathy Friedman suggested that they apply for funding to
write a teen abuse prevention curriculum. They were awarded the funding and with
$42,000, they went to work designing a curriculum. Aldridge described the process as
“very unscientific” as they stitched together content from existing educational materials
with their own informal research in classrooms. Aldridge, without an institutional
network to turn to, ran a rudimentary search on the Internet and drew from the few
organizations she knew of that were trying to take a similar approach:
Marin Abused Women's Center services, which is now something else…They had
a little thin curriculum and it was called TAP, Teen Abuse Prevention, and Barrie
Levy’s curriculum…It goes back to the mid-80s and it was skills for building a
violence-free relationship. It didn’t have a real public health prevention swath
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across it, but it was about never getting into an abusive relationship to begin with,
which nobody had really developed a game plan for how to do.
Aldridge explained that they pulled testimonials collected for Dating Violence: Young
Women in Danger, a 1991 book by Barrie Levy, a longtime supporter of LACAAW and
with funding from “Teen 1 Media, which was a division of Toyota of Lexus or something”
turned them into a poster campaign, which they brought into classes.
According to Aldridge, the challenge was to talk about violence as though the
audience were potential perpetrators without alienating them, and to change the language
of feminist consciousness-raising into public health prevention messages. She and
Friedman, with her public health background worked together, she told me:
Nobody, to my mind, had ever figured out how to talk about the cycle of violence
as a prevention strategy, or had pointed to the cycle of violence rather as being an
indicator how the cycle of violence can be used as a warning sign in the effort to
prevent dating violence. Nobody had talked about that, looking at [that] from the
notion of patterns…These are the components of the cycle of violence, and
therefore, when you begin to recognize these, you need to make different choices
or bust a move or whatever. Nobody else had done that. I was trying to figure out
dating violence — nobody knows it when [they’re] in it. How do I teach someone
what it is that they need to know: what's symptomatic, what's a predictor of the
abusive relationship. I pulled it apart. I kept figuring out how to pull it apart. We
had previously used the cycle of violence as a way of proving that you were in an
abusive relationship. Now how do I take that and move it again from being an
indicator or evidence of to being a predictor, which was a little tricky.
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In her description, one can see how Aldridge worked to reformulate consciousness-
raising into prevention. This meant making violence and the precursors of violence
visible not just in male perpetrators, but in everyone. She told me, “I had to locate or
situate the behavior within each of us as opposed to a perpetrator, someone over there. As
a prevention strategy, I had to make this about your behavior.” It is unclear if similar
struggles were playing out at other feminist organizations across the country, although it
seems possible given the possibilities that public health funding promised for
underfunded feminist organizations. Regardless the work that was done at LACAAW,
and in subsequent years across the country would dramatically extend the reach of
feminist organizations into uncharted territories.
At the close of the 1980s, LACAAW was financially stable, and beginning to
implement one of the first in-school gender-based violence curricula in the country. In the
process, they had set in motion several trends that would propel them through the next
several decades. First, they learned to compete for and combine patchwork funding
across a range of areas – child abuse prevention, crisis counseling, and teen dating
prevention – under the umbrella of a cohesive response to violence, which pushed women
and gender away from the center of the frame. Second, they developed prevention
curricula that repurposed the models of the grassroots feminist movement consciousness-
raising in ways that greatly extended their reach, while possibly thinning their political
foundations. In the years that followed, these trends in domestic violence and sexual
assault prevention continued at LACAAW, even as a dramatic evolution in criminal
justice policies was reshaping the field.

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Crime Control (1992-2000)
At the start of the 1990s rates of violence rose in cities across the country in what
was called an “urban crime wave,” marked by a “moral panic” around violent young men
of color (Glassner, 1999). The startling numbers and media attention drove urban youth
violence, and the young men who were seen as the primary culprits, to center stage and
shaped the “tough on crime” politics of the decade. This period was marked with new
forms of deeply embedded and contested crime control measures, such as broken
windows policing, gang task forces, and new surveillance technologies, such as
CrimeStat, which allowed police to track and map the locations of reported crimes. Taken
together, these new approaches set out to “govern through crime” (Simon, 2007) and fed
a massive boom in the prison population, largely by incarcerating men of color.
In 1992, after the videotaped beating of Rodney King failed to lead to the
prosecution of two LAPD officers, the LA riots set off the bubbling tensions and saw one
of the first uses of paramilitary policing tactics in U.S. cities. Between street violence and
police violence, new organizations formed that approached violence prevention from a
different perspective, including, in 1992, Homeboy Industries. Homeboy, while also
focusing on deterring violence, was established as a religious gang recovery organization
whose motto was “nothing stops a bullet like a job” (Flores, 2013). Most significantly,
this new wave of organizations was dedicated to working directly with young men to
deter violence.
As an epidemiologist at the Department of Health Services in Los Angeles in the
late 1980s, Billie Weiss explained how youth violence became a central issue:
In the 1980s what was very clear is that young people in Los Angeles County were
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not dying of infectious diseases, but they were dying of injuries, which at that time
were primarily called accidents. Among the injuries, as we define them in public
health, violence was the primary one and it was killing more young people between
the ages of 15 and 24 than anything else, including car crashes.
At an American Public Health Association meeting. Weiss, along with Deborah
Prothrow-Stith and Larry Cohen formulated the argument that would guide public health
into the world of violence prevention: “It was impacting the health of young people more
than anything else. It was way over what could be expected, which is the definition of an
epidemic. So it was a huge epidemic.” With the support of Shirley Cannon, who was a
pediatrician and the head of Infectious Disease/Communicable Disease Control for LA
County, and after a lot of “shopping around, looking for grants” they received a CDC
grant to study injuries from violence in Los Angeles.
The climbing rates of violence and the sense that nothing was working fed an ethos
of experimentation. At this time, according to Weiss, “everybody was trying something.”
Alongside Susan Sorenson and Paul Juarez, Weiss’s growing team decided to “find
anybody in the county who was doing anything that looked like violence prevention, or
working with young folks to try and keep them safe.” This brought them into contact with
LACAAW and other domestic violence and sexual assault organizations, as well as the
district attorney’s office, child abuse prevention advocates, the LAPD and the Sheriff's
Department. Weiss told me,
We all got in a room and started talking and I talked about what the public health
model was about, that it was really ... [that] you could measure [violence] and
monitor it and you could see where it was going, see who was at risk, where the
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risks were, and so forth. Then it seemed like the public health approach to trying to
prevent it made the most sense.
This strange collection of organizations would eventually become the Violence
Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles, a powerful political force for promoting the
public health to violence prevention in Los Angeles.
However, combining anti-violence approaches under a single umbrella of public
health also caused tension, especially at the height of concern over urban youth violence.
Friedman explained that LACAAW was part of the California Wellness Foundation’s
ten-year Violence Prevention Initiative: “We kind of wrangled our way in there and…we
were the only collaboration in the state that really looked at gender violence…We really
kind of held that up to the state and that was something they needed convincing on.” The
emphasis on gang and community violence at the Violence Prevention Initiative pushed
LACAAW to rethink their approach to law enforcement. Where feminists had historically
struggled to get the criminal justice system to treat violence against women seriously, it
seemed when the violence included young men of color, the police often overreacted with
extreme prejudice. Drawing again on their consciousness-raising roots, LACAAW, with
funding from the California Wellness Foundation funded the formation of STOP,
Students Together Organizing Peace, which built on LACAAW’s existing curriculum
and added youth leadership activities, which LACAAW framed as an opportunity for
community engagement in youth violence.
In 1992, the CDC received its first appropriation aimed at curbing the high rates of
homicide among youth. The following year, the CDC published The Prevention of Youth
Violence: A Framework for Community Action, which outlined the steps necessary to
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implement a public health approach to youth violence prevention. By 1993, several
violence-prevention programs were being developed and undertaken and evaluated in
schools and communities across the United States under the CDC’s newly established
Division of Violence Prevention. These evaluation studies were among the first to use
randomized control trials, developed to test medical interventions, to specifically assess
the impact of programs on violence-related behaviors. These programs demonstrated to
funders and organizations that significant reductions in aggressive and violent behavior
were possible under specific conditions. For the first time public health took on a focus
not on potential victims, but on potential perpetrators.
In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act,
Title IV of which is often referred to as the Violence Against Women Act. Much of the
funding provided by the act went into crime control and policing in working class and
poor urban communities of color. On the ground, this often negatively impacted women
in communities of color and poor communities as much as it helped (Richie, 2012). The
legislation also launched the first national violence-against-women survey and
established rape prevention and education programs (called RPEs) and called for local
demonstration projects, community laboratories for new programs, to coordinate the
intervention and prevention of sexual assault and domestic violence. Marking a
significant change, the CDC, not the DOJ was given the federal responsibility to
administer both efforts, drawing a clear distinction – the criminal justice system is
responsible for the results of violence, the prevention of violence is a health issue. Up
until that point, LACAAW had only received state level funding, but VAWA began to
deliver a steady stream of funds for wide-ranging projects from legal services, to
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disability services, to transitional housing to a program to engage men.
In 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Act, which transformed welfare into a temporary program and pushed work
requirements. Much of the burden of welfare reform fell on single mothers, a
disproportionate number of whom had experienced domestic and sexual violence (Hays,
2003). Alongside the support for women enacted in VAWA, welfare reform signals a
change of tactics on the part of the government’s approach to violence against women:
the dismantling of the social safety net, alongside increases in law enforcement and
prevention.
As the transformations of the crime control years settled into relative orthodoxy, a
new wave of youth violence captured national attention, this time perpetrated by young
white men in suburban and rural schools, beginning in 1999 at Columbine High School.
Programs for youth began to take center stage as the focal point of efforts to prevent
violence, but in raced, classed and gendered ways that were prefigured by the events of
the previous years and would shape prevention going forward.

Measurement and the Market (2001-Present)
Even as the tide of violence began to recede from urban communities, for reasons
not fully understood, violence continued to take on an increasing important position
within institutional and academic thinking, pushed in large part by the ascent of a public
health logic in public policy. Bolstered by success in discouraging smoking, encouraging
seatbelt use and stemming the spread of AIDS, public health advocates felt compelled to
focus on violence, which was the top cause of death for young people. Public health
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pushed youth violence programs to be more rigorous, evidence-based and rationalized.
In 2001, the achievements made in the prevention of youth violence throughout the
1980s and 1990s were published in Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General,
including what was known about patterns of offending, risk and protective factors within
and the effectiveness of prevention programs. In 2002, The National Violent Death
Reporting System, which was the first state-based surveillance system to link data from
multiple sources to enhance violence prevention efforts, launched in six states. In the
years that followed, the NVDRS expanded to include 17 states.
The laboratory of the crime control years spawned dozens of programs, all claiming
some level of success at prevention youth violence and clamoring for funding. Weiss,
who in the 1980s first formulated the argument that youth violence had become a public
health epidemic, explained,
There was a big push for evaluation, where you're actually demonstrating that what
you're doing works. That's been a huge change. It's a sea change in the way money
is allocated to all sorts of issues but that is definitely a public health mantra. If you
can't show that it works then really how do we know you're doing anything but feel-
good stuff?
The touchstone for this shift was the Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE
program, which sent police officers into middle schools to encourage young people to
“just say no” to drugs. DARE was founded in Los Angeles in 1983 and had been
receiving 20 million dollars a year at its height in the mid-1990s. However, when DARE
was evaluated it was found to actually create more harm than good, in large part because
police officers were not seen as trustworthy messengers. At LACAAW, Aldridge
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explained, the evidence-based push was “impactful;”
First was that we realized we had to sharpen and crystallize our approach. We
know we were doing it, but we didn’t have all the pieces in place, and maybe we
didn’t even have them in the right sequence or whatever. We had to get clear about
language: a predictor in sexual assault is something different than it is in public
health. We knew we had to get some research and evaluators associated with us;
wasn’t easy…We did it once with the Violence Prevention Coalition and the LA
County Department of Health when Billie Weiss was there. They evaluated the tool,
if it was an effective tool, and evidence came back that it was an effective tool.
This process pushed the organization, according to Aldridge “to back pedal and spin and
raise the muscles and evolve and adapt and overcome, which, we were up for the fight.”
Paramount among these new adaptations, LACAAW began to develop programs built
upon lessons they had learned over the previous decades. For example, out of a program
for incarcerated juvenile females, LACAAW developed Be Strong, which emphasized
women’s empowerment through healthy relationship education and financial literacy.
The organization was changing in other ways too. They grew from one prevention
staff member on one project when Leah Aldridge began in 1991, to 18 projects and 12
staff by the early 2000s. By 2004, these shifts could be seen in the makeup of the
organization, as fresh university graduates in public health and social work showed up
interested in doing prevention with youth, but without experiences volunteering in
feminist agencies. The organization continued to grow and take on new prevention and
education initiatives including a growing national awareness campaign called Denim Day,
which used media and print campaigns to raise awareness about sexual assault.
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In 2006, the organization enacted a change they had been contemplating for years:
leaving behind the LACAAW name and taking on a new one. The word “commission”
and its association with a government agency made little sense in the context of the
nonprofit sphere, and they needed a name that could be a “brand.” As Friedman
explained, “as we had more youth involved in the organization and more men involved in
the organization, we found that concept of ‘assault against women’ very limiting for our
constituency. Besides the fact that gender violence doesn’t only happen against women,
we really saw the need to incorporate men and women into the work that we do and to
say that this is a women’s group was off-putting to young men.” LACAAW, like other
violence against women organizations across the country, was looking to change its
brand, and in the process broaden the array of funding they had access too – both in terms
of audiences and projects, by taking on a clear and marketable brand identity. And other
organizations across the country did the same (Messner, Greenberg & Peretz, 2015). In
2006, the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women officially became Peace
Over Violence. And with the new name, came a new motto, one which built on the
promise of public health prevention, “violence is an equation and it can be solved one on
one, one by one.”
Los Angeles and other cities across the country were increasingly flooded with
youth programs in the mid 2000s. In 2006 alone $958 million was spent by the city and
county of Los Angeles on dozens of youth programs, most of which were aimed at
deterring youth violence in some way (Rice, 2007). POV and their curriculum, In Touch
With Teens had established a strong reputation around Los Angeles, but they had so-far
fallen short of becoming a national brand. At this time, funders began looking to local
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organizations like POV to implement national evidence-based programs. In 2005, the
California Coalition Against Sexual Assault received $1 million from the CDC to
develop a program from Men Can Stop Rape, which focused on encouraging bystander
intervention by men. POV was one of six pilot sites where the program, MyStrength, was
implemented. In 2010, POV was awarded a spot in a massive four-year undertaking by
the foundation arm of pharmaceutical company Robert Wood Johnson, which spent 18
million dollars at 11 sites across the country for a middle school healthy relationship
program called Start Strong. Since the close of that project in 2014, the curriculum
component, called Safe Dates is being adapted for use in public health departments across
the nation. Several other health care companies have begun to fund violence prevention
through their foundation arm as well, including The California Endowment, which was
founded by Blue Cross of California. These major health funders have put their money
behind evidence-based and nationally implemented programs.
This round of programs shared a new focus on a discourse of personal choice. In
2006, the CDC, with a nonprofit called Break the Cycle, launched Choose Respect,
which they dubbed “the first national communication initiative designed to prevent
unhealthy relationship behaviors and dating abuse.” POV would later follow suit,
launching a Choose Peace campaign in 2010 and a Make a Choice campaign in 2015.
This was the mission statement of their 2010 Choose Peace campaign:
At Peace Over Violence, we realized that we cannot work to eliminate sexual
assault and domestic violence in isolation, without regard for the connection that
these particular manifestations of violence have to other forms of violence in our
society. If we want to empty our prisons, to be safe in our homes and our
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communities, and to build healthy relationships, families and communities free
from sexual, domestic and interpersonal violence, we have to protect children from
experiencing or witnessing violence, or get to them as soon as possible after that
experience and teach them that there is another way to relate to others. We have to
teach them that violence is learned and can be unlearned, that violence is a choice,
and you can choose peace over violence.
As is evident in the statement, the Choose Peace campaign looked to bring multiple
forms of violence together within a single interconnected logic, an approach that was
being explored using epidemiological approaches. The 2012 National Institute of
Medicine report “The Contagion of Violence” explains “researchers have recognized the
tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one
type to another” (IOM, 2012: 1.2). Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who founded Project
CeaseFire, which is now called CureViolence, in Chicago explained "the spread of
violence mimics the spread of infectious diseases, and so the treatment should be similar:
go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source” (Kotlowitz, 2008).
Even as the public health approach to violence prevention gained public and
political support, LAUSD had resisted mandatory prevention education in schools. That
changed in 2011, when 17-year-old Cindi Santana was murdered by her boyfriend at her
Los Angeles high school. In response, a coalition of local organizations, including POV
worked with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to pass AB 1373: A Teen
Dating Violence Prevention Education Bill, which called for high schools to teach
mandatory healthy relationship programs and to designate an on campus prevention
liaison For the last two years the 4-million dollar resolution has sat on the books, law but
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un-funded.
At the national level, it seems that focus is consolidating on youth violence
prevention. This is clear in the Supporting Teams through Education and Protection or
STEP grant, the first funding stream for prevention from the Office of Violence Against
Women. And while “it’s a very bland acronym which means nothing” according to
Eleanor, the grant itself funds a top-to-bottom education campaign for parents, teachers,
local police and students on “teen dating violence, domestic violence, stalking and sexual
assault prevention.” In 2015, of the nine programs under the umbrella of the CDC’s
division of violence prevention, five were focused entirely on youth, two were data
collection mechanisms and the final two, which focused on domestic violence and rape
prevention, both contained a significant youth element.
The measurement and market years signal an expansion of violence prevention in
both funding and focus, as private and state support has coalesced around a
comprehensive approach to violence that poses a legitimate challenge to the criminal
justice system. At the same time, the unabated extension of mass incarceration and
criminalization and the dismantling of the welfare state leave many questions about this
new paradigm unanswered. In the conclusion of this chapter, I turn to one such question
as I map the shifting definitions of violence across organizations and agencies. These
definitions matter, because they increasingly form the basis of institutional intervention
into violence.
Over the last 40 years in Los Angeles, feminist movement organizations dug in,
police cracked down, public health funding climbed and schools fell apart. It is against
this backdrop that violence prevention programs have arisen. In this chapter, I have laid
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out the ways that large policy shifts led to the formulation of change programs.

Framing Violence and Anti-Violence in Prevention Programs
The evolution of violence prevention programs since 1970 illustrates how these
approaches are imbued with cultural and structural assumptions about the causes,
consequences and remedies for violence. In the section that follows, I highlight some of
the tensions that run through the framings used by organizations working on violence
prevention programs and discuss how they are situated within larger frames.
As one of the first to apply the public health approach to violence, Billie Weiss has
spent nearly 40 years studying violence. But until recently, Weiss and the organization
she founded, the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles (VPC) lacked a
formal definition of violence. Definitions of violence varied widely across the
organizations and institutions I came across in this study. These definitions were not just
moral questions; they were moral as well as practical and institutional. They occurred
within institutional frameworks. I found that they often depended on three central factors.
The first factor is the question of intention. This is often decided by criminal proceedings
and therefore facilitates the use of data collected by criminal justice systems. If it isn’t
intentional, then it is accidental and could be collected through hospital records. The
second factor is directionality: does the definition include self-directed harm, such as
suicide or cutting or only harm directed at others. Built in to this question, below the
surface, is a tension around agency and autonomy. Can a person make decisions about
their own body? Lastly, is the way the determination of what counts or what doesn’t is
made, whether it is based on the subjective assessment of the alleged victim, the
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perpetrator or some outside authority such as the police or medical institution or a
psychologist. This question is particularly important for underreported crimes such as
sexual assault, as well as threats and emotional violence. Thus, developing a definition of
violence was not only practically difficult, but was a morally and methodologically
loaded process of drawing symbolic boundaries, with high stakes in funding, data, and
identity. Definitions of violence determine the allocation of funding, the framing of
problems, assignment of victim and perpetrator identities, and legal repercussions.
Ultimately, the VPC and Billie Weiss decided on a definition that included
intentional harm but not self-directed or subjective measures of harm, or, in her words,
“excluded suicide, but included football.” This definition allows the VPC to incorporate
criminal justice and public health data sources more easily. It is also closely in line with
the way that the CDC defines interpersonal violence as “the intentional use of physical
force or power, threatened or actual, against another person or against a group or
community that results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death,
psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation” (Dahlberg and Krug 2002). Basing
a definition of violence on intention has the added benefit of aligning with cultural values
around choice and personal responsibility. If violence is intentional harm to others, the
framing in programs is likely to steer towards advocating personal responsibility and
interpersonal skills.
POV, on the other hand developed a dramatically different definition of violence,
rooted in their work with survivors of violence, one that I heard dozens of times in
trainings and presentations: any act, action, force or energy that injures, harms or destroys.
An implementer named Jennifer explained, "Our definition of violence doesn't include
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intent. If you hurt somebody, physically or emotionally it doesn't matter what you
intended to do, violence is violence." One implementer liked to tell classes that an
earthquake is violence. This is a flexible and thus widely applicable definition. It is also
one that firmly puts the act of defining in the hands of the victim or survivor. This formal
definition however sometimes contrasted with an informal mantra around POV –
“violence is always a choice.” This second definition was a crucial part of implementers’
work with potential perpetrators, as it allowed them to downplay the argument that
violence was natural or justified by emotion. Sometimes, young men would argue that it
was possible to commit violence accidentally, if they don’t mean to push hard or if a
woman gives consent and then changes her mind.
As these examples make clear, definitions of violence are constructed by and
embedded within institutions. However, like at POV, organizations often worked to
reconcile multiple different, even contradictory logics. The head of policy and evaluation
at POV described the alignment between different counter-violence frameworks:
The public health frame is really about identifying a problem, and going up to the
root of that problem, and fixing it…It’s like instead of just pulling the dead bodies
out of the river we’re going to go up and see who’s pushing people into the river
kind of thing, that’s public health. It’s about going upstream, figuring out the root
causes. Social justice is about understanding that there are fundamental inequalities
in our systems and in the way we live our lives. These are stemmed in history,
slavery, and oppression. The way we categorize people and that really the way to
combat a lot of the inequalities and injustices we see today, is to consider the
historical contents, context and also to movement build around spreading awareness,
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any stereotypes, and shifting that. They really are very complementary but they are
two distinct philosophies, when you look at any problem.
However, when I asked the women and men who implement these strategies on the
ground, they described the two models as fundamentally at odds. Donna argued that
“violence is a side effect of oppression, oppression is the cancer itself and violence is the
brittle bones and sickness that comes with it.” Jose said violence happens because “basic
needs aren’t met.”:
That leads people to feel really helpless, really angry and that anger then
manifests into violence. I think these things are happening very strategically;
where cancer doesn’t strategically pick like, "Okay, I am going to find you," and I
think the way the violence happens is really strategic…So, it is the same way that
the violence that happens in our community with our young men is because they
feel so damn helpless because they feel like the only thing they have to hold on to
is their masculinity and how this masculinity is totally based off of the need for
power and control and dominance and how that power and control and dominance
is then exerted by violence and being the most violent and having to assert
yourself through this violence.
The public health approach to violence that has taken shape over the last 40 years is
designed not to change core structural inequalities, but to change cultural norms.
In this chapter, I have examined anti-violence as a historically and institutionally
contested terrain. Such an analysis reveals how approaches to violence are not isolated,
but instead are connected within a larger field. In the next chapter, I examine how the
structure of the program market and the tensions enacted upon program implementers as
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they find themselves caught between overlapping and often contradictory approaches to
violence.
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CHAPTER 3: THE IMPLEMENTERS

At the edge of the Roosevelt High School campus in eastern Los Angeles sits the
permanent trailer that serves as the school’s health classroom. A few weeks into my
research at Peace Over Violence, I sat waiting for the students to be pulled from their
classes for our session with Rob, a passionate implementer and Charles, a visitor from a
small community anti-violence organization in the neighboring county. All around us
posters extolled their readers to wear a condom, to respect diversity, and so on. Rob
tapped his fingers against the thick white binder on the table in front of him, a diverse
group of smiling teens on the cover, an anti-violence curriculum inside. Charles, it turned
out, wanted the curriculum so he could teach it in his community, but couldn’t get access
to it because he didn’t represent an authorized organization and he hadn’t been formally
trained. Rob, with a hint of a smile suggested that Charles come by the office after
today’s class, because the curriculum might be “accidentally left on the copier.”
As we talked, the topic of conversation turned, as it often did among anti-violence
professionals, to concerns over grant funding “drying up.” Rob, shook his head and
shrugged, “I wish they would cut our funding, then we could have a real movement.”
Charles echoed in agreement. Rob and Charles weren’t the only ones who questioned the
role of the nonprofit system. Program implementers and other prevention workers often
told stories about how they undermined “the fucked up system” or “the establishment” in
order to accomplish more empowering goals. Lauren, a manager at Peace Over Violence
put it this way:

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People don’t care about pushing down a little bit anymore or about doing
anything new. They just want to do their numbers, do their ten sessions or
whatever. It’s just become – just put survivors into the mill. Yes, there’s definitely
that whole, that thing’s very interesting, but it’s all tied to capitalism too and
that’s capitalism. When I was asked what type of feminist I was I felt like I was a
socialist feminist for a really long time. Strangely enough I’ve probably become
more radical feminist over time and nobody cares.
When I asked Lauren what she meant by radical, she responded “Blow up the system:
anarchy.” Her stance was confusing, in part because she regularly explained how much
she enjoyed her work, and more than that, saw it as contributing to a vital enterprise:
changing the social norms around violence. That day at Roosevelt High School, Rob
worked to do just that as he implemented a unit on stereotypes of masculinity with seven
Black and Latino boys. The money to create the curriculum and to pay Rob’s small salary
was provided by the same grant funding that Rob hoped would dry up.
As we walked to his car after the session, Rob described a book he had read on the
“nonprofit industrial complex.” I had read the book Rob cited, “The Revolution Will Not
Be Funded” by the Incite! Collective. In the book, a range of academics and activists lay
out the consequences of a sprawling system of nonprofits and funders, which secures
inequality as it pacifies grassroots activism with band-aid measures. The authors argue
that would-be activists are funneled into low-paying nonprofit work, which reinforces the
status quo.
It is hard to imagine Rob or Lauren having ended up doing anti-violence work
without the nonprofit industrial complex in place. Rob had been a construction worker,
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“hammering posts into the ground,” until his late 30s, when he saw a flier for a violence
prevention specialist training, which seemed to him like a fitting counterpoint to his
martial arts practice. Lauren went to law school to focus on sexual harassment. Both
found their way into anti-violence work through a professionally institutionalized
feminist movement (Messner, Greenberg & Peretz, 2015). At the same time, both were
critical of the very system that provided them with a career. Throughout my time with
implementers, this paradox came up repeatedly: love the work, distrust the system.
Alongside the notion that nonprofits constrain movements, there is a second
argument woven through The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, one which I never heard
during my time in violence prevention programs: that together, nonprofits represent what
Jennifer Wolch called a “shadow state” that has grown up parallel to the prison industrial
complex and the military industrial complex and partially fills-in the gaps left by the
dismantling of the welfare state (Gilmore, 2007). Today, nonprofits, funded in large part
by state and federal grants, are the primary deliverers of services in the U.S. (Marwell,
2004). And according to a study from the Urban Institute, “Some 33,000 human services
nonprofits have government contracts, typically an average of six per group.” In this way,
the growth of the nonprofit sector represents a dramatic shift in approaches to social
problems, away from government bureaucracies and towards a system of grant-funded
nonprofits.
As I showed in chapter two, feminist agencies such as Peace Over Violence
experienced the benefits and tensions of this transformation over the last thirty years. In
total, during 2013, about half of POV’s funding, nearly 1.5 million dollars, came out of
government grants, while the rest was a mix of private and corporate foundations,
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individual donations and program fees. Over the last several decades, the
institutionalization of a competitive market for service-delivery grants has collided with
many organizations’ roots in social justice, feminist consciousness-raising and collective
organizing, giving rise to “feminist bureaucracies” (Martin, 2013; Fried, 1994; Martin,
1990). On the heels of this transformation from grassroots movement to professionalized
bureaucracy (Markowitz & Tice, 2002, Reger, 2012, Staggenborg, 1988), a second
change is underway. For many nonprofit service organizations, funding support for
services is increasingly overshadowed – financially and publicly – by violence prevention
programming. The repercussions of this transformation for feminist organizations have
not been adequately examined.
The behavioral interventions at the core of prevention programs have a long
history, but have historically been paired with support services and punitive policies.
However, in the new paradigm, these programs are largely disconnected from meaningful
engagement with the social context and lived experiences of participants. In the current
moment, Americans largely view support services as signs of weakness and attach stigma
to what they see as dependency (Sherman, 2013; Silva, 2013). Further, many Americans
distrust state institutions across the board. This is no less true of implementers. JJ, a 20
year-old African American implementer who grew up in South Los Angeles put it this
way: “I feel like no governor, no mayor, no government is going to help me protect my
family, give me money to help my family out. I feel like, every man for themselves
basically. Everybody has to go out and get it.”
JJ’s “every man for themselves” stance echoes the neoliberal call for personal
responsibility, even as it is embedded in a social context where broken-windows policing,
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three-strikes laws and mass incarceration compose a dramatic extension of the criminal
justice system’s reach into everyday lives (Kohler-Hausmann, 2013; Western, 2006;
Garland, 2001). How implementers like JJ and the nonprofits that organize programming
navigate their social location at the intersection of criminal justice over-reach and
nonprofit marketization provides a crucial point of perspective into the contemporary
approach to gender-based violence.
At first glance, prevention programs look like what feminists and other social
justice activists have been asking for: institutionally supported programs, designed to
engage young men and women in changing harmful social norms. However, violence
prevention programs also align with a range of “paternal” behavioral interventions,
intended to teach personal responsibility and empowerment, that have grown up in the
cracks between the dismantled welfare state, abandoned rehabilitation programs and the
extension of policing and surveillance (Soss et al, 2011). Thus, change programs
represent a strange overlap between social justice movements and government-sponsored
personal responsibility training. Whether these attempts to “change social norms” and
create empowered, responsible and knowledgeable youth fall in line with the social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s or the behavioral change theories of neoliberal
paternalism, depends largely on the who, what, where, when and how of their
implementation.
Rob and JJ are program implementers. Their work entails the daily work of
coordinating and enacting a variety of programs – for mobilizing concepts and behavior
changes in practice. As a kind of work, implementation is relatively new. Up through the
1990s, programs were largely implemented by full-time teachers or, in the case of DARE,
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police officers. However, at violence prevention agencies, along with a wide range of
other nonprofits, programming has increasingly become a key tool in their toolbox and a
source of funding. They sometimes called themselves facilitators, which points to a more
engaged and dynamic role than the one defined by program funders. Implementers are
able to commit their full time employment to engaging with young people about healthy
relationships and social inequalities. They are able to do so at a scope that is, as far as I
can tell, unprecedented. A single implementer may work with several hundred youth each
year. Implementers operate at a fulcrum point within the larger structure of the program
market, caught between the distant governing of funders and enacting power over their
audiences, simultaneously caught between meeting their deliverables and the social
justice values which motivate them.
In the last chapter I showed how change programs arose from consciousness-
raising, in large part as a system of marketized nonprofits came to organize approaches to
social problems. We know little about how this marketization is restructuring movement
organizations on the ground. I show marketization has led to the production of a program
market, which extends the reach of the organizations and formalizes their approaches.
This chapter uses participant observation and interviews to examine how the marketized
structure of change programs constrains and enables the mobilization of social justice
work by implementers. What tensions arise as implementers navigate the formal
mechanisms of social control they experience from the market and the state and the
informal mechanisms of social control that they have to enact on their audiences? How
do they manage decisions between grant deliverables and social justice on the ground?
By exploring the contradictions that bubble up out of a neoliberal approach to social
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problems, we can see gaps and holes in it. In the first half of the chapter, I explore how
the structure of the program market constrains and enables the daily work of
implementers. In the second half of the chapter, I examine how implementers balance
social movement values, while also fulfilling the requirements of the program market. I
argue implementation is a form of neoliberal performance, which manages to “do both”
to some extent, however largely works to reaffirm the market model.

The Program Market
During the opening of a conference on the bystander approach to violence
prevention programming, the president of the host university explained how he saw the
goals of the conference as aligned with the work of the university, explaining, "we're an
institution that can change culture." As the crowd cheered this ambitious goal, I was
puzzled. As a job description for daily work, culture change is a strange demand. Which
culture should implementers change? Are they part of this culture or outside of it? Where
does this culture reside?
Prevention doesn’t provide any concrete resources to its audiences. Without
resources to dispense, funders place the weight on implementers to fulfill quotas, to hit
their numbers and to justify their work. In 2012, Peace Over Violence received over one
million dollars in funding from government agencies and private foundations for
prevention programming and with that funding, a team of implementers and volunteers
reached over 20,000 Los Angeles youth. One grant, for Rape Prevention Education is the
longest running prevention grant at the organization. If you were to look at what the
report for one year of the grant, you would see the accomplishments listed in figure 3.1.
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Figure 3.1
- We provided 6-8 sessions of In Touch With Teens prevention education,
reaching over 1500 students from the two target school districts of LAUSD
and AUSD.
- During the reporting period Peace Over Violence Self Defense Instructors
provided a total of 55 girl’s self-defense and safety/assertiveness classes to
620 girl’s age range from 12 to 17 years old.
- During this reporting period, Peace Over Violence trained a total number of
31 community members, including 26 women, 5 men and 3 POV staff
members, ranging from ages 18 through 56, both English and Spanish
speaking.
- During this reporting period, 30 VPS volunteers led and co-facilitated
presentations to students in middle schools, high schools, and colleges as
well as to parents and professional staff.
- In total, 45 students among 3 high school campuses gained leadership skills
through STOP clubs and have led prevention presentations and activities
within their clubs and on campus.
- Additionally, during July 2013, 21 youth leaders gained skills through the
Youth Over Violence Summer Institute.
- Total number of professional training sessions conducted: 117
- Total number of unduplicated RPE education participants: 6961
- Total number of RPE education sessions conducted: 443
- Total number of unduplicated professionals trained: 1020

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In my time at POV, the organization was funded for at least 8 prevention grants. All
of these were complex, multi-year undertakings, often mixing public and private
authority and multiple agencies. Take, for example, the Start Strong initiative. The Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation and Blue Shield of California funded 11 sites across the
country each for 1 million dollars over four years. Futures Without Violence, the biggest
name in violence prevention in the U.S., provided technical assistance. While the out of
school component was different at each site, the in-school program required the use of
Safe Dates, one of the few evidence-based teen-dating violence prevention curricula.
POV also used their curriculum, In Touch With Teens during a summer institute, which
brought over twenty students, all of whom needed parental permission and transportation,
to the office four days a week for over a month. This, between the money coming in and
the deliverables going out, is the messy, difficult work of prevention.

Market Bureaucracy, Close Up
Organization scholars have raised concerns over the extent to which funders and
donors are able to shape the work of nonprofits that rely on them. This came as no
surprise to grant-writers and managers at POV. Amanda explained:
We brainstorm about what’s something that we can bring forward to this
application. We research the foundation, the businesses. Are they aligned with
what we’re doing? Do we know anybody there? All that stuff. Then we meet with
staff and we get their ideas about what’s reasonable? What can we do? Is this
worth our time? Do we let this pass? Is the timing right for us to look at this
direction? Do we have the capacity? What do we need to add to bring this
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program to capacity? So there’s a lot of factors…you learn the different language
stuff. I mean there are stuff for example we would not write in a Verizon grant
that we would write in NOVO grant because it was like pretty radical but you
know that because you read their web site. You do their conference calls where
they say like, “We’re a feminist organization. We will pay for childcare as part of
this grant.” Where you’re like, “Okay, I could send you a manifesto.” I cannot
send Verizon a manifesto.”
Managers see this as targeting their message, not shaping their values to donor whims.
Implementers however, often had a larger critique of the system, much like the ones
leveled by Rob and Lauren at the start of the chapter. During an interview, Rob
elaborated:
Here’s the dangerous part of that, I think it’s very easy for social movements to
slip into adjusting their programming, adjusting their mission to get funding,
versus staying on track with what the original grassroots movement was about.
It is telling that donor discipline has become the core critique of nonprofits by those who
do street-level work. While they at times had to scramble to "get their numbers up," they
were relatively autonomous compared to caseworkers and other bureaucrats. Many
funder requirements seem reasonable, such as benchmarks for the quantity of
programming done. At times, however, the requirements seemed obscure. Implementers
have struggled to find performance venues within specific geographic areas. There is a
“ridiculous” level of documentation. At times, it can feel like the brand is more important
than the work. For example, on a grant from the Office of Violence Against Women,
Eleanor explained,
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Technically, I can’t have a meeting with an agenda, if that agenda wasn’t first
approved by OVW. And everything that I print out has to have a disclaimer: this
was printed under money from grant blah-blah-blah, this is the opinion of this
agency and not necessarily … and that has to be on everything that I do and I
can’t give out this needs assessment until I first create it, send it to OVW, they
approve or not approve it, I get the stamp, they bring it back to me and then I can
do it. So it totally slows down the process. Why has that been an issue on my
grant because I’m working with the school district, that means there’s a very
specific calendar that they use. They’re only in session August till May. So if I
have sent something to you and you don’t approve it till July, I can’t even use it.
And, since a scandal over $300 muffins at another government agency, she hasn’t been
able to purchase food. “Why is that an issue? Because I’m working with students and
parents and how do you get them to do anything especially like, hey, parents, come at
five o’clock after work, by the way, I’m not going to feed you.”
They have to submit for approval 90 days before an event, but only receive word
15 days before. “Sometimes it would hold us back from performing or we would have to
have seven-to-nine deliverables or performances within this grant period. In actuality, we
probably perform 11 but only maybe about 8-9 of those are actually counted, and that's
because we started performing before we got the approval.” They let people know about
“under the radar” performances through email and word of mouth, but not Facebook,
because, Rose said, they "don't want there to be a trail…the last thing I want is an audit
from the feds." Fears of an audit, or of being sued for copyright infringement and other
legal and bureaucratic hassles were the main forces that constrained prevention work.
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There were new wrinkles in the systems of bureaucratic control enacted on
implementers in a marketized system. First, instead of one authority, the government,
implementers managed multiple overlapping and temporary authorities, which produced
instability and uncertainty. Grants rarely lasted more than two years, and POV often had
multiple grants at some point in the cycle, not all of which would be accepted. On a few
occasions, a grant that seemed likely to be renewed wasn’t, leaving youth and
implementers scrambling and disconnected. Many implementers were directly grant-
funded, which means that when a grant ran out, the position disappeared and the
implementers were left floating until something came together. For this reason, it was
common for implementers not to know their job title. This also created jumbled
allegiances. During my time at POV, alongside ITWT, grants required them to implement
at least five other curricula. And on the ground, that complicated and confused people
receiving programming.
The second distinction of a marketized field, is that implementers work for a
single entity in a field of competitors and possible employers. As one trainer put it to a
room of violence prevention specialists, “you are a POV franchise.” For some
implementers, like Jose, this was frustrating:
The only talk that we have at those meetings is, "Oh, you were fighting for that
grant? You wanted that grant? Oh, so you got it? Because we wrote the grant, and
I guess we didn't get it." It makes me believe like, that's what I'm saying; there is
no social justice. Organizations are just competing for money, for a digital
number to appear in their bank account. That's where I feel like a lot of the power
and the energy is being focused. It's not like, "Okay, we did not get the money.
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Fine. How can you help us do this?" I feel like there's no cohesiveness. I feel like
everybody's just too damn ... They have a cloud in their brain, and all they're
thinking about is how to write that grant better than the other organizations so
they can get the money. Capitalism has somehow made us all players into their
game, and now we're all competing. We're competing and it should not be a
competition. It should be some type of helping or some type of assisting
mechanism, and there you go, capitalism is failing again. Instead of making allies,
I believe it's making enemies, because everybody is going against for the money.
It's like, "Really? It's all about the money? It's not about the change?
Despite the pressures of the marketized system, I never saw or heard of implementers
lying or inflating the numbers that they gave to funders. In fact, no one even talked about
it. While some implementers talked about undermining the funding system, most try to
“do both.” Despite talk to the contrary, meeting the numbers mattered. But the re-
organization of the state, while it has created new tensions, has also created new
possibilities. Implementers learned from the service side of the organization how to meet
the letter of the requirements of a nonprofit in a competitive field, while maintaining
some level of social justice action. For example, at one prevention training, hotline
workers came to talk about how they balance mandated reporting rules against their fear
of having their notes subpoenaed and used against the caller. They explained that they
avoid taking detailed notes or asking questions that might give away personal details, and
if they accidentally get this information, they often "forget it." They don’t ask the ages of
the individuals having consensual sex because in Los Angeles the age of consent is 18, no
one under 18 can have sex (consensual sex between a 17 an 18 year old is statutory
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rape). They never write that the caller was “depressed” or descriptions of an event, they
instead write something like “discussed family relationships.” The hotline workers rely
on their memories and each other to keep the information. I imagine somewhere there
are stacks of case folders full of worthless, vague information. For implementers,
learning to do prevention is in part, learning to cover over the gaps and flaws in the
nonprofit system by making it seem everyday, predictable, rational.

The Alienation of Jennifer
In interviews, implementers often talked about their work as a “calling” or “a
dream come true.” I met Jennifer in her first month. She was still settling into her office,
the first one she’d ever had. It was at the satellite office 45 minutes from the main office,
which was “not ideal” because she had to go back and forth often. She was humming
with excitement, just out of college and doing a job she was passionate about. Jennifer
had been active in an anti-sexual assault group on her college campus – she eagerly
showed me their youtube video. But her new job wasn’t entirely what she expected. She
pointed to a dozen white, 6-inch binders along a low shelf, each one containing dozens of
pages tracking a title page, email correspondence and sign in sheet for the hundreds of
presentations each. Her predecessors had “let the paperwork slide” before she left and
now Jennifer had to clean up the mess. She hoped to be better organized and planned to
go through and make sure they have the sign-in sheet for every presentation. A few
months later, Jennifer asked if I could help enter post-surveys into a survey monkey form
for her grant, she was buried in paperwork and had to give some up. I came to the office
and she set me up at an old computer. There were nearly 100 total fields to fill in for each
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survey and entering them was mind-numbing work. After nearly three hours, I had
entered 10 of the 600 that need to be done.
A few weeks after that, on a Monday, I met Jennifer at an East Los Angeles
school for a day-long string of programming. She came charging into the class at 8am, 15
minutes late, towing her plastic cart of handouts. She had printer trouble, making copies
of certificates for a graduation that night. And then there was traffic. As she began to
introduce herself, her weariness and resignation spilled through her set smile. After that
session and before the next, she explained that she had that “whatever feeling,” and
couldn’t quite summon the energy to push the interactions towards fun and educational
and real. It is helpful to have someone else there to fend off boredom she says. Jonathan
had told her when she first came on that presentations could get boring and she had been
surprised, thinking that "this is what we do, this is what we love" but now she realized
that he was right, that she easily goes on “autopilot,” that she just sort of does the
presentation without the feeling. She hands out the sign in sheets, and when the students
ask what they are for, Jennifer explains that they are “what she needs to get paid.” In a
busy week, implementers may interact with over 100 youth. In a year it can be thousands.
Beneath all these numbers, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the job of a violence
implementer is to explain the legal and moral edges of one of the most terrifying and
puzzling of human experiences to a brimming classroom of teenagers.
As her idealized narrative faded, Jennifer came to describe her work more like a
retail worker and less like an activist or entrepreneur. When I asked how much income
she made, her answer showed the chasm between her experience of the work and the
wider system that engulfed her.
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I know that my grant is, I want to say 120,000. I make about 33 and that's before
taxes. I don't try to make the math work in my head. But then like our funder, I
only interact with her every year when we do reports. We do the annual report in
November and then send it out, it is pretty extensive…I think that was a 48 page
report or something around there. Because I have about seven goals and about
three objectives in each of those goals. It's a lot of work…Anyhoo, but it was
really cool actually. Nancy, her name's Nancy – I’m going to forget her last name
right now – she sent back an email giving us props basically, that was really cool.
She was like, "Very nice work. Well done. Look forward to seeing more," kind of
thing. That was really nice and affirming. That's pretty much it as far as I know
for funding.”
While Jennifer struggled to sound excited to receive kudos from Nancy, it was clear that
she felt far away from the funding and its administration. Several other implementers
knew little or nothing about the grant that provided their funding. Sarah said that she
“didn't even have a copy of the grant I was funded with.” Most implementers, most of the
time, were worn down and frustrated by the long hours, low pay (every implementer I
asked made less than $40,000 per year) and the repetition of facilitation. On the ground,
working for the Nonprofit Industrial Complex was alienating. The last time I saw
Jennifer, she was exhausted and saw no end in sight. She was doing better at self-care,
she said. But there’s “a lot, always a lot.”

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Fractured Schools
A few blocks East of the metro office is the World School, one of a half dozen high
schools where POV has had a long-running youth program. Like POV, the school has
metal gates and thick glass, but without the bright design it provides an aura of heavy
fortification. The only way in is through the office, where after filling in a row on the
crowded sign in clip-board listing your name, affiliation and time in, you receive a neon
yellow badge proclaiming “VISITOR.” Once inside, a dark hall opens out to an open air
concrete box, nearly always teeming with hundreds of teenagers. Technically, the
program is at a school within the school, a byproduct of LAUSD’s attempts to make
money by leasing chunks of the public education system.
Schools are central institutions in society. They are where young people spend
nearly half their waking time. They shape communities and train the future workforce.
We like to think of them as the place where young people learn the basic rules of
citizenship. In LAUSD, that is certainly true, although not in the rosy way many might
hope. With a drop out rate hovering near 50% and rampant disciplinary over reach,
disproportionately enacted on young men of color, LAUSD provides a window for many
young people into the criminal justice system and hyper-policing.
There is a widely recognized schooling crisis in Los Angeles, which has been met
largely with calls to break apart the bureaucracy and hierarchy of school districts and to
promote testing and competition as a way towards better schools and students. For POV,
this has aligned with changes to the way schools approach violence prevention. Just ten
years ago for their annual youth sexual assault awareness day POV held a massive rally.
School rules always seemed to get in the way. Students had class or afterschool activities,
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the buses wouldn’t take them to the rally, the site had to be secured. Now, as one
organizer explained they are able to hold the events in schools. This approach is, as he
describes it, much “more guerilla” and “empowering.” That the legitimacy that has come
with the institutionalization of feminism has opened up schools and community centers,
strapped for resources, to feminist messages has been a huge boon for POV, not only
allowing them to reach significantly more young people, but to do so within the
institutions which shape their worlds.
In fact, nearly all prevention programming takes place within larger institutions -
schools, community centers, juvenile courts, police departments. When viewed from the
perspective of the movement, this is incredible. However, I want to suggest a second lens,
one that provides a much more complicated and troubling picture, that of governance.
That is to say, violence prevention represents the extension of a form of governance into
the daily lives of youth. And not all youth, but in particular, young men and women from
marginalized communities, often Black and Latino, based on their alignment with broad
“at-risk” populations.
Schools, in sociological theory, have been considered one of several types of “total
institutions” that surround and shape individuals: “forcing houses for changing persons.”
However, one would be hard pressed to see the World School as anything so tightly
controlled or cohesive. Budget cuts have slashed many of the music and art programs and
in order to meet state and federal requirements, the emphasis is increasingly on test
materials. Teachers have large class sizes. Many of the school periods are free periods or
study halls, with nothing scheduled. As economic forces have gutted the welfare state,
schools have been dismantled and sold off and many of their institutional functions have
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been filled by outsourced to program implementers. However, this is not to say that the
effects are not cumulatively impactful. Whether or not this is a formation that allows
greater gaps for freedom to flourish or an all-encompassing ever-present society as
forcing-house is an open question at this point.
POV is one of several organizations that have rushed in to fill gaps in schools. One
student talked about what used to be a single school but is now three: “It’s CHAS, which
is a Community Health Advocacy School. RISE, the entrepreneurship school, and C-Tex
is about game designing. So I’m in CHAS, and so my teacher, my advisory teacher, she,
she told us to, you know, get involved since we’re health advocates and she even guided
us through some surveys and she said computer survey and about POV and you know,
you see how it goes. And so, I was like the only one who thoroughly finished it and I
first began in BHC with, over at the YMCA.” This may. Seem like a win-win in many
ways: schools get free programming, which often carries with it productive messages
about social issues, violence being one of the central concerns. For the nonprofits, like
POV, it provides incredible access to students that may have never otherwise heard those
messages along with clear deliverables for funders. And for feminists, and social justice
messengers more broadly, it is an opportunity to bring a critical analysis into the heart of
the beast. And, ideally, as outside organizations, these nonprofits lack the allegiances and
internal pressures that often shape internal programming.
However, the breaking up and selling off of pieces of school is not without
consequences. Teachers are often shuffled between schools and pink-slipped and have
little lasting connection with students or administrators. Outsiders are under-trained,
short-term, and uninvested in the individuals, while pulled by conflicting institutional
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mandates, tons of paperwork and vague positions. And, from the school’s side, they are
less invested in the program. Jose saw the problem with all this as one of bureaucracy:
What really gets in the way, I mean, when I get down to the gritty-nitty, the actual
process itself. So here we have probation, we have a federal grant, the high school's
on board, probation's on board, POV's on board. But I feel like when I go to the
schools, schools don't know nothing about the grant. When I go talk to probation,
probation doesn't even know that the feds, or the federal wrote a grant so that they
can use to further educate the youth. So it's not about an office issue, it's not about
paperwork issue. It's not, I do feel, though, that it's like a bureaucracy. I do feel like
if those people in power who have titles of directors, and I don't think that they're
really there for the hearts and minds of the youth. There's just there to, hey, I think,
I honestly I think that they're there to collect a check, do their job, go home, and
then say, "Hey, I'm this part of my job, and that's it." So that's the problem here:
Bureaucracy.
While Jose frames the problem as bureaucracy, what he describes looks more like the
problems of a system of marketized programming in under-resourced places. It isn’t
surprising that workers on the ground lose track of the programs. It takes an incredible
amount of coordination on the nonprofit side - emails, phone calls, campus maps, class
schedules, grant details, and paperwork to get one implementer to a specific class.
Implementers need to know what the room is equipped with, the age and size of the class,
what they have been learning and more. And for employees of POV this is their job, for
school staff, this is often an extra task they have taken on.

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Implementation as Performance
Grant contracts and evaluations paint a straightforward picture of what prevention
should look like: consistent, uniform and reproducible with a “high degree of fidelity.”
However, I only saw sessions facilitated “down the line” this way on two occasions.
Once, by a first time volunteer, who was nervous and overwhelmed and ran through the
session while the audience talked amongst themselves. The other time, a relatively new
implementer became frustrated with the class for acting out and, under the threat of laps
from their gym teacher, had the students sit quietly through the entire unit. Because
authority in the violence prevention field is largely dispersed and distant, implementers
have a large degree of autonomy in how they do their work. This parallels what we know
about the representatives of state institutions, “street-level bureaucrats,” such as welfare
caseworkers or postal workers, who give out services and make decisions that shape how
citizens make sense of state bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980). Whether citizens see the state
as helpful, coldly rational, incompetent, or malevolent depends largely on their
experiences with street-level bureaucrats. Similarly, implementers regularly represent the
forces of a marketized field of nonprofits and the goal of changing social norms, to their
audiences, and so we might consider them street-level neoliberals.
In this section, I theorize implementation as a form of performance at the overlap of
the program market and social justice. First, I explore the informal lessons that
implementers provide each other about performance through training. Second, I discuss
how the raced, classed, and gendered social location of implementers constrains and
enables their performance.

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Train the Trainers
What exactly it means to change culture as your job isn’t obvious. In fact, it takes
extensive training to learn how to change culture the right way. This message is sent
through the ritualization of training itself. Eleanor, who first became involved with POV
as a youth and now works as an implementer, explained that everyone in the prevention
department is working on "different projects which require different outcomes, but the
curriculums make up the core values" of the organization. During the course of my
participant observation, it seemed that more than the curriculum, it was the pedagogical
approach implied in curricula that organized the prevention work at POV. In this way, the
training at POV was actually training for a specific kind of performance, on that was
meant to thread the needle between meeting the requirements of the funders and the
social justice goals of the implementers.
In my time at Peace Over Violence, there were trainings for the eight prevention
programs they implemented, as well as a dozen organizational trainings for new
initiatives, dozens of conferences with training components and at least 50 optional
webinars. POV also operated their own training for volunteer hotline workers and
violence prevention specialists, which every prevention employee had to go through.
Over the course of 4 years, they trained over 200 volunteers.
While training was a vital part of every organization I have come across, for some
it took on the distinctly advertising tinged language of a product. The flyer for a training
from a prominent organization exclaimed: “Tuition is $500 per person. This fee includes
a full copy of the curriculum, certificate of completion, and continental breakfast each
day.” And at the end of the flyer: “Space is limited, so please act now!” Not all programs
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used the language of marketing, but they all treated training as a crucial way to extend
their programmatic outlook to wider audiences and to establish a larger piece of the
market share. Training served several practical purposes. It allowed the organization to
collect a modest fee for the training, $60. It prepared a pool of unskilled, inexperienced
volunteers to fulfill the demand that paid staff cannot. It provided a form of institutional
memory in the face of high employee turnover. It taught implementers practical
requirements of the parade of temporary programs. The credentialing component
restricted who is able to use the curriculum and maintained a market for what is
essentially a collection of text exercises. All of these were byproducts of the marketized
grant model.
While the content of trainings varied across programs and organizations, I found
that all trainings contained ritualized cultural forms, which made sense of institutional
pressures of the program market (Watkins & Swindler, 2013). In order to show how
training contained lessons not only for changing culture, but for dealing with the
particular social location of implementers, I examine in detail the 8-week training course
for violence prevention volunteers at POV. In the course of the training, I argue,
implementers learn five lessons.
First, trainees learn to bring together strangers within institutions, for temporary,
often-vague reasons. Nearly every training began with the facilitator energetically
shouting something along the lines of “Lets start with an icebreaker!” Icebreakers ranged
from the involved, such as playing two truths and a lie or discussions of participants’
greatest fears, to the mundane, such as favorite ice cream flavors. Program work is, by
definition, a short-term approach to deep issues. It involves working with various
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audiences for one hour at a time over the course of up to 12 weeks. Trainers often
emphasized how programs could have deeply emotional impacts on implementers, even
in their short timeframe. At one graduation, the trainer explained that the trainees will
remember each other forever and will stay friends. This didn’t happen. There was talk of
getting together, of moonlight hikes and barbecues. Ice-breakers and other techniques for
quick-connection helped promote the loose and shallow connections necessary for
training.
Second, training provided implementers with practice converting everyday
language and experience into the prescribed discourse of the prevention program.
Trainees were often taught to sort ideas into diagrams in the shape of wheels, trees, and
pyramids. The form of expertise enacted by implementers it is as an expert on providing
formalized language for personal experiences. At the same time, trainees learn that this
expertise is fraught. For example, one trainer wrote IPV on the board as he was giving a
lesson and then asked the other trainer: “what is that inter personal violence?" Even
though he clearly knew that yes, it IPV is an acronym for inter personal violence, by
asking out loud he drew attention to the process of formalization. He went on to say, "If
you are in grad school and want to impress someone, say IPV, but kids will fall
asleep." It was common for trainers to both teach a lesson and to draw attention to how
the lesson is flawed.
Third, trainees learned to apply the lessons of the training to everyday life. In the
violence prevention trainings, trainees learned to live in a constant “before” of violence:
As one trainer explained, “I wish I could turn it off when I’m listening to music or
watching TV…I wish I could turn it off. Like in my house, like if I hear a woman
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scream…I wish I could turn it off when I’m talking to my friends because I’m sure they
would appreciate that. This is just the way I look at things at this point.” Many of the
implementers, cutting themselves off, say "peace over violence" as a way to diffuse their
own potentially pre-violence language. In all of these instances, the words are not
explicitly about violence, but about something that triggers a domino in the lead up to
violence. During a training session, when Natalie joked about another trainee’s recent
vacation, “you went to Barcelona, I hate you,” Julia jumped in "Peace over violence!" In
another example, a trainer exclaimed at her candy ring lollipop: "Pinky ring, that's
Gangsta” and then quickly, as if realizing that saying “gangsta” was perhaps violent, she
tacked on “peace over violence!"
Fourth, trainees learned to enact forms of casual authority so that they could
“steer” the conversation without relying on disciplinary or authoritative actions, which
they rarely had access to as outsiders in other institutions. Being able to manage
audiences, without telling them explicitly what to do is a central challenge for many
organizations in a post-welfare context. For organizations with empowerment goals, such
as Peace Over Violence, forms of authority were consistently undermined. The "group
agreement" which we had to initial and sign, was described as guidelines put together
rather haphazardly and non-binding.
Lastly, training creates a system of meaning-making that runs parallel to and often
collides with meaning made from formal evidence. Despite the heavy institutional focus
on gathering evidence, training teaches trainees to stress personal connection. A couple
sessions into a 50-hour training, Amy stressed to a room full of volunteers, in her matter-
of-fact lilt, that they shouldn’t put too much weight on their prevention work, they
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weren’t going to change the system, and simultaneously, to let go of the idea that we will
go in and save everyone, "It's not Stand and Deliver, it's not our job." A woman trainee,
bothered by this narrow interpretation asked, “if our goal isn't individual and it isn't huge,
then what should we be going for?” Amy responded that the goal of prevention is to
promote "a sense of agency." This is, read one way, a powerful endorsement of the
capacity for prevention to change the way people see themselves in the world. But read
another, perhaps more cynical way, it shows the failings of prevention as a paper-thin
discourse over systemic inequality, a sense of agency, but not the real thing. This
description by Amy is a fitting illustration of the bind that implementers find themselves
in and of the creative ways they navigate the tensions of their work.
Today, many social problems are not met with policy changes or movements, but
rather, with training and programs. On the ground, training is paradoxical and fraught
with contradictions. A friend recounted how at one conference presentation, the presenter
talked about Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, a radical education theorist that
argued that education operated as a tool of the powerful to reproduce inequality, on a
powerpoint slide with two institutional brands on it. These ritualized aspects of training
provided more than just formal practices, it provided skills and meanings that enables
implementers to navigate and make sense of their often conflicting goals.

Intersectionality and Performance
Despite the program-framework, implementers walk through the door with bodies
and histories inflected by race, class, gender and sexuality. Implementers were aware that
they were going to be perceived differently, but they also knew that their representations
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afforded them some leeway in how they performed intersectionality. Race, gender and
age were the most salient aspects, and wrapped up in those were class and gender. As
Eleanor put it, “just based on how we look or how we talk or how we act… like they’re
definitely going to look at Mia differently than they see us or Rob, like they all thought
Rob, like Rob would walk in, oh, that guy’s a cop or whatever, right.” Eleanor, a 20-
something white female pointed out how Mia, a 30-something Latina woman with
angular black hair and Rob, a jujitsu loving middle aged man with bright white hair and a
beard were read differently by most youth. Implementers worked to navigate the
intersections of how youth made sense of them, with their own performance.
About halfway through a presentation to a small, multi-racial charter school in
Western Los Angeles, I stepped up to run a short exercise. As I stood up, one student
shouted out "oh good, an expert." I was quick to say "no, I'm not an expert," and Sarah
jumped in to say "none of us are experts" the young man, catching on in a way says
"we're all experts." Sarah responded, "yes, we're all experts" while Janet nodded. Sarah
and Janet were far more experienced and skilled implementers, but as was often the case,
they were perceived as less knowledgeable because they were women.
In another example, early on in Jennifer’s time working, she was dismayed that a
group of students hadn’t understood the lesson on sexual assault, so she gave a
painstaking, detailed breakdown of sexual assault, through concept after concept; digital
penetration, forced copulation, anal sex, oral sex, etc. Some students began to have side
conversations and others began to fidget in their seats. Jennifer made small shh noises
every few seconds as she wrote on the board, dedicated to completing the lesson. This
form of implementation, which prioritized audiences learning the concepts and ideas
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expressed in the program, was common among less experienced implementers or when
deadlines or evaluations came due. They did this by repeating ideas, quizzing youth,
reminding them and doing more educational focused exercises. This was the closest to
the formal curriculum that implementers got, but it still required a great deal of skill to
identify and work through pedagogical challenges.
When I interviewed Jennifer months later, she talked about how her style had
changed:
For me, because I'm perceived as this young white girl, sometimes I can ... I feel
they may not take me seriously and this is just might be my own assumptions or
fears or whatever. But if I'm walking into a group of youth who are, we have
black students, latino and a whole mix ... I'm just ... this happy white girl it's like,
"What the fuck do you have to say to us?" I didn't think that would be an issue
until I was actually in front of them and I'm like, "Wow, okay." This isn't as
comfortable. Now I was kind of learned more about what we do it just makes
more aware of it…I’ll try to acknowledge, 'Okay I'm white,' without ... I don't
want them to think that that's weird too. It's kind of finding what's comfortable in
that classroom.
Jennifer went on to explain that she used the song “Love the way You Lie,” to “make it
informative and fun. Part of why it’s fun is because I’ll stand up there and rap to them
and they think it’s hilarious to see me rap. So then that kind of hooks them and then I can
get them like to talk about it.”
Young women however, faced another challenge, as they were at times viewed as
sexual objects and even asked out. Kali explained
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They are trying to figure out if they can hit on me or if they can't hit on me, how
old is she, and I have had some young men tell me, "Dam miss, I didn't know you
were 27, you look like you are 20 or 22" and I am like, "Oh, more than that." So,
once they find out my age, then they step back and their attitude or performance
around me changes. Sometimes I have had that happen but especially when I was
younger, was there definitely boundaries that were crossed by young men."
Constantly. I remember one time this young man asked me, he said, "Miss, do
you have a boyfriend." I said, "No." He said, "Are you married." I said,
"No." "Do you have any kids." "No." He said, "What's wrong with you?" and I
said, "Nothing."
Students were often curious about the personal lives of implementers. Jonathan
explained, “I mean, the first thing I do is always talk about myself so they can understand
my background. And when I let them know about what I used to do and what I do now –
they could tell me, like, you don’t know what you’re talking about and I go up to them
and tell them well, I was in this position, I know what I’m saying, you know.” I often saw
Jonathan describe how he didn’t used to be a good person, "I've done bad things, all the
people in this job have bad pasts. Back then I wasn't a good guy." In contrast, Jennifer
and other women dodged personal questions.
An implicit heterosexuality ran through most of the programming and was often
reinforced by conversations about personal lives and relationships. One 9
th
grade boy
called me "homie Max with the Jesus beard.” This male bonding however, can mask
deeper tensions. The same 9
th
grader wrote on his survey that the program was a waste of
time, that this didn't happen at the school and that we were “stupid sad single men.” Men
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often reinscribed their masculinity in order to avoid the stigma that could be associated
with talking about gender, healthy relationships and feminism. One man brought a
football to his presentations. Another referenced his military service. Another his martial
arts skill.
Sean, a 30-something African American man that came up in the business world,
often talked about violence as something done equally by men and women. When I asked
Sean about his presentation style, he explained:
I think what I try to portray is I am the presenter. I do have a level of credibility,
validity, authority to a certain degree, but I am no better than you…I make sure
that we are here to learn so I guess my performance is let’s be the suave professor.
If that is anything, you know what I mean?… I am not here to be Mr. Enforcer of
the law. Because hell I think. The laws I broke. Certain laws are made to be
broken. But it is still I don’t know why, but I always come back to feel. You can
feel the room. You can feel certain students where they are at. How do I bring
demand? I am losing them. It is really a mess. I am just trying to dance with
them.”
Rob, tall and broad, white and in his 40s with short white hair was often mistaken for a
cop and worked hard to counter that perception. He had to do more work to connect with
the young people. He picked up some “cred” by describing his hardscrabble youth and
experiences with violence. “I grew up in a bad part of town, but then no one had
guns.” The dynamic between Rob and JJ, who is young and Black has a rhythm; Rob
cracks bad jokes, and JJ says “only you Rob.” On a few occasions, Rob called groups of
Black and Latino students “brothers” and got chuckles and sometimes eye rolls for it. At
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one point, a light-skinned African American student talked about how girls used to
mistake him for white and called him sugar cookie, a name that Rob quickly adopts as his
own. White implementers had to think critically about their own positionality. One
teacher, an East Asian woman, explained some of the issues that came up in her class:
I think, on the surface, it looks like we don’t need white people telling us to not be
violent. There’s a real analysis and understanding of its racist and easy for white
people to tell people of color what to do. I think, on deeper levels, it’s very, very
meaningful for people to get to see people from their own community, people
from their own demographic, that can really speak with confidence and
experience about the validity of saying that we can position peace over violence.
Unfortunately, I think racism in our society just sets that up so that message is just
not as legitimate when it’s coming from white people….This one guy, he was
basically like, “I’m not coming to your class. I’m not being lectured out by a
bunch of white people about what I should do in life.” That’s the most explicit.
Then there’s the gradations in the middle that are people that have learned to
listen and look like they’re paying attention but there’s the block to actually
taking it in…in some ways, it’s discouraging for young people to see people
outside of their community being the ones that bring this message because it feels
like, “Oh man, it’s just another example of how the good life isn’t for me.
“Telling me about my life” was a central concern, not just among white implementers.
All implementers walked a line, to varying degrees, which they were put on by the
behavioral curricula. Sometimes implementers drew on the survivor and counseling roots
of the organization and engaged in honest conversations about youth’s lived experiences
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and relationship troubles. This entailed a lot of asking young people about their lives.
And while this was very engaging, it meant less of the curriculum was covered. It also
opened up implementers to being derailed by student disclosures and questions. Other
times, implementers spoke from their experience and put it in shared structural contexts
of race, class and gender. For young women and men of color, this was often easier than
it was for older and white men and women, who at times struggled to connect. Because
intersectionality and representations were not part of formal training, these skills were
largely individualized and were shared through informal conversations.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have shown how program implementers are constrained and
enabled by the system of marketized nonprofit programs. In the first half of the chapter, I
mapped the structure of the program market and showed how it is distinct from other
structures for dealing with social problems as it governs at a distance and is situated
within other institutions. In the second half of the chapter, I showed the program market
from the perspective of implementers, situated in the liminal space between distant
funders and audiences. Implementation, I argue, required a performance, largely learned
informally, that accomplishes both the goals of the program market and maintains a
commitment to social justice. As I show in the next chapter, a parallel set of institutional
mechanisms construct at-risk youth as the audience for change programs.

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CHAPTER 4: WHAT IS AN AT-RISK YOUTH?

Max: Have you ever heard the phrase “at-risk”?
Hendrix: At-risk? Yeah.
Max: Yeah, what does it mean? Where have you heard it?
Hendrix: I mean, I haven’t heard it a lot, but I know what it means.
Max: What does it mean?
Hendrix: It means, like, something that’s, like, you’re walking on eggshells
pretty much.
Max: Do you feel like you know people who are at-risk?
Hendrix: At risk of -- of just period?
Max: Of anything. Yeah.
Hendrix: Yeah.
Max: How about at risk of violence?
Hendrix: At risk of violence, no.
Max: No, okay.
Hendrix: I don’t know a lot of people. I mean, I know a lot of gang
members. That’s, like, violence right?

By formal and informal measures commonly used in the professional anti-violence
field, Hendrix himself was “at-risk.” Latino, with an easygoing demeanor, he was 16
years old when we talked in an empty classroom at his high school. He had been kicked
out of three schools, and often spent weeks taking care of himself while his father worked
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as a long-haul trucker. The current school Hendrix attended was in a rundown storefront
on Crenshaw Boulevard, in a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood in South
Los Angeles. Many of the students at the school were on probation or in foster care and
had been pushed-out of other schools: some students called it a “last-chance” school. I
expected that of all the youth I talked to, the ones there would have picked up on the at-
risk discourse that swirled around them, but most had not, and those that did shared
Hendrix’s confusion. This was also true of the academically successful youth leaders that
Peace Over Violence recruited into their programs from schools across Los Angeles.
Not only was the at-risk discourse absent from youth’s daily lives, but their lives
were so embedded in “risk factors” that the label didn’t make much sense. Another
student at the school, Angel, a 19 year old Latino youth with deep-set eyes and level-
voice, explained how he saw his life compared with other people his age: “I think it’s
normal, the same thing [as] like every 19-year-old, like certain things we go through, like,
uneducated, a lot of 19-year-olds are like that. Not being employed. Like having, like
rough things at your house. Things like that.” Angel is partly right. Los Angeles has a
low graduation rate, just 67% (LAUSD, 2014), and according to a study by the Brookings
Institute, one of the lowest rates of teen employment in the country, 16.7% (2014). But
these troubles aren’t about age; they are about the social context.
Several times, when I asked youth where they saw unhealthy or violent behavior,
the answer was simply “everywhere.” Gigi, who at 25 was the oldest youth participant I
interviewed, was part of a performance-based anti-violence program at a performing arts
studio. We talked in the break room of the dance studio where the group was practicing
for an upcoming performance. “A lot of the warning signs that one would never think or
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one is so used to, such as, you know, fighting all the time for example, in my community
are a normality, so to [learn] that that’s a warning sign for me was, well, I hear that all the
time.” She continued: “You hear ambulances, police, your typical city. So, there have
been calls on domestic violence maybe two houses down from me. A child was abused in
the house diagonal to mine. There was a juvenile delinquent who actually was a friend of
my brother’s when we were young. He grew up with the wrong crowd.” Like Gigi, most
of the youth I talked to described the violence that surrounded them not as risk factors,
but as everyday facts of life.
It isn’t surprising that Gigi, Hendrix and Angel didn’t see themselves as at-risk.
Their lives seemed similar to most of the young people around them and no adults in their
lives used the term. However, this label did have consequences, just ones that were
largely obscured from their view, as it functioned as one part of a system for organizing
resources and bodies. Several scholars have discussed the at-risk discourse as an
extension of criminalization (see for example, Ferguson, 2001; Rios, 2011). However, I
argue that, while it connects up with systems of school discipline and hyper policing, it is
a distinct system of nonprofits, funders and service agencies, which constructs labels and
sorts young people into them in a distinct way that is largely defined against the criminal
justice system. I refer to this system as the at-risk complex, a loosely-connected, grant-
funded matrix of schools and nonprofits that seeks to intervene into the lives of youth
before things go bad and they end up arrested, violent, hurt, homeless, or gang-involved.
Specifically, I spent time in programs which sought to prevent relationship violence, but
because at-risk functions as a vague label, these youth were often seen as at-risk across
the board. In this chapter, I show how the at-risk complex works on the ground and begin
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to sketch the outlines of an alternative. First, I show how risk data is made and I use
interviews with youth that share risk factors to illustrate the variety and embeddedness of
risk factors within lived experience. Next, I explore how risk factors are applied on the
ground to construct a status group of at-risk youth. I conclude the chapter by showing
five patterns in the lives of “at-risk youth” that are obscured by a risk factor approach.

Risk Data
The foundation of the at-risk complex is population-level data. Because the amount
of risk data produced around youth is mind-boggling, it helps to focus on one aspect of
this. Data on gender-based youth violence is recorded through a range of what are called
in public health “surveillance systems,” including the National Violence Against Women
Survey, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), and the
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. This data is collected in two main ways: First,
record-based data, which is the data from systems within the cities such as police,
emergency rooms and rape crisis centers. Record-based data provides easy comparisons
across geographic areas and demographic characteristics, but doesn’t help much to define
the causes of a problem. Second, is population-based survey data, which collects
information directly from a sample of individuals through questionnaires and surveys.
This survey data is helpful to compare self-reports of violence against the rates reported
by police. Survey data also allows for analysis to connect experiences of violence to
everyday attitudes and behaviors (Armstrong 1995; Crawford 1980). This data is then
extrapolated to determine “risk factors” for specific measurable concerns, such as teen
dating violence.
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Like all data, surveillance system research on gender-based violence is socially
constructed, and therefore, epistemic, organizational, economic, and political factors are
“woven into their construction.” Further, sociologists have shown how “[c]lassifications
implicit in statistical systems are not mere mirrors of social reality but are performative in
the sense that they invent and transform collectivities and social reality…These have
effects on how people conceive of themselves and others.” (p 468, De Santos 2009; see
also: Meehan 2000; Abeysinghe 2013; Foucault 1991; Hacking 1990). In other words,
statistical data takes the messy, subjective, confusing mass of human lives - events that
were full of meaning: fear or hope, trauma or joy, thrilling or boring – and converts them
into data points. Then, it takes hundreds or thousands or millions of those points and,
stripped of their meaning and removed from the institutional and cultural context in
which they occurred, looks for connections between them. This process of
decontextualization, at least the way it works today, often strips out race and class. Take
for example, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, which examined the
long-term impacts of twelve types of childhood trauma, including abuse, sexual assault,
death of a parent and parental drug abuse. The ACEs study found that the more ACEs
you have, the worse your mental and physical health as an adult. This has focused
attention on communities with high rates of trauma, and often sent needed resources to
them. At the same time, the study participants were 75% white and 5% black; 40% were
college educated and most were middle class. When the experiences of the few are used
to make sense of risks to diverse and differently located groups, what do we lose in the
process?

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Survey data are, in a sense, a map of the past. For example, the National Intimate
Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), asks a random sample a survey to assess
whether or not respondents had experienced various forms of intimate partner or sexual
violence. This survey is helpful for gauging the gap between reports made to police and
people’s experiences. However, to use NISVS to designate people at risk, one must
operationalize those experiences, to turn them into possible futures. The conversion from
historical data point into risk factor for the future is subtle but powerful. The past is
aggregated and spun through a statistical program and the future comes out the other end.
One survey of high school seniors is literally called “Monitoring the Future.” By
displacing real experiences into the future, risk data not only erases problems that exist
today, it also tends to ignore current institutional and social contexts. This isn’t to say that
risk factors are incorrect, just narrowly defined. A young person who witnesses parental
aggression is more likely to be violent than one who didn’t. However, without
understanding the institutional context in which this occurs and the social mechanisms
that convert experience into action, interventions are limited.
In the paragraph above I mentioned that the young person who witnessed violence
is more likely to reproduce it than the kid who did not. Risk data is a fundamentally
comparative approach. As sociologists have pointed out, asking “how different” groups
are serves to construct categories and implicitly frames the comparison as a competition.
In this case, groups at “increased risk” are seen as at-risk, while baseline "normal" groups
are not, a distinction that likely has consequences on the ground in terms of both identity
and resource allocation (Silver & Miller, 2002; Riele, 2006). These processes of
decontextualization, future displacement and comparison strip out vital components of
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youths’ lived experiences: in particular, race, class and institutions.

Statistical Lives
In 1983, when statistics on domestic violence and sexual assault were just
beginning to enter mainstream conversations, feminist activist Andrea Dworkin talked
about what those numbers meant in personal terms (2005):
We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that
those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say,
"Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them
up another way." That's true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one
by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me.
Over thirty years later, Dworkin’s words require revisiting. In his assessment of the
“paradoxes of prevention” which have prevented a widespread adoption of the public
health model, Harvey Fineberg, former head of the Institutes of Medicine, worried that
the “statistical lives” produced by public health data were too far removed from “personal
stories” (2013). Fineberg doesn’t define the term, but as I looked through dozens of
surveys and curricula and reports, I came to develop my own definition: statistical lives
are the accumulation of risk and protective factors, fact sheets, grants, curricula,
powerpoint presentations and other formalized discourses that abstract lived experience
into numbers. I have come to believe that increasingly, we all live two lives, a statistical
life and our daily lives. And while our daily lives produce our statistical lives, policy is
shaped with our statistical lives in mind.

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The CDC highlights eight risk factors for teen dating violence, whether youth:
Believe that dating violence is acceptable; Are depressed, anxious, or have other
symptoms of trauma; Display aggression towards peers or display other aggressive
behaviors; Use drugs or illegal substances; Engage in early sexual activity and have
multiple sexual partners; Have a friend involved in dating violence; Have conflicts with a
partner; Witness or experience violence in the home.
4
In the course of my interviews, I
heard all of these risk factors for teen dating violence from youth multiple times. To me,
these sounded like common experiences of youth across racial and cultural lines. Several
used marijuana or drank recreationally. Many engaged in sexual activity. Nearly all had
friends and loved ones involved in what would qualify as dating violence, although they
didn’t always see it that way. And those who had partners, sometimes got into heated
arguments. Others, although not many, talked about situations in which they believed it
would be okay to yell at or play fight with a partner.
In this section, I explore how young people experienced the “making” of risk
factors in the course of their lives. I focus on three factors that clearly align with
commonly held ways of thinking about how risks work: witnessing violence in the home,
showing signs of trauma, and displaying aggression. When viewed as part of a narrative,
it is clear that risk factors alone provide almost no grounds for understanding the lives of
young people. Instead, we can see, when we talk to youth about their experiences with
violence, how they are deeply imbedded in systems of meaning making and identity.

4
In a review of the research, Vagi, Latzman & Hall found 53 risk factors for teen dating violence across 20
studies (2013).
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“Witness or experience violence in the home”
Sky, a 27 year old who identified as “Mexican and Honduran” viewed her parents’
constant fighting as inseparable from the love they felt for each other:
My parents, they’re goofy. I see the love, but it’s just, it’s because it’s in their
character, too. My mom’s like the, “Oh my God, do this, do that!” My dad’s just
laid back like, “You know woman, leave me alone.” And that results in fighting.
Like yesterday, my mom was like, “Man, these people don’t cooperate.” She was
referring to my dad. And so, although she’s been going, or they’ve been arguing
for the past 15 years, I know the love is there, or else one of them would have left
already. And then, my dad’s like, “I want to leave, but I don’t want to leave
because you guys are here.” And it’s like, “Oh, well, put up with it then,” just
cooperate like my mom says. You know, do what you know you have to do.”
Sky didn’t like that her parents fought, but ultimately decided it was okay in the context
of what she saw as love. Misty, a 17-year-old Bangladeshi youth, on the other hand
recognized her aunt was in a destructive pattern and tried to intervene:
They actually go through the whole cycle [of violence]: the honeymoon, the
tension, and then the abuse. It’s not physical abuse, but at times it gets so bad
there. It’s actually both of them trying to put the other one down, and then at
times my aunt, she just gets so down and then one time she tried to kill herself. I
don’t know what my uncle said or anything, but we all tried to tell her to just
leave him, but then they got back into the honeymoon again. And, I don’t know, I
just feel so helpless in that place. And then I tried to talk with them and they were
like, “Oh, you’re so young you don’t know anything. You shouldn’t even be
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getting into the whole conversation.” And they were also like, “Oh, it’s not your
life, it’s my life and I can live it the way I want to.”
Fighting between adult family members was extremely common among the youth in this
study, but it took a wide range of forms, from arguments, to physical violence. All of the
youth I talked to about adults’ violence grappled to make sense of it and many had tried
to intervene. A large number of the youth I interviewed talked about witnessing fighting
in their home. It was rarely clear to them or me whether or not this fighting could be
considered abusive or violent.
Valeria was 18, and counting down the days until graduation when I interviewed
her in the guidance counselor’s office at her high school at the edge of downtown Los
Angeles. Fighting and confrontation were seemingly constant aspects of Valeria’s life.
Her mother was a bartender and “at night sometimes she just hangs out and drinks and
she comes home drunk and stuff.” This was a source of tension between the two of them
while Valeria was growing up:
We would always be fighting. We would always argue about random things in the
house, or about school and the people I would hang out with. So growing up with
her was like a struggle, you know, because I would judge her of the certain things
she did. And she would judge me of the certain things I would do. So that was a
problem, you know. And I never had a father. So that was another issue. I would
always rub it to my mom’s face and tell her like, “Oh, I don’t have a father, so I
don’t have no rights to listen to you,” or stuff like that. So it was kind of harsh.”
Valeria was most critical of her mother’s hypocritical judgment, and seemed less
concerned at her mother’s used physical violence as a form of punishment:
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She used to get the chancla [the sandals] every time I would do something bad or
like [she] used to whoop me when I would do something bad. So I grew up in that
environment. It made me a better person, because I know now I won’t do that to
my kids, unless they’re actually -- like they really deserve it.
Valeria’s relationship to violence at home was clearly very different from that of Misty
and they were both different from Sky’s. To treat these three narratives as cases of the
same type of phenomenon seems to dramatically miss how they are embedded in deeply
emotional relationships, cultural values around family, and economic pressures.

“Are depressed, anxious, or have other symptoms of trauma”
I talked with Flora the day after a group of young people went to see Fruitvale
Station, a film which chronicles the extremely ordinary last day in the life of Oscar Grant,
a young Black man who was shot and killed by a white BART officer in Oakland while
lying on the ground with his hands above his head. When I asked Flora about the movie,
she explained that it struck a chord for her:
I cried a lot because it reminded me of what I went through with my father. It's
not the same problem that happened. But the events, how they happened, that's
why I felt like I was living them again, like oh my god, no, no. And um, just
looking at the baby girl just, being with her father, just having fun and being a kid
with a loving father. And I used to say like, just another one. If my dad died, why
not him? In like, in my opinion, my dad was a good person. And why him? And
ah, but now I was like, with Trayvon Martin too, like I used to say, well maybe he
was doing something. But then they [facilitators] were talking about well, it's a
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kid that lost his life. And I don’t know its just something, I don’t know what it is
but it just made me change so much about the way I think now and my mom is
like oh you know you're perfect now and I'm like no, I'm not perfect. I'm just
trying to change. And I feel like it's so stupid how society is breaking and I feel
like it's so stupid that we have to make like programs to help people instead of
just doing it. It's like, is that really hard?
For Flora, the trauma of her father’s death seemed to be a catalyst not only for empathy,
but for “change.” To treat Flora’s trauma only as a risk, would have ignored something
much more profound.
Hoxton’s story, while still marked by the symptoms of trauma, was very different
from Flora’s. He switched to a downtown school, from another school in the district after
“an absolutely horrible experience…I even got a legitimate rape threat from another
student and I was escorted for the last few days, before I was transferred here.” He
explained that the rape threat came from a “dumb-ass of a guy.” At his new school, a few
students who “think they’re big shots” make fun of Hoxton in PE, but he largely brushed
it off in our interview.
Hoxton’s performance of gender falls outside the norm at the school. When I
interviewed, him he wore a tucked-in pink plaid shirt and had a sweater tied around his
waist. At the beginning of the interview, I asked Hoxton his sexual orientation, which I
asked most interviewees. His response hinted that this may not have been the first time he
was asked:
I'm heterosexual. But…Well, I'm in no way homosexual, but in general with the
amount of things that I do in one day – they're not important, it's just I do some
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things that I just don't get off of [stop doing] – and with the amount of things that
I hope to do one day, [such] as I hope to be a game designer, in my opinion, girls
are just a big waste of time. Again, not gay.
Hoxton enjoyed video games, but first-person “shooters” were his “main thing.” This
worried his mother:
She got a little scared that I was thinking about actually going into military
service and ever since that day I've made a promise that I would never do
something like that as I do not want to risk the chance of going into virtually a
hell on earth that I would be risking my life for and has a chance to make me go
back home in a coffin with my family mourning me. I do not want to take a
chance like that. I do not want to take an opportunity like that. The military force
is not for me and that's why [I play] the games I play, that's why I do what I do
and that's why I've always wanted to try an Airsoft [an air powered rifle]. If I ever
was to buy an actual weapon it would be for self-defense, hidden in let's say a
secret glove compartment I have in my car just in case I ever needed it. But, it
would probably collect dust before I'd ever need it. When it comes to fake
firearms, like the Airsoft weapons that I hope to have, that's the furthest I'll go to
ever shooting an actual person if it wasn't for self defense.
As I listened to Hoxton, I was worried too. While he was doing well in his classes, he
also seemed to be struggling with being bullied. He seemed to, understandably, be giving
a lot of thought to how he might defend himself.
Most of the young people I interviewed had experienced something that could be
considered traumatic. Many had lost loved ones to disease or violence, had family
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members in jail, had witnessed shootings, or had been beaten up. Given these experiences,
the youth I talked to, like most youth, were stunningly resilient (Jain & Cohen, 2013).
These experiences were diverse, but consistently youth tried to understand why the
trauma had happened, and worked to make sense of how they should continue on. For
some, the world seemed uncertain and for others it looked unjust.

“Display aggression towards peers or display other aggressive behaviors”
When I interviewed Joe Moses, a Black youth, he was fifteen years old and
already six feet tall, although he curled himself down to be smaller. He wore three strings
of rosaries around his neck and his arms were dotted with burn marks and scars. We
talked at a picnic table in the courtyard of his South Los Angeles high school, his peers
laughing and talking 20 yards away. The school mascot a hulking muscle-bound Viking
stared down at us from a mural. Maybe it was the other students around or maybe it was
just his manner, but he was calm and a bit shy, speaking with a slight lisp caused by his
lip stud, while he told me about his experiences with police:
Joe: I got arrested in 8
th
grade. The dude was in class, he just kept bothering me,
bothering me. So, he pushed me, and so, I socked him, and then I got arrested.
They said battery assault, and then I was arrested. I got arrested again in 8
th
grade
because this dude in my class, the teacher saw me playing, but she thought we
were fighting. So he -- the kid -- my friend, he was trying to tell his parent that we
weren’t fighting, but they didn’t believe him, so they took me to LP [Los Padrinos
Juvenile] for like two weeks.
I asked Joe why he thought people seemed to worry that he was being violent, and he
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explained that it was because of his size.
Joe: Yeah. Because I'm big, that's why.
Max: How do you feel about that?
Joe: I feel, like, that's unfair, she just thought -- because I was the one that was
-- we were role playing, she thought, just, I'm the big one, I'm the one that was
starting the problem, but he's the one who actually started it, and then we were
just, like, playing, and then she thought it was me, and then she told me to go to
the office. She said if I didn’t go to the office, she was going to call the school
police, so said alright, I’m going to go to the office, and she still called for school
police.
The police cuffed Joe, put him into the police car, took him to the police station, “booked
[him] into the system and then took [him] to Los Padrinos.” I asked Joe what jail was
like:
Joe: It was, like, really, not cool, it was, like, boring in there (laughs). You got
no type of freedom, all you do is go to school for, like, three hours, and then we
go back and then we just, like, watch movies, and then we go to sleep and stuff.
Max: Yeah. Do you feel like it changed the way you felt about what happened?
Joe: Yeah. Basically, my experience in there, if, like, because I've been away
from my family for, like -- away from my home for, like, two weeks, like, nah, I
wouldn’t go back there, like, I do my best to stay out of there, because it's like a
place I don’t want to be at. It's like, a place, my brother, my little cousin, she be
there, it's not a good place to be locked up in. Like, especially, if you're not a
violent person, you shouldn’t be there, it's not a good place. And the staff there
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told me that I shouldn’t have been there, I got in trouble for playing in school,
that's stupid, they shouldn't have arrested me for that.
Joe’s experience mirrors the stories of other young Black and Latino men especially,
those who are big for their age and are treated as adults and violent offenders, instead of
playful teenagers (Rios, 2011).
Crystal, a Latina youth, with multi-color hair and a pin for a sexual assault
awareness campaign called Denim Day on her bag alongside a pin that read, "I'm
picturing you naked" told a very different story about getting in a fight. We talked in a
counselor’s office at the back of the school office suite:
Back in, like middle school, because I was in a crew, like, when people would,
like, I had a low temper before. So, like, if you would, like, even, like, get in my
way, or, like, look at me wrong, I would, like, go off on you. And, like, I got in a
lot of trouble because of that. I guess because I was going through stuff and I
didn't know how to handle it that well, either. So I would, like, just let it go on
people…I had a big fight when I was [in], like, eighth grade, because oh, I had
this one girl, she was talking to me and I was, like, we were fighting, but it was on
top of -- it was, like, it was the stairs, and then, like, I pushed her. I didn't mean to
push her, but she, like, fell down the stairs, and I got -- I got, like, in big trouble
because they, like, the police took me, and, like, I got a ticket for, like, fighting,
and my mom was all, like, in my business, and everything. And then the -- the girl,
I mean, the girl was OK, but they still saw it as, like, I tried to harm her.
The police wrote Crystal a ticket, but her repercussions weren’t as bad as Joe’s: “I had to
go to court, but I just paid it off, like, with money, because I don't want to, I don't want to
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do community service, so I just paid it off.” It is difficult not to see Crystal’s light
punishment and her ability to get out of it by paying the money, as, at least in part, a
byproduct of her gender, race and class. Across risk factors, as we might expect, gender,
along with race and class mattered deeply for how risk factors were defined and how
young people made sense of their experiences.
Risk factors, as a way of making sense of the social worlds of young people of
color in Los Angeles, fail to capture the intersectional meanings and institutional contexts
in which youth live and in fact, can actively erase these forces. This process not only
obscures the social context in which risk factors are lived out and navigated, but it erodes
any sense of urgency by reframing everyday concerns as predictors of future problems.
So far, I have painted a picture of risk factors that may make them seem useless, or worse.
However, in the next section, I show how they did have a use, just not the formal one
meant to mark future danger. Instead, risk factors, on the ground, were used to mark and
sort a large number of youth into change programs.

Marking Risk
Sean, an African American implementer, explained how his supervisor talked about
the youth they work with:
She’s like, “we work with the future victims and the future perpetrators.” For me,
when I heard that the first time, I was like, “Damn, that is so harsh,” but it’s very
true. Because no matter how much education we do, no matter how much we try
to prevail, I understand that education is not solely going to fix everything, that
there’s a lot of other things that need to be in place to make somebody whole and
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healthy and happy … I think because I work in prevention, those labels don’t
exist yet and I’m able to see everybody with the same, if you will, naked eye,
where everyone’s just pretty much across the board same, even though
statistically I know I’m looking at future victims and future perpetrators, but
because they’re not labeled, there’s no discrimination that’s happening across the
board.
Sean’s perspective echoes what I heard from implementers and public health experts
alike – the language of prevention avoids discriminating against and stigmatizing a group
of young people who are already marginalized and criminalized. One teacher, summed up
her opposition to labeling students as at-risk:
I don’t use the term “at risk.” I specifically, politically and emotionally don’t use
it because; let me think of the best way to say this. One of the things that I
remember learning was when I started studying Black English and African
American Language, is that there’s certain aspects of African American language
that don’t allow you to have passive voice construction. It’s not possible to say
that something just happened to someone. You have to say who did it. Part of why
I hate the term “at risk,” is it’s “This set of people were not just magically put at
risk. Don’t act like no one had a hand in this shit.” There’s a way that it’s just so
absolutely distancing and throwing away all responsibility and completely
alienating a set of people that this society feels like it can just say, “Oh that’s ‘at
risk,’” like, “Oh that’s dusty. Dust just happened to settle there.”
Given what we know about the ways that labeling can produce hopelessness or a “deviant
self-concept” or can lead to a cycle of criminalization (Rios, 2011), it is understandable
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that implementers would try to avoid it. As I have shown, implementers succeeded in
keeping youth unaware that they were considered at-risk. But, while at-risk youth are not
informed that they have been labeled, they did experience clear repercussions of that
label. Implementers and school officials figured out which youth were at risk and more
specifically, which would be enrolled in prevention programs.
In this section, I show two mechanisms for marking at-risk youth. The first, is
based on funders and agencies determining that the population of a specific geographic
area possesses comparatively high rates of some assemblage of risk factors. The second
mechanism is based on institutional sorting at multiple tiers as administrators, teachers,
police, and other institutionalized authorities make decisions, often contrasting and
complicated decisions about who ends up in the programs. After that, I discuss how these
two mechanisms collaborate to construct a status group of at-risk youth.

Community-Bounded Grants
During my time at POV, at least half of their eight major prevention grants
required community-bounded programs. In many ways, place was used as a proxy for
race and class, which enabled funders and agencies to say that young people in certain
neighborhoods or school districts are at risk, without having to say that these youth are
disproportionately of color, poor, working class, immigrant, etc., or to frame those
variables as risk factors. Eleanor explained how these grants target specific communities:
“So my grant, I work in Highland Park, which is mostly urban youth. I’d say I work
probably 50/50 boys, girls, really big Hispanic population, also pretty high Asian
population, pretty at risk, just because Highland Park as a community has really big gang
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issues. So a lot of the kids are at risk for some of those things.” The Highland Park grant
is for top-to-bottom training of students, school administrators, parents and police about
teen dating violence. There are good reasons to focus on a whole community instead of
on particular demographic group, namely it sends the message that the problem is a
community-wide cultural issue instead of putting the onus to change on any one group. It
also makes evaluations easier, since schools and police departments already keep track of
community measures. However, community focused grants can mask differences
between and within communities.
Only twice in my three years of participant observation did I witness violence
prevention enacted in one of the middle-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Once
was at a small, environmentally-focused and politically left private nonprofit school near
Culver City where one of the administrators had volunteered at POV. The other time was
at a large and diverse public school in the suburbs north of downtown. I never saw or
heard of programs enacted in an upper-income neighborhood. Put another way, if any of
the youth in this project had been able to move to Beverly Hills, even while he or she
would remain the same person, his or her geography would put them outside the
institutional mechanisms for enrollment. The logic behind this, at first glance, makes
sense. Kim, a program manager at POV explained:
We're trying to provide it to at risk youth, and not to say that kids at Beverly Hills
aren't at risk, because they are at risk for all kinds of things. Money doesn't really
protect you from violence. Our programs are grant funded to support low-income
schools; to provide resources where there aren't resources. They have one
counselor for every 1,000 students at LAUSD now: one thousand students for
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every one counselor. Imagine the types of issues that are bubbling up in these kids
who aren't getting any services. We go to support where there's a need. In Beverly
Hills they can pay for somebody to do some classes.
This makes sense given that POV sees itself as working outside of the state and local
government to remedy the failures of the educational and policing systems in Los
Angeles. However, if we take into account the fact that much of the funding for these
programs comes from state and federal sources, then it is clear that the state is funding
both sides: the schools and the bandaid programs. At the same time, the focus on
programming, implicitly and at times explicitly frames the problems of those
communities as cultural problems, not structural ones.

Institutional Sorting
Community-bounded grants only constrain the geographic area in which
programs happen, they don’t determine how youth are enrolled. The prevention grants
that were not community-bounded required programming for blanket categories of youth
in specific categories, largely determined by gender and age range. Therefore, every
prevention grant required institutions to sort youth on-the-ground. This was often enacted
by school representatives and occasionally by the criminal justice system.
According to implementers, schools often asked for programmming in order to do
“damage control” for an ongoing issue, such as sexual harassment or fighting on campus.
“It’s a lot of word of mouth and it’s a lot of people like, oh, my God, I’m having an issue,
let me Google something” Eleanor told me. Jennifer explained that schools “may reach
out because they've been carrying a lot of disclosures from students.” Schools with a
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“higher socio-economic status,” do sometimes request programs, “but those kids and
those administrators view it differently” Eleanor said. Those schools are more likely to
request a program on “bullying or something” and when Eleanor would raise the issue of
teen dating violence, the school would respond “no, no, no that’s, that’s not our problem.”
Instead, they want programing “coming in so that [students] can put this on their college
application or like they want skills so that they can help support kids out there, but they
don’t need it.”
Because the grant system is loosely marketized, POV relied heavily on informal
ties with sponsors at schools where they did programming to organize and legitimize
their efforts. When sponsors left a school, the institutional foundation for prevention
programming left with them. For this reason, a significant amount of implementers’ time
was spent building and maintaining relationships with school personnel. However, even
with a reliable school sponsor, the connection between the agency and the school is
tenuous. One time, Eleanor explained, they were looking to formalize an agreement with
a school they had been working with for a while through a memorandum of
understanding (MOU), “the principal had no idea who we were and was like, why do I
need this?”
In practice, probation officers, school counselors and administrators decided
which students would participate in the programming depending on a variety of factors.
Sometimes, the school was looking to establish a group of leaders, other times they were
looking for counseling for students who were having trouble at home, other times they
were hoping that the program would turn around students who were failing or getting in
fights. Jose described how this process worked for the high-risk grant he worked on:
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They say, "Hey, these are the kids who are in the school who are in probation, so
they've got to meet the standards -- they've got to be in school, they've got to get
the grades up, and whatnot." From there, the probation officer talks to me and
says, "I have a list of ten students who are on probation in my roll, so they're part
of probation." However, working also with high-risk, they don't necessarily end
up there because they're on probation. The probation officer could be working
with counselors or the principals within those schools and say, "Hey, this kid, or
this young woman or man, they might need some type of extracurricular
education on violence." Then they come into his or her caseload, and then my
list therefore expands.
Often, implementers, as well as youth, didn’t know if students were placed into
programming because of a single incident, a referral, or because they were tapped as
potential leaders. As Sean put it when I asked how he dealt with not always knowing how
students ended up at his class, “I just show up and show them how to do what I am
supposed to do.”

At-Risk Status
Ella, a Latina longtime implementer, explained that the school district had their
own system for marking youth at-risk: “It was primary, secondary, tertiary, which is high
risk. It was primary kids getting in trouble getting bad grades, there was this intervention
at that point. You have the secondary kids [who] are showing signs of failing to meet
class requirements, having trouble with authority. Then you have the tertiary [kids],
which are the high risk. Those are the kids getting suspended, getting arrested.” On the
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ground, this system of categorization often overlapped with the system used by funders.
When I asked implementers what made a young person at-risk, their responses were
wide-ranging. Eleanor told me “it’s students who come from either a home where there’s
already a history of violence somehow or the students are maybe like low academic
achieving. All right, so that opens them up for other issues. Or they’re from communities
where there’s a lot of community violence and it’s something that they have to deal with
all the time.” But many implementers also said that every youth they worked with was at
risk for one reason or another. Ella told me “in the communities I’ve worked with, every
single [youth] is high-risk just because of the environment that we live in.” I asked if she
just meant high risk for violence, and she responded: “At risk for anything, drug use,
alcohol, pregnancy. It’s overall just high-risk.” On the ground, at-risk worked as a wide-
ranging and flexible label. Implementers had few details about the individual youth they
worked with. They didn’t know their family income or structure, whether or not they had
experienced trauma, or their beliefs about gender.
All of the implementers I spoke with shared a simultaneous resistance to the
specific application of the at-risk label to a group of young people, and a broad
consideration of at-risk as a quality of most of the youth they worked with. Take for
example, Jose’s explanation of how he views youth as opposed to institutions:
They so label people that they don't even know them at a personal level. I don't
label them. I come in, and I treat them like, "Hey, I'm in a high school, you are high
school kids." I go in a middle school: "You're middle school kids." I don't come
there labeling, I don't come there with my biases, I don't come there like, "Oh, I
need to bring a gun," or, "I need to protect myself," or, "Is he going to jump
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me because he has tattoos?" No, I see, if anything, I see them as young kids.
They're really kids. Maybe they did stuff wrong, but that doesn't mean that that
label should be put on their foreheads, and that's it. Their label in society
is "probation youth" or "high-risk kids." I don't even see that. I see them as first-
name basis, so I know them as "Oscar," "Michele." Whatever their names are,
I want to see them as that.
I viscerally relate to Jose’s critique of the ways that labeling can isolate and erase
individual experiences and reproduce inequality. However, I found that the prevention
approach runs the risk of swinging the pendulum too far back the other way and focusing
on the individual at the expense of a critique of the underlying systems of inequality.
When we look closer, we can see that this tension mirrors the current historical
moment, demarcated by both “labeling hype” and a neoliberal discourse of individualism.
These two processes, I argue, work together to reinforce inequality more powerfully than
criminalization alone. Scholars have shown that the hyperpolicing, punitive discipline
and surveillance of youth of color in urban communities create a status group of
criminalized youth, who are funneled into a “school-to-prison pipeline” (Rios, 2011;
Goffman, 2014). “Bad kids” are labeled and criminalized, but represent a small
proportion of marginalized youth. Parallel to this system is a second one, whereby
schools, community organizations, nonprofits and funders work together to convert the
byproducts of systemic inequalities into cultural and individual risks, to mark youth as at-
risk and steer those youth into programmatic interventions, where youth learn that the
system isn’t on their side and develop skills to avoid being pulled into it. However, rather
than celebrating this as “resilience” or “empowerment” I believe that it illustrates how the
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neoliberal discourse implicit in those terms pushes youth to navigate an unequal society
by turning inward and focusing on their personal lives.

Alternative Histories, Dismantled Histories
If we look closely at the lives of at-risk youth, we can see these same social forces
play out on a biographical scale. On paper, each of the youth profiled below has lived
with a compounding sequence of risk factors. All of them had at least five that came up in
our interviews, and likely more that did not. In the stories that follow, I present
alternative histories of five youth marked as at-risk. Unlike risk factor analysis, these
histories center the context in which youth lives play out, marked by instability,
institutional challenges, intersectional stresses, social isolation and distrust of government.
These patterns diverge from risk factors and protective factors, and instead reveal the
gendered, raced and classed injuries of a dismantled welfare state and an overzealous
crime control system.

“They didn’t want me there” - Hendrix
When I interviewed Hendrix he was 16, younger than his peers at the school, and
preparing to graduate early. He didn’t care much for school he told me, but he did well
when he tried. On the first day of a six-week implementation, he enacted the
quintessential performance of “contrived careleness” common among young men in
schools: head down, one ear-bud in (Morris, 2011). But in the weeks since, he had
become a vocal contributor to class discussions. He was eager to finish and devote his
time to a career as a music producer, which he already spent much of his time doing on a
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soundboard at a friend’s house. Hendrix’s mother worked in a sweatshop in L.A.’s
garment district and he lived with his father, who worked as a long haul truck driver since
Hendrix was born. His parents were doing well financially and he no longer needed to
contribute as much to the household as he once had. He was thrilled to have new stylish
clothes, bought from money earned at his part time job. He took his pseudonym from
Jimi Hendrix and talked effusively about his love of music. He closed his eyes for long
stretches while we talked, puzzling over his answers, and he fidgeted with a roll of paper.
Hendrix, like most youth I spoke with, had grown up in an environment that was
largely segregated along racial and economic lines at the same time that the prevailing
ideology purported a so-called colorblind society (Bonilla-Silva, 2009). Hendrix
skillfully navigated this paradox, often talking about race, without talking about race. For
example, when I asked him what life was like for men his age in Los Angeles, he told me,
“I mean, I don’t even know what a normal 16 year old feels like, ‘cause I got a lot of
friends that are doin’ the same thing that I’m doin’. But I think, like, I think it leads back
to race too. Some 16 year olds don’t deal with this. Like, I mean, I’m not putting you --
like, people in a category, but I know, like, people out here in LA, like, they deal with the
same thing that I deal with.” Hendrix’s explanation that “it all leads back to race,”
ironically, situated his analysis of race within geography. And yet, it was clear to me that
when he was talking about “people out here in LA” he was talking about Black and
Brown youth. At the same time, Hendrix could easily use racial labels to undermine
racial difference. A few minutes later Hendrix did explicitly talk about race as he
explained how it doesn’t matter to him: “It doesn’t matter at all, ‘cause I got, like, I got
black friends, I got -- I haven’t had a white friend. I had one white friend before…I used
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to go to [school in] the valley. I met a white friend out there. And I have a lot of Latino
friends too. I’m Latino. Yeah, so, I mean to me it really doesn’t matter to me as long as
you’re a cool person.” This doesn’t mean that Hendrix was colorblind, but rather that he
knew how to talk about race in a colorblind way. Just a few days earlier he had described
himself as “half-black, half-white” during a prevention program. He was “just playing”
he explained during our interview. The way that Hendrix “played” with race seemed to
depend, in part, on his social context.
Like many young men labeled at-risk, Hendrix had been in trouble for most of his
educational career. He was suspended in 2nd grade for “poppin’ a firework in class.” The
harsh discipline at the school didn’t translate into lessons at home he explained, “My
mom didn’t know. She thought that I was just being sent home for some reason. In school
I’ve been suspended 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade been
suspended. And I’ve been suspended, like, three times every year.” I asked him what
kinds of things he was suspended for, he explained:
I used to get in a lot of fights with people. I used to do a lot. And my principal
didn’t like me. She hated me. She hated me so much. She used to try to find little
things, she, I guess, I’m pretty sure she sent someone to write “Fuck Ms. Curtis”
on the wall, right. And it was the teacher that I had just had a parent-teacher
conference with. This principal hated me so much she brought me up to the office,
she had a paper of mine -- I don’t know how she got a paper of mine, right. She
was like, “It’s the same writing that was on this wall,” tryin’ a suspend me. She
was like here comes one administrator. But I was, I mean, I wasn’t stupid. I was
like, OK, you can bring them all in, I didn’t do it. And do you have proof that I
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did it? Why are you accusing me that I did it? You know, she didn’t like me.
And she knew that I was smart, and I wasn’t stupid, but that was always her motto,
like, tryin’ to suspend me, tryin’ to take me out of school. So when she found out
that I was leaving the school, she was like, “Yay! Thank God he’s leaving.”
Here, Hendrix’s story splits. He begins with a classic marker of at-risk status, constant
fights, but then he emphasizes the role that the authorities at the school played. Hendrix’s
belief that the principal “hated” him, whether it was true or not, significantly impacted his
investment and trust of the school institution. After Hendrix left that school, he went to a
charter school in the valley, but he was only there for a short while before it was closed
down, “‘Cause my principal was corrupt. Corrupt principal. And they found, like, a lot of
stuff about her. She was keeping the money to herself.” The school was supposed to be a
“two-storey place” with a “big gym” but since the principal had been diverting the money,
the school was “real small and it was real ghetto.”
Hendrix went to another school, but that didn’t last either: “I was a bad kid. I
moved to Animo Jackie Robinson. After there -- they didn’t want me there -- I moved
there for a month, and I went to a continuation school… I went there and then I came
here. Yeah, so I’ve been at, like, five [high] schools.” When I asked Hendrix to say more
about why he left the previous schools, even though he had said it was because he was a
“bad kid” and that they didn’t want him, he elaborated:
I didn’t like school. First time what happened with Jackie Robinson, it wasn’t
diverse at all. Like, it was just a bunch, a bunch of Latinos. I don’t know. And,
like, I didn’t, it’s not that I didn’t want to fit in with them, it’s just that I knew I
was gonna move, ‘cause I wanted to move. So I was like, no, I’m not about to
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talk to nobody.
It isn’t surprising that Hendrix didn’t like school given his previous experiences. After a
stint at the continuation school, Hendrix decided that he wanted to join one of his best
friends Michael, at the Crenshaw school. “It worked out good, ‘cause I’m graduating
early,” Hendrix told me. Several young men I talked to recounted moving schools
multiple times, often in response to disciplinary issues and this had negative
repercussions on their view of schooling broadly. But for some, such as Hendrix, it
allowed for a sense of agency in choosing schools.
In his moves between schools, Hendrix learned to navigate institutional authority
even as he resented it. This was also true of his interactions with police. He told me that
had learned to avoid the corner and the liquor store and not to be out with “a pack” of his
friends. Still, Hendrix had been “pulled over a lot” while out walking in his neighborhood.
When I expressed surprise, he laughed it off, “I’m from L.A., of course.” Hendrix told
me that he believed that police knew that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, but “they try
to play with you.” I asked Hendrix what reason the police gave for pulling him over:
He said I looked suspicious, you know? I’ve been stopped before too for other
things too, but, I mean, they cannot find anything, they can put charges on you, just
because they don’t like you, period. They see you’re a young kid, you’re Latino,
you’re walking at night, they’re gonna pull you over. They’re gonna do something
to you.
Hendrix seemed resigned to this pattern of harassment. “I still walk at night. I don’t really
care about it. I mean, I do care about it, but I’m just one person, you know? It takes a lot
to change that,” he told me. I asked what he thought it would take: “It would take a lot of
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people with their same state of mind to change that. But [for] my part, I wouldn’t want to.
I really wouldn’t care about it.” “You don’t care about getting stopped?” I asked. He
shrugged,
I do care about getting stopped, but I just wouldn’t, it’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s
not a waste of time, it’s just that I wouldn’t want to do that. I mean, I know
there’s people out there that would want to do it. I’m pretty sure eventually
change will come, ‘cause change is inevitable. It will come. It always has. So it
will come, but I don’t think I should do it.
Hendrix didn’t have a solid answer why he didn’t want to be a part of this change, but I
think his story provides clues. Repeatedly, institutions and authorities decided Hendrix’s
options in ways that seemed unfair and manipulative. In response, Hendrix had learned
how to navigate and move between those institutions. From his perspective, schools and
the police weren’t a cohesive “youth control complex,” (Rios, 2011), they were a series
of poorly-run, fickle institutions with corrupt adult leaders, which he wanted nothing to
do with. It is unclear if Hendrix possess a skill or personality quirk that allowed him to
spend so much of his time in disciplinary systems which so often funnel young men of
color into jails and prisons. In fact, an attempt to uncover such a factor, to ask “why not
Hendrix?” runs the risk of shifting focus away from the corruption institutional context
and placing it on youth.

“Back and forth, back and forth” - Zephire
Zephire took a bus one hour each way to and from his high school, so I was grateful
when he agreed to stay after one day to talk with me at the same school in Crenshaw that
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Hendrix attended. He wore a camo zip up and black athletic pants and had a practiced but
winning confidence and a smile that was quick to come and quick to go. He spoke with
an off-kilter meter that belied an imposed adulthood. He was 20 years old when we talked
and identified as “mixed: my mother is from Trinidad and Tobago; my father is American
from Chicago.” Like several of the youth I talked with, impermanence shaped Zephire’s
social, institutional and familial life. He explained how he moved around throughout
middle and high school: “I went from Compton to Gardena, then Compton to Boyle
Heights, to near USC, to Ontario then back to near USC.”
Zephire moved around Los Angeles often as his mother struggled to make rent and
to find a safe place to live. His parents divorced when he was four, and “it was one week
my father, next week my mother back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, till I was
–- till around the last years of my middle school, around eighth grade. Then I just started
living with my mom.” At that time, Zephire’s father moved to Chicago to take care of his
ailing grandmother. Zephire doesn’t remember much from his early years in Compton,
but he does remember that it was hard to fall asleep with the noise from sirens at night.
He didn’t like Compton he told me: “The violence, the gangs, the life I just really didn’t
like it there. Like the kids, they were rude, kind of rude to me. Like they [gave] no
respect to each other.” Some students bullied him. He joined the Cadet Corps: “I was
trying to get away from all that.”
Zephire spent much of his youth “trying to get away.” Often, he searched for
stability in masculinized and ritualized institutions, such as the Cadet Corps and martial
arts. Always the new kid, Zephire struggled to make friends. “In middle school I didn't
really have many friends. Those that were my friends I didn't really consider them friends.
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I was kind of antisocial. I was always trying to show off, or whatever. If I got something
new I'd always try to show off just to win acceptance, I guess.” One year, his dad bought
him a small “ninja knife,”
It was heavy, but it wasn't really sharp. I still brought it to school to show off, and
one of the kids, Carl, he was like, “that's not real.” I'm like “yeah, it is.” And he
tried to take it away from me. I was trying to take it away from him. The students
were all looking around, the teacher saw that. I went in to class because I had
class. Teachers came in, parents were called in and I was expelled from the
Compton district simply for having that at school. That was actually a good thing
because if I didn't have it I would have most likely stayed in Compton up until
high school, and I don't think my life would have been any better than it is now.
Zephire had a knack for putting a positive spin on a tough situation. He seemed to mostly
accept this severe punishment. After he was expelled, he moved up to Boyle Heights,
which “really changed [his] life.” There was “no bullying, I made friends real fast and
then they showed me the difference, how different life in Compton is compared to other
parts of the world.”
While he made new friends, tensions with his family made focusing on
schoolwork difficult. “I was expected to be like my dad,” he told me. Zephire framed his
retreat from education as a response to the standards of masculinity exemplified by his
father.
I guess everybody expected me to be carrying out my life correctly, graduating
high school when I was supposed to be graduating, being in college by now. I just
didn’t live up to all that pressure and in sophomore year in high school I was just
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lazy. My teachers knew I was smart, my parents, my family knew I was smart.
But I just didn't have any motivation at all.
Zephire continued going to school to make his parents happy, mostly his father, who
wanted him to join the Marines. Zephire left school sophomore year and during that time
off, he became a Buddhist, one in a string of passions, including interests in China and
Japan. At the time of our interview, however, Zephire had decided he would change his
religion to Shintoism, when I asked why, he explained, “I want to try everything. I tried
everything through Buddhist ethics, it was good, except for the whole no sex and all
(laughs).” Zephire often took on new ways of being in the world for long stints. His life
was shaped by impermanence and it seemed like these passions provided some stability.
When we talked, Zephire was working most days after school and over vacations
at a job paying “far below the minimum wage” shipping packages from a custom
motorcycle shop. He explained that he was hoping to save up money for a trip “to Europe
or Japan or somewhere,” but “every time I got paid the money would go to something.”
He had to pay for a new phone since his old one was stolen, a bus pass, the phone bill, his
nephew’s plane ticket and Christmas presents for his nieces and nephews. Between work
and moving Zephire hadn’t been able to stay in touch with his friends, the ones who
helped him when he had moved away from Compton and was feeling lost. They used to
get together every other weekend for movies, but now they all have jobs or are in college,
“so it's very hard to like hang out. And I guess that I definitely feel a little lonely because
I don't really talk to many people here.” A lack of sustained connections, driven by the
geographic instability of home and work, was a recurrent theme for the young men I
talked with. When we talked, Zephire hadn’t seen his dad for over two years and he lived
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with his mom and a man that he was pretty sure is his step-dad in a neighborhood with
frequent violence. He explained that to stay safe, “I always have an umbrella even if it's
sunny out so I have some sort of weapon in case I am walking home late at night and I
have something with me in case somebody tries to mug me or something.”
Zephire was literally doing the math to count down the days until he graduated
before our interview. At several points throughout our conversation he talked about his
plans once he finished school. He was going to join army. He was going to travel. He was
going to write screenplays. Like so many young people I talked to, Zephire had spent his
youth moving around Los Angeles, even spending a stint in Ontario. In the process he
had made and lost friends, picked up interests and lost them. For the vast majority of the
young people I talked to, place and the resources associated with it, were impermanent.
For many, a mix of economics, safety and institutional trouble pushed them to move
every couple years or less, not only across the city but sometimes out of Los Angeles
entirely. This had different stakes for young men, who seemed to struggle to make male
friends.

“I don’t know what the government is really planning” - Cleo
I talked with Cleo, 18, who identifies as “Black with a little Cherokee” in a
breakout room at Peace Over Violence, where she was participating in a summer-long
training. She had long wavy black hair, parted in the middle and she kept herself in
perfect posture for most of our talk. Cleo is one of six siblings, and since her dad passed
away when she was 13 the family had found solace in the church. Cleo liked “helping
people out” and her compassion for others was clear: “when I was in school, I always
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gave my counselor hugs, and everything, and it always made her feel better. And then
when, like, one of my friend were crying, I guess or when someone was crying, she was,
like, ‘go to Cleo.’” While several young men described having positive relationships with
their counselors, far more women expressed the closeness that Cleo described.
Inspired in part by the relationship and support from her counselor, Cleo planned
for a career in care work. She hoped to become a child psychologist, she told me, “that’s
my thing, children and dogs.” While Cleo was compassionate, she was bothered by the
way her peers treated each other:
Like, when I was in my high school, our motto was ‘trust, respect, and
responsibility.’ Some people got the responsibility right. I don’t know about the
trust and respect. It’s like, nobody really understands those two words. So I felt
like, some people are like they will make jokes about either how people are or, like,
stereotypical and making jokes about people’s backgrounds or whatever. And I felt,
like, even though they joke about it, it like could probably hurt the person inside.
Cleo’s distinction is telling. Given the regular condemnation of young people as
irresponsible by administrators and politicians, it isn’t surprising that her peers got it
“right.” At a few points in our conversation, Cleo was critical of her peers for being
disrespectful and wished that they would try “putting their selves in that person’s shoes.”
Like many of the young women I talked with, she was proud of herself and confident in
her decisions, “I feel good about that, because I could be, like, going in a different
direction, and could have been, but I chose the right direction to go.”
Like several of the young people I talked to, religion was an important part of Cleo’
social and moral worldview. However, few other young people talked as freely about the
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role of religion in their lives as Cleo. When I asked her about this, she clarified her
identification, but in a way that hinted that she held a very different conception of
religion than I did. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m religious, but I’m just a believer, and I
follow, like, what the Bible says. I’m a Christian, but that’s not really considered a
religion.” Instead, she explained, “I just say I’m a believer, but, it’s not really like that.
It’s just living a Christ-like life.” Like many young religious young people I spoke with,
she saw violence prevention as an extension of her religious morality.
Cleo thought that the media and sometimes, other religions could be a source of
violence. “I know in the Bible, it doesn’t say this literally, but it says, like, if you commit
sin or something you just would chop your hand off or whatever, but it’s, like, a figure of
speech in the Bible. It doesn’t mean it literally, but some people actually do that.” Cleo
continued:
I don’t know people personally, but I know it happens. I heard, I forgot, but it was a
while ago about, like, people, like, doing, like, rituals, and well, that’s witchcraft,
but (laughs) like, people, like, they say they’re talking to a God, but I don’t think
it’s the God that made heaven and earth from what I believe, but -- but I don’t know
they take it seriously and they kind of like hurt themselves in a way.
While this was the only time I heard this particular narrative, I heard a variety of dark
urban legends and governmental conspiracy theories from many of the youth that shared
similarities: powerful forces in the shadows harming people. Rather than treat these as
pure myths, I suggest that they represent a logic of fear and distrust which runs through
the lives of young people. This logic is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the exchange
I had with Cleo about the government:
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Cleo: So much [of the] things that’s going on in the world, it’s crazy, like, I just feel,
like, government has a lot to do with everything.
Max: Like what?
Cleo: Like with media, with different jobs, and just the whole woman and men kind
of thing, but then, it goes back, way back in history. So that’s where everything
really started, but still, we could change it, but I don’t know.
Max: What do you think the government does?
Cleo: Well, I would say they keep secrets, a lot of secrets. So I don’t know what the
government is really planning. I try not to really, to me I don’t really, really try to
focus on it too much, but I know the government has, like, a lot of things, like, I -- I
know it’s some law that I heard about. It’s called, it starts with an M, but
supposedly, I guess, like, whoever is out at night gets shot up, or something, ‘cause
they have something. It was -- it was weird. I heard something about that.
Max: Where’d you hear it?
Cleo: Well, actually, my boyfriend. He looked it up or something about it, and then
they have, like, one-point-something billion gravesites or whatever, graves or
something for people that do get that, I don’t -- I don’t know. It’s like twisted stuff.
— At this point she paused and looked around the room and bit her lip —
Max: What?
Cleo: [in a whisper] Because we’re talking about the government.
Max: Oh, you’re worried, OK. Do you want me to turn it off?
Cleo: [whispering] No.
Max: OK. I’d be happy to. I don’t work for the government just so you know.
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Cleo: Nuh-uh.
Max: I might look like I do, but I don’t.
Cleo: Well, yeah [laughs]
Max: Well, that’s what somebody from the government would say. Is that what
you’re thinking?
Cleo: [whispering] I don’t know. I’m awkward.
Cleo had very little direct interaction with the government. She had a few brief
interactions with police, and while the officers were slow to respond to a neighbor’s call,
they were neither incompetent nor malicious. She trusted firemen and had a great deal of
respect for authority and her elders. And yet, she was scared to even talk about the
government. Many of the young people I talked with believed the government to be a
powerful, tightly controlled and secretive force in their lives. I expected this to some
extent from young men of color, given their persistent punitive interactions with
authorities. However, young men more often viewed individual police as abusing their
power, while several young women expressed broad distrust and even fear of the
government broadly.

“I just look up to myself” - Paula
Paula, a Latina youth, was 17 years old when I interviewed her at the Peace Over
Violence office. She was in jeans and a black cardigan and wore thick-framed glasses.
Paula was crisp, relaxed and professional during our conversation. Throughout our talk,
she described her life in active terms, as the product of decisions that she made. Much of
Paula’s worldview was shaped by broken social ties, which taught her to be independent
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and often isolated and distrustful.
Early in her life, Paula witnessed a shooting in Koreatown: “we were just walking
down the street and there was like a drive-by and then like it was like right in front of our
faces and my mom was super scared. She just like threw us on the floor and she was like
“get down!”” This wasn’t the only incidence of violence in Paula’s life. When I asked her
where she saw violence, she said, “Well, like everywhere. I see it in a lot of places. Not
just here in LA, also like the valley. I used to live in [the valley] you know, there was
violence there. Violence is everywhere. It’s like you can’t escape it.” She continued,
“Well, like in homes. You see a lot of violence in homes, just in the street with
sometimes like moms hitting their child. I mean I don’t find it right for a mom to hit their
child, even though it’s their child but, you know, it’s like they’re not doing -- you’re not
suppose to do that. And it’s illegal, too, to smack your kid across the face or something.”
Paula hesitation seemed to signal a conflicted over who should have the authority to
decide what parents could do with their children.
Paula made sense of her life largely in relation to influence of those around her.
She told me that she was a good student early on, but then things changed when her sister
was arrested and sent to juvenile hall:
My older sister, she was in juvenile hall for a while, so me experiencing that
[caused the change]. She was my role model and stuff and then like,
watchamacallit, she was arrested and she was my role model so then, like, who
was I going to look up to now, you know?...There’s been a lot of violence in my
family, like my brother. I was about to join a gang too but I was like, no, you
know, this is bad. So there [was] a lot of stuff going on in my life. Like the world,
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the people around me they weren’t like good role models either and then, like my
environment, my surroundings, like the park, it was like filled with gangsters, you
know.
At school, Paula fell under the influence of some older kids:
You go to middle school and then there’s like older kids and then they’re like
influencing you to do stuff and then it’s like when teenagers go wild and they just
want to like try everything. So I would like sometimes hang out with friends, just
ditch school. I was like a big ditcher. I got bad grades. Like I was not good in
school. And, I don’t know, I just started trying drugs.
Paula looked back on this as period in her young life where she wasn’t thinking for
herself. It wasn’t that she broke the rules that Paula regretted; it was how easily others
had influenced her. Even in hindsight, Paula prided herself on rarely being caught. “There
was like one time I was caught drinking in the bathroom in seventh grade so it was like
somebody snitched on us, I guess.” She and five friends were sent to the counselor’s
office and they had to call their parents.
Paula left home several times, “I’ve never really ran away from home but I’ve
gone and haven’t came back sometimes because I’m mad so I just like sometimes get
mad -- well, the last time I kind of ran away was like two Thanksgivings ago. So my
sister got me really mad so I just left and I didn’t come back until like two days later.”
Not long after that, things began to change, even though Paula couldn’t really explain
why. She started working hard to do well in school:
Now, it’s like, I mean I know more so I don’t get in trouble. I just like, I know, I
just, I’m kind of myself but like in a productive good way. Not being like, you
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know, really bad and stuff because -- I mean if I do drugs that’s going to get me in
trouble or if I drink, you know, it’s illegal for me to drink and -- or sometimes if I
ditch school I could just get caught. It’s stuff that -- you just have to be -- it’s like
logic. Like you know you’re not supposed to do that, why do it, you know.
Paula’s phrase, “I’m kind of myself, but like in a productive good way” aligned with the
way other young women who had been once been “really bad” made sense of themselves
as active social agents.
Paula’s commitment to doing what she was “supposed to do” sometimes meant
going to extreme lengths. After several scary incidents walking at night, she decided to
change her lifestyle:
I just do everything I have to do during the day. Because during the night
sometimes [I get] really scared because like I’ve experienced, once like somebody
just came and they touched my butt, some guy just walking by and I was like,
well, this is not going to happen ever again. So sometimes [I’d] rather not like
walk at night. And then my other sister, it was during like the afternoon and she
just -- she got her necklace stolen by some gangsters that were in a car, I guess,
and then they like pointed the gun at her and they’re like, oh, you know, give me
your necklace and then they took also her ring and she just came home crying.
She was like super scratched.
Advocates of personal responsibility in crime prevention might applaud Paula’s
dedication to keeping herself safe. However, what was startling to me was that Paula
didn’t mention police at all. Instead, she saw it as her job to avoid harassment and armed
robbery.
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I asked Paula if she still looks up to her older sister, she said no, “I just look up to
myself.” This is, in many ways, a powerful statement of empowerment. However, even
though Paula got back on track, and now holds her self up as her own role model, those
around her haven’t let up in their messages about how she should act she told me,
My mom’s like don’t get pregnant. People are like don’t get pregnant. It’s like
I’m not going to get pregnant. And it’s just like, oh, you have to do good in school,
just don’t follow like any, like don’t hang out with bad people, or like bad friends
or bad influences and I have friends that are like bad influences but it’s also my
choice, you know. If I choose to follow them. It’s not just like them and, oh, you
know they’re bad so I’m going to become bad. So my mom sometimes like she
puts an order, you know, like you can’t hang out with these people because
they’re bad.
Paula’s newfound sense of personal responsibility was a common theme among the
young women I interviewed. And while it is a quality often lauded in politics, on the
ground it often had complicated results. We can understand Paula’s strategies to stay safe,
and applaud her confidence, but her emphasis on her own responsibility leaves little room
for critiques of the system that enables men to assault her. And while her mother might
wish to talk with about hang out with “bad” kids, Paula leaves little room to budge when
she frames it as her choice.

“There’s a point where a man just breaks” - Manny
Manny, a Latino youth whose parents emigrated from Guatemala, was 17 when
we met in a prevention program at his high school. We talked in a counseling room at his
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school, jammed with a small desk, two chairs and an old computer, the floor riddled with
scraps of paper. He spoke thoughtfully and held his backpack against his chest for most
of the interview. I asked Manny how gender mattered in his life:
Everything goes back to my parents, and their culture, and how they were brought
up. It affects me as a male, because we’re seen as the head of the house, you have
to, if something goes down, you’re responsible for it, like, you have to take care
of everything, you have to provide for the family, support the family. So things
like that, and there’s other things that I oppose like women have to just be in the
kitchen, and they serve the man, and they’re just housewives. So I oppose that,
and I’m like if they can do something with their lives, like, if they can bring more
income to the house, or they could bring something of worth that doesn’t involve
them just staying at home and making dinner, and taking of the kids that would
better myself…So my gender affects me in that sense where I’m seen as don’t be
afraid, or don’t show fear, or you’re emotions, because that’s how I was brought
up. Don’t cry for things that aren’t worth crying for. A lot of things just reflect on
being strong and taking that man position that you ought to take. So sometimes
crying is seen as weakness, so you don’t, you just don’t cry. So growing up,
you’re just, something hurts you and you don’t show it, or if something offends
you, you don’t show it, or someone hurts you, or someone breaks your heart, and
you just don’t -- you just let it go, but inside you know it hurts you…it’s a lot of
conflictions, because there’s -- there’s a point where a man just breaks. So that --
that point in a -- in a -- in a man’s life always comes like hardships, or struggles,
or something, a -- a family emergency, someone passes away that has to come out.
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And in our everyday lives, we -- I guess we can’t in a sense do that, because it’s
just seen as you’re a wimp or something. So, it conflicts with me a lot, because I
bottle up a bunch of feelings that I’m -- I’m maybe not supposed to bottle up and
that just turns into -- it just ends up being, like, anger. So I’ll have anger in my
heart, and then I won’t -- I won’t let it out, and I just keep putting things in, and
then it’s -- it’s -- you just -- you just dying inside, and you keep adding more
things, and -- and it affects you real bad. Well, it has affected me really bad. So,
I guess things, maybe things like that aren’t supposed to be bottled up.
Manny’s explanation of the stresses he feels as a man were bound up with his family’s
notion of manhood, and how he was viewed in society. He explained that people saw
young Latino men like himself as “drug dealers or gangsters” that “aren’t going to
amount to anything and they can’t go anywhere in life.” He explained, “We’re stuck in --
well, I’m stuck in this little, I guess community where things they either worsen or they
get a little good, and then they just go back and forth. So, it’s like it doesn’t -- it doesn’t
stay in one place forever.”
With money being tight, Manny’s family had to live in a difficult, at times violent
neighborhood:
You get used to the gang bangers, and you hear there was a killing around, and
you’re like, it’s normal to you. When you’ve lived in an area where like that for a
while or you just, you hear that someone gets killed, and you’re like man, like, it
saddens you, and then you’re just like well, I mean that’s the neighborhood I live
in, like -- I have to learn to live in it, because unfortunately, we don’t have the
luxury to live somewhere else.
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Money “comes and goes” Manny told me, he “learned to live with that.” Still, he hoped
that he would have money someday so that he could give “to those so they don’t have to
re-live, like, something that I lived.” He also hopes to be able to take care of his mom:
She brought up six kids in, like, a screwed-up environment and a family. She
took the role of a father and a mom at the same time and being caught up in that
whole situation she managed to raise us and too, I mean, I’m still here. There
hasn’t gone a day where there’s no food in the fridge, or I don’t have a roof over
my head. So I want to, I guess take that weight off my mom’s shoulders, and who
knows, maybe buy her a house or for her not to worry about paying rent or the
bills.
Manny felt like he owed it to his mother to do well in school. His mother had left
school after 2
nd
grade, and his father only made it to 6
th
grade. Manny wanted to make the
most of his opportunity to get an education and had a 4.0 GPA through 9
th
grade.
However, during his sophomore year in high school, “things started to get complicated at
home” and school became “a rollercoaster ride.”
For the most part of my high school years I was conflicted with depression,
anxiety, and insomnia. It was something I -- I didn’t have a hold of, and that was
kind of a curveball to me, because it was -- it just came out of nowhere. It was,
like, a slap in the face, because I was trying to understand something that was not
at my level of understanding yet because I was trying to understand why things at
home were the way that they were -- and the way that they -- they still are. So,
it’s conflicting with -- with my focus at school and -- and a lot of -- a lot of
expectations of my, like, I guess a lot of teachers were, like you know, you were
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an A student, or you were this, and expectations I don’t know, sometimes they
weighed me down, because I look at myself and I’m like well, I was at that person
in ninth grade, and now I’m this person. And it’s hard to -- to focus when, I guess
you got some sort of spotlight on you because of your background, and because --
because I’m really hostile, and because I’m very, I guess very secretive of what
my past has been. It has -- it has conflicted with -- with me getting help of what I
need.
Manny made sense of his life in deeply personal and emotional terms. He felt caught
between the pressures of a particular cultural formation of masculinity and the
repercussions they were having on his life.
I grew up in a dysfunctional family due to my dad being unfaithful to my mom.
So a lot of times, I was -- I snapped out of my childhood real, real quick, because
I started to understand things more often, like, my parents wouldn’t -- when they
would talk, it would be arguments, or it’d be, you know, they always result in oh,
man, the kids this, or the stressing out, or something like that, and -- and, I guess
that was part of thing of growing up that I -- I snapped out of my childhood, and
part of that also deprived me of myself. I was deprived of myself, because I was
growing up too quick.
Most of the youth I talked to felt pulled between conflicting notions of gender, race
and class and they struggled to reconcile these contradictions. This is, to some extent,
standard for teenagers today. However, the youth I spoke so did so within the contexts of
poverty, violence and criminalization.

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The standard discourse of at-risk youth posits that young people go through life
accruing risk and protective factors. This narrative strips out institutions and identities. In
this section, I have put forward alternative histories of Hendrix, Zephire, Cleo, Paula and
Manny, which show how their biographies have unfurled within a social context of
disciplinary social control and a dismantled welfare state. On the ground, this manifested
as institutional corruption, geographic instability, governmental distrust, social isolation
and intersectional stress. In recounting these alternative histories, I have tried to draw out
the ways that gender and race, and to some extent class are filtered through social context.
My goal has been to highlight not only how an at-risk discourse fails to capture the social
forces at work, but that even while they were at turns clever, kind, intelligent, responsible
and empowered, there is no obvious change to these individuals that would have lead
them out of at-risk status.

Conclusion
In promotional materials and at public events, the staff and management at the
organization where I conducted fieldwork often described violence as "an equation"
which could be solved, “one on one, one by one.” The organization built their
programming around the notion that violence is logical and measurable through statistical
data, an approach established by a program market that prioritizes data and evidence. It
has seeped into our cultural ether that risk can be put spreadsheets, equations, and metrics.
The numbers of violence animate the news in death tolls, casualties, assaults and more.
We live in a sea of violence statistics. Young people are simultaneously disconnected
from and engulfed by these numbers. Violence is statistically described, but rarely
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discussed personally. Violence is seen as a population level trait, but the metrics
commonly used to fuel the programs I studied are not equipped to understand it within
individual lives. And yet, it is the presence of risk factors, and their connection to future
violence, in individual lives that serves as the moral justification for implementing
change programs.
Data and surveillance medicine is changing the way we think about and act upon
social problems, perhaps nowhere more than in the realm of violence. And while these
approaches hold great promise, in particular for convincing the public of problems, we
don’t yet grasp what is lost when we turn lives into data. We choose to use data this way.
We could, in theory, tie data to individuals and use it to provide them with direct
resources instead of labeling them based on probabilities.
In the next chapter, I explore a parallel process that arises out of the
decontextualization of lived experience into risk and protective factors: the widespread
adoption of public health curricula. What happens when at-risk youth encounter programs
that set out to deliver them from risk? Do their social contexts reappear or are they further
obscured?

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CHAPTER 5: THE CURRICULUM
Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.
- Adrienne Rich

At Peace Over Violence, implementers and managers often felt pulled between
their social justice values and the increasingly marketized system they were in. Consider
this excerpt from my fieldnotes:
I’m sitting across from Ella and Joan, two managers at Peace Over Violence,
in Joan’s glass-walled office, looking out at the cars and pedestrians on Wilshire
Blvd. To my right is a pastor from a California coast community, a tall white man
with a neat silver goatee. Minutes before, Joan pulled me out of the prevention
office and asked that I sit in on this meeting. I have no idea what it is about.
“It’s a paradise, small, but we still have violence, we still have people" the
pastor begins, with a practiced rhythm as he glances out the windows. I hear
“paradise” and “small” as code words for wealthy and white. He explains that a
congregant brought a local domestic violence shelter to his attention and since then,
he has been working with athletic coaches, some of whom he golfs with, to “do
something about violence.” They put on a Walk a Mile in Her Shoes march he tells
us, and he laughs and shakes his head as he recounts the male coaches and football
players stumbling in red pumps.
5
Inspired by the success of the event, the pastor
says, he wants to begin a program for young men in the community.

5
Building on the adage that to understand someone, you must walk a mile in their shoes, Walk a Mile in
Her Shoes Marches are designed to raise awareness about men’s violence against women and often to raise
money. Bridges has shown that the marches can end up reinforcing gender difference (2010).
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Ella darts out of the room and returns with a tri-fold brochure describing
POV’s in-house curricula, In Touch With Teens (ITWT). “It sells for $230” Ella
says with a matter-of-fact tone. “You can buy it online, it's very easy" Joan adds.
Joan suggests a two-day training, adding, “we have done it all over the country.” I
finally catch on to what we are doing here: this is a sales pitch. Ella and Patti seem
uncomfortable.
Joan tells a story about applying for a grant and discovering that POV was
competing against other organizations using ITWT. The pastor looks skeptical. He
asks if ITWT includes a mentorship component. Ella and Joan don’t answer. Joan
tells him that they have “had a lot of luck with in-school, curriculum based
programs” which is what ITWT is. It isn’t a mentorship program. When he asks
about a mentorship program from another organization, Joan responds, defensively,
“a lot of that came out of our curriculum" and then, after a pause “we can train your
team on it though.” Ella, hesitant, corrects her, "no we can't" "We can't? Who can
train on it?” asks Joan rhetorically. Joan looks at Don and explains: POV was one
of the first to do the program, but they aren’t able to train on it. But, they can train
on ITWT, because they created it. Joan asks Ella to get the pastor a copy of ITWT
to look through.
The pastor flips through the glossy pages of the thick white binder slowly, his
expression flat. “What about youth clubs?” he asks. Joan, to no one in particular,
shrugs, "they stole clubs from us." The pastor, quite literally, does not seem to be
buying it. Joan recommends a pledge. The pastor perks up and asks if the pledge
comes out of the ITWT curriculum. Ella answers yes, but as the pastor flips through
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in search of it, Ella hedges, “no, it isn’t in there.” The pastor closes the binder and
thanks us for the time. He says he will think about it. Standing in the doorway, he
asks Joan to put him in touch with another organization about their curriculum.
Perhaps my presence as a participant observer threw off what was usually a winning sales
pitch, but I doubt it. Maybe trying to sell something you are passionate about is always
awkward. Regardless, this moment revealed a central feature of prevention programs that
I had long known, but hadn’t witnessed: they are bought and sold. Programs are
commodities, and in order to sell a lot of them, organizations need to appeal to a wide
audience. The programs need to look like they can work just as well in a wealthy, white
religious community as they do in poor and working-class neighborhoods in South Los
Angeles. Ella and Joan were taking part, hesitantly, in a larger field of market
competition. And they weren’t doing well. This isn't to say that In Touch With Teens
wasn’t successful, it was. POV used it with thousands of young people across Los
Angeles every year. Teachers liked having it in their classrooms and students seemed to
enjoy it too. The paid staff couldn’t keep up with demand, so volunteers covered some
implementations. What eluded the curriculum and dogged the managerial staff, however,
was reaching the next tier of national recognition. This required spending time and
resources to evaluate the curriculum and acquire an “evidence-based” certification. But as
I spent time with POV’s curriculum alongside others that had acquired an evidence-based
stamp, I began to think that there was a larger problem than resources: Their curriculum,
quite simply, let young people talk.
Several months after the failed sales pitch, I talked with Ella in a small counseling
room at the back of the POV office. Ella is Latina, and a rare mix of street-smart and
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grant-wise. She had worked at POV for over a decade and steadily risen up the ranks. She
had worked with all kinds of populations, from incarcerated women to at-risk youth. I
asked her about ITWT. “The greatest tool that we have is In Touch With Teens,” she
explained:
Believe it or not, there have been a few people here in the agency who don’t see
the value of the curriculum. They don’t necessarily feel that youth empowerment
will come from the implementation. For me, that’s the strongest tool we have - is
In Touch With Teens. The reason why I say that is because you create not only a
safe space but you create dialogue. You begin to challenge those beliefs that these
young boys and girls have [had] for many years, but you are still catching them at
a very vulnerable age. You can, you have the ability to shift something so that this
kid will make healthier choices, perhaps. Not that we’re saying we’d reach every
single one, no. Definitely my favorite strategy is that connection that we have
with youth using our curriculums. That’s why it’s important for all of us. I don’t
think you can do prevention work — because prevention work is 90%
implementing curriculum — if you don’t love that interaction with youth. Then,
its most likely you will not survive in prevention because it’s a have-to.
Ella’s response paired two aspects of prevention that I had come to see as antithetical:
curricular implementation and “interaction with youth.” When I first began attending
violence prevention programs, I took for granted that curricular programs were a “have-
to.” The approach had the force of orthodoxy. But as I spent time with Ella and other
implementers, I began to see the curriculum, and Ella’s unwavering support for it, in a
different light. There were gaps in the gospel of the curricula. Most glaringly, I never saw
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anyone implement it as written. Curricula were a have-to, not because they provided the
best science available, but because they provided an avenue into classrooms and a
framework for talking about lived experience.
Sixty-five percent of young people aged five-to-seventeen in the United States have
been exposed to at least one violence prevention program for dating violence, sexual
assault, bullying, or gang violence and 75% of high schools include some form of
violence prevention programming (Finkelhor et al, 2014). As these numbers show,
violence prevention programs have quietly become a significant educational force in
young people’s lives. However, there has been little theoretical consideration of the ways
public health curricula work on the ground (for exceptions see: Dworkin et al. 2012). In
this chapter, I apply critical education theory to public health education in order to
examine the extensions and breaks that occur as healthy relationship curricula are
translated from the binder into the classroom.
Critical education theory describes two forms of curriculum that students learn in
school institutions. The first, is the official course of study intended by an institution,
called the formal curriculum. The second, the hidden curriculum, is made up of the taken-
for-granted lessons, including those about legitimate authority and the valuation of
particular forms of cultural practices, which are built into the structure of schooling and
the mode of instruction (Ferguson, 2001; Fields, 2008; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; hooks
1994).
Increasingly, curricula are being used to prevent and respond to a host of social
problems. States use curricula to teach courses on healthy marriage promotion (Heath,
2012) and responsible fatherhood (Curran & Abrams 2000; Randles 2013). School
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districts use them to teach abstinence only education and comprehensive sex education
(Fields, 2008; Garcia, 2012). Nonprofits use them to teach healthy body image (Rauscher
et al., 2013). Unlike traditional means of education, public health curricula make the
hidden curriculum not only visible, but also central as they explicitly set out to act on
aspects of culture: knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. A critical approach to public
health curricula must make sense of both a visible curriculum that focuses on changing
cultural forms and a shadow curriculum, which obscures social context. In the first part of
this chapter, I lay out such an analysis using a teen dating violence curriculum called Safe
Dates as a case study. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss the ways that youth
challenge the shadow curricula on the ground as they recontextualize the curriculum.
Implementers are able to either encourage or discourage this process. In conclusion, I
discuss the widespread process of curricular-ization as a means of social control on a
large scale.

The Visible Curriculum: Changing Culture
Painted on the sky-blue wall of the youth center at Peace Over Violence is the
formal mantra of the prevention department in crisp white lettering: “violence is learned
and it can be unlearned.” In order to make sense of this optimistic, sweeping and
somewhat cryptic declaration, it helps to understand where it comes from. Public health
advocates and policymakers hold curricula up a key form of “primary prevention,” which
sets out to stop violence before it starts by changing cultural norms. The interconnected
system of culture change, built in to curricular content and evaluations, constitutes the
visible curriculum of public health. The declaration on the wall of the youth center is
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meant to distill public health theory to its most basic parts and signal POVs acceptance of
the public health model. In a special comment in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Harvey Fineberg, former head of the Institutes of Medicine, explained how
prevention flips the medical approach to health problems on its head:
Prevention reverses the usual order of clinical thinking: it often starts at the
population level and then translates information back to the individual. Rather
than dwell on the pathology of disease, preventive medicine focuses on risk. In
curative care, the goal is usually to restore patients to their earlier, normal state of
health. In prevention, as in dealing with hypertension or elevated cholesterol
levels in a community, the goal is to shift the entire population-wide distribution
to a healthier level, thus changing the norm. In curative care, the principal
professional responsibility is to the individual patient, whereas in preventive care,
focus is often at the population level and entails a responsibility to the entire
community. In curative care, solutions involve prescribing medication,
performing operations, or delivering other clinical therapies; in prevention, there
is a much wider array of possibilities, from changing behavior choices to altering
social conditions. (p. 85, 2013)
“Changing behavior choices” and “altering social conditions,” as Fineberg describes, are
exactly what curricula set out to do (Lupton, 1995). Billie Weiss, one of the original
advocates of the public health approach to violence prevention, explained to me during a
phone interview that this approach has worked before:
I think it is about changing culture. I think it’s about changing community norms.
In public health we always point to the tobacco issue and it’s true. Forty years ago
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in this country you could’ve it up a cigarette any place you were…That doesn’t
happen anymore because it’s become unacceptable in the community’s mind. If
you light up a cigarette now someplace people look at you like there’s something
really the matter with you, and will ask you to not do that. That’s sort of what we
think has to happen with violence. It has to be an unacceptable way of behaving
so that when people see parents over-disciplining, for lack of a better word, a
child, more and more [of them] feel obligated to step up and say something, “Can
I watch your child for a few minutes for you?” Just to somehow stop it from
happening. Same thing with domestic violence and teen relationship violence. If
you keep emphasizing the fact it is not okay for people to hit each other and push
each other around, and we really want to change the community mind so that
violence is not seen as an acceptable way of life…You really are changing norms,
you have to change the way people treat each other. You have to provide
nurturing environments for people to grow up in and for people to live in. That’s
really what it is, it’s really changing the community.
As is clear in Weiss’s description, changing culture entails an intentional and strategic
shifting of localized norms. In order to accomplish this, public health advocates develop
programs and policies located along the highly influential “social-ecological model,”
which, according to the CDC, “considers the complex interplay between individual,
relationship, community, and societal factors” (2015). The model is often represented as
a diagram with a series of concentric ovals with the center oval labeled individual,
surrounded by ovals for relationships, community and society.

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However, evaluating cultural change programs on the ground is complicated. I
talked with Lauren, who directs the evaluation and policy work at POV. She seemed
positive about evaluation, even as she acknowledged the challenges. “Ultimately what
you want to measure is behavior change. The best way is open-ended questions that teens
don’t like to fill out.” Instead, Lauren videotaped questions and answers with youth. She
explained how this might go:
“’Hypothetically, your friend tells you she was raped by her boyfriend last night.
What do you say?’ [We record them] working through that answer and then we
code it for whether that was a supportive answer, blaming answer, something else,
not taking it seriously, whatever. Another [one], “What do you do as a bystander? If
you see something going on in the hall, you see a boyfriend girlfriend pushing it
each other in the hall. What do you do?” [We’re] not saying that there’s an explicit
right answer, there’s lots of things you can do but it’s more the thought process,
right? Do you just ignore and walk on by? Or do you tell a trusted teacher
something’s going on? If it feels safe do you intervene?’”
Each of these questions is meant to evaluate changes in behavior that align with a theory
of prevention: “One of the theories is that by having bystanders intervene or not accept
this behavior anymore, we’re going to end this type of violence. Another is by
empowering young people to know what they deserve in relationships, you’re going to
end that type of violence; or by reaching out to their peer groups. All of those behaviors
go directly back to our theory, that’s been proven.”
This broad sketch of violence prevention fairly well represents the visible
curriculum of public health programming as a whole at this particular moment. Thus, an
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outline of the visible curriculum for, say, drug abuse prevention, would fit well under the
framework laid out here. In the next section, I focus in on a single curriculum, Safe Dates,
in order to provide greater detail on the ways that the shadow curriculum erase social
context.

The Shadow Curriculum: Invisiblizing Context
If there is one program that has won out in the marketized field of violence
prevention programming, it is Hazelden’s Safe Dates: An Adolescent Dating Abuse
Prevention Curriculum, “a ten-session program that targets attitudes and behaviors
associated with dating abuse and violence” intended to “change norms” (2004). Since its
inception, Safe Dates has undergone several random control evaluations, which have
testified to its effectiveness at increasing knowledge and changing attitudes and behaviors
(Foshee et al., 1998; Foshee et al., 2014). This evidence-based stamp of approval
contributed to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which describes its mission as fostering
a “culture of health,” requiring the Safe Dates curriculum be used at all eleven sites
across the country for their eighteen million dollar Start Strong Initiative. Most recently,
Start Strong has become the basis for the CDC’s Dating Matters program (Tharp, 2012).
Despite its proven evaluations, many of the implementers were critical of Safe Dates.
Kim told me:
I think that it is OK for certain populations. I feel like sometimes it’s not as
culturally diverse. It’s not based on real cultural competency. It’s a little difficult
and challenging to pick it up off the paper sometimes and bring life to it because
there’s a lot of different issues. I don’t know if it was written by people who
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actually do violence against women [work], and know the work very well,
because some of the sexual assault section was victim blaming. We had a lot of
trouble with trying to implement that unit.
The Safe Dates curriculum does worse than lack “real cultural competency,” it is a
colorblind, gender-neutral and heteronormative program. I argue that these factors are a
central part of what has enabled Safe Dates to succeed on evaluations.
Alongside the visible curriculum, which promotes various forms of cultural change
not as subtext but as text, public health curricula, like Safe Dates, contain a curriculum
that obscures social forces. In the shadow curriculum, lived experience and institutional
contexts are stripped out and a colorblind, gender-neutral, heteronormative and class-less
discourse is reproduced. Scholars have shown how educational programs can construct a
“missing discourse” (Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2006). In the case of the shadow
curriculum, this process is formalized.
The Safe Dates curriculum is in a three ring binder – nearly every curriculum is.
The cover has a photo of a diverse group of smiling youth beneath the Safe Dates logo
and the names of authors Vangie Foshee, Ph.D., and Stacey Langwick, Ph.D. Where the
first edition had a line of text in the top right that read “research based” the second
edition has a small gold emblem that says “evidence based.” Plastic tabs mark each of the
sessions, which while intended to be done in order, be broken out and done on their own.
The first page of each session lays out a straightforward plan “at a glance” for 50 minutes
– the standard length for school classes – with each minute accounted for and a list of
“learner outcomes.” The curricula included step-by-step guides for every task, from how
to introduce oneself, to how to build trust, to how to describe each exercise. The message
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to facilitators and their audiences is clear: there is a rationalized, universal, “evidence-
based” and clear-cut way to reduce the risk of interpersonal violence. All this makes
sense, given two factors that shape curricula: First, they meant to be used by
implementers with a wide range of experiences and training at diverse sites. Second, the
more rigid the content, the more clearly reproducible it is for evaluation. As the
introduction put it, this is important to the “fidelity of the product and the accompanying
outcomes.” Not every curricula is as formalized and universalized as Safe Dates. But in
the current policy environment, which emphasizes evidence-based prevention, this
approach increases legitimacy and funding.
This is not to say that the Safe Dates curriculum is the equivalent of a one-way
lecture. Instead, it strategically designs activities in such a way that there is minimal
space for student creativity and personal connection. For example, in the first session,
which is on caring relationships, the curriculum has facilitators “ask: What activities are
examples of dating?” It also has facilitators tell students to circle characteristics they are
looking for in a date on a bingo card and list people who have made them feel good about
themselves, but specifies: “no one will see this list except you.” The curriculum has
facilitators ask students “What are some ways that people have treated you that have
helped you feel good about yourself?” and list the answers on poster board. The only
ways that stories and experiences are given space in the curriculum is if they are scripted.
The narrow space for students’ voices is understandable. With 50 minutes, tightly
budgeted, and classes of often 25 or 30 students, there isn’t room for digressions. In other
words, the curriculum, which is designed to change individuals, is also simultaneously
designed not to challenge the larger educational system within which it takes place.
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Inside the Binder: The Text of Culture Change
Safe Dates, like most curricula, uses a mix of activities and narratives in order to
change culture. In Safe Dates, one story described Tony and Jennifer, once an inseparable
couple, but as their relationship went on, Tony restricted what Jennifer could do and
became increasingly abusive. Jennifer ended the relationship and with her parents help,
got a restraining order against Tony. But, the story explains, school officials didn’t
enforce the order, “dating abuse isn’t a big issue for teens, or so school officials thought.”
Tony stabbed and killed Jennifer at school. The story ends with this line: “But how could
they have known? After all, Tony and Jennifer were only teens.” This story reflects two
characteristics of Safe Dates, as well as the other curricula I have studied. First, the story
is devoid of detail about the two characters lives, identities or social locations. The goal,
it seems, is to provide a blank slate onto which youth of various social locations can
project people they know into the roles. Second, even though it gestures to structural and
institutional failures, it ultimately puts the blame squarely on Tony and Jennifer. These
two processes, the erasure of social location and an emphasis on independence from
institutions were central components of the curriculum.
While information on social location wasn’t explicitly provided, it shined through
in other ways. In scenarios, the curriculum used names and discussed social actions. Take
for example the four scenarios given in session 2: While watching movies at a friend’s
house Jason yells at and hits Megan. Juan wants to break up with Christina because he is
interested in another woman. Nicole breaks the CD that Tyrone gave her as a gift. Lu
makes Tau feel guilty about spending time with her friends. Each of these scenarios
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involved a seemingly ethnically-matched, heterosexual pair – a pattern which continues
throughout the curriculum. Studies of other curricula have shown that they can
“reinscribe heterosexual masculinity within a very familiar and limiting frame” (Murphy
2009, 15; Masters 2010). That is certainly true of Safe Dates. Again, one can imagine the
decision process of the curriculum designers: the inclusion of narratives of non-
heterosexual couplings could disrupt the implementation. In my participant observation,
this, in fact happened several times.
The obscuring of social location often meant that the scenarios and skits, while
lacking any formal markers of race and class, still carried with them an unmarked
whiteness, as in this closing scene from a 45-minute play:
Carissa: Emily, I want you to do what is right for you, and only you know that
answer. You know I can’t stand to see you get hurt physically and emotionally.
Well, maybe you need to take a break from Jason for a while and see how that
goes.
Emily: Maybe you’re right, but I’d really like to talk to him and ask him why he
—
Elizabeth: Why he pushes you around and slaps you? Emily, no one should have
to put up with that, but you’re the only one who can do this; and you can change it.
You’re smart and you’ve got lots of friends who want you to be happy and safe.
We’ll be there for you and for Jason, too, if he’ll let us.
Emily: We’ll probably need all of you guys. Listen, can you stay with me tonight?
My parents will be home soon, but I can’t talk to them about this right now and I
really don’t want to be alone.
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Carissa: Sure, let us call our folks and then we can just talk or chill or whatever
you feel like.
Emily: Thanks, you’re great friends!
(All hug. Scene fades.)
— THE END —
This style of speech, what one implementer called “like an after-school special,” is
present throughout Safe Dates. While it is likely more formalized than any actual pattern
of youth speech, it reproduces an idealized upper-middle class white style. The evaluation
of Safe Dates was conducted in rural North Carolina schools in the 1994, and seventy-
five percent of the participants were white. In this way, a white speech pattern likely
helped Safe Dates achieve its evidence-based stamp. If students are going to show
changes based on their exposure to the curriculum, they must understand it. At the same
time, if the writing had been inflected with an attempt at Hispanic or Black dialetic, it
would have been criticized as racist for implying black and brown folks need violence
prevention. This, like including non-heterosexual couples, is a problem that is
fundamentally bound up in a curricular approach that seeks to change culture without
acknowledging its presence in the implementation context.
In addition, the curricula emphasized gender equity in violence and “considers both
boys and girls as potential perpetrators and victims of dating abuse.” While the curricula
went out of their way to emphasize this point, it also used consistently gendered stories
and scenarios with men enacting physical violence and women enacting emotional
violence. The gender-neutral discourse of the curriculum then erased the particulars of
gendered-violence, even as the stories, to a small extent, acknowledged them.
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A central goal of Safe Dates was to “raise awareness” of “dating abuse and its
causes and consequences” and “what constitutes healthy and abusive relationships.” This
focus on “awareness” stripped away the role of institutions and structures in enabling and
responding to relationship violence. In the curriculum, under the heading “what can we
do to prevent dating abuse?” the answer provided is to look at “why people abuse” and
then “identify key ways of preventing dating abuse including changing gender
stereotypes, promoting healthy communication and equal power in relationships and
dealing with feelings, particularly anger, in healthy, non-violent ways.” These are likely
valuable avenues for reducing violence, but without situating these key ways in the
context, what meaning to they really have? In the next section, I discuss what happened
during the implementation of a range of curricula as youth brought context back in.

The Curriculum in Contexts
During my second visit to the POV office, Amy, a white female implementer,
slammed down a Safe Dates binder, bursting with sticky notes, on the desk in front of her.
“This is psychotic” she steamed, “and victim blaming.” Discussing and critiquing
curricula was a common past time at POV, and Safe Dates was a frequent subject. I asked
Amy what the problems were with it. Among many, she explained that, a section on myth
busting stated: “Do Black men most often rape white women?” She recounted that when
she called to complain about the problematically racial framing, someone suggested that
facilitators say “do men of opposite races most often rape women?” Amy went on to lay
out a half dozen critiques of the curriculum, pointing to post-its for each one. On many
pages, she had taken a black pen and crossed out and re-written whole chunks of text.
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After a long conversation, she held it up, and asked, mostly to herself, “it can’t all be
harmful right?” My meeting with Amy was an early signal that curricula are not always
implemented as intended. Despite the rigid framework of most curricula, implementers,
like Amy, were active agents in the curricular process. Not only did they pick and choose
aspects of the curricula to focus on or downplay, but, they often had to navigate the social
context of the school. Like sex education, violence prevention programs can be structured
in schools by institutionalized “fears about the instability of racial, gender, class, and
sexual hierarchies” (Garcia 2009, 520; see also Fields 2008). However, the curriculum
was ultimately constructed in interaction between implementers and students.
There were several ways that young people actively engaged with the curriculum in
their social context. Kim, an implementer who was often critical of Safe Dates, explained
how she saw facts and figures translate into real life changes:
When you hear a kid talking and they sound like you, you know you did a good
job. When you see a kid call another kid out on something like, "That's sexist."
When you hear it in their natural conversations you overhear that they'll call each
other out on things. They're like, "That's not healthy." or "That's not cool." Then
you know, they really got that. They really believe it. It's a lifestyle change, not
just information.
I did hear youth in the ITWT program do this on several occasions. Few other actions
provided such tangible evidence of content translating into action. But I never heard
youth in curricular programs truly talk like implementers. The young people who used
the language of the curriculum switched between their peer-group discursive style and the
health curriculum discursive style, even changing their tone of voice. They would go
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from laughing and dissing friends as they waited for the class to start, to talking about
“verbal abuse” in the class, and then back again to insulting each other. Even for the most
successful programs, the new vocabulary of the curriculum didn’t seem to be used to
articulate lived experience in a way that fostered shared understanding. Instead, youth
would use short phrases from the curriculum, calling out “that’s not cool” or “that’s an
unhealthy relationship.” These call-outs seemed to predominantly work as ways of
marking specific behaviors in public settings.
Having youth learn the technical language of violence prevention provided them
with new ways to label experiences. However youth always actively reinterpreted the
meanings of this vocabulary, even long after they had left the classroom. Take for
example this conversation between two youth leaders, John and Arianna, as they
explained to me how their definition of sexual harassment had changed:
Arianna: I was with this guy and we were like on and off for a long time. And he
would constantly be texting me like, “Oh let’s hang out.” Then I would be like,
“Oh, no.” And he would keep texting me. And I found out that that’s like
harassment. And I didn’t know that. But I was like, “Wait, but he just wants to
talk to me.” And -- but they’re like, “No, that’s harassment.” So little things like
that can be labeled as harassment. And I’m like, “Well like, just little things like
that?” So I’m kind of like --
Alex: Yeah, I kind of agree with her, now. I forgot Kim told us that. I’m like,
“Wait, what?” So me bugging my friend and telling her, “Let’s go. Let’s go.
Let’s go,” I’m harassing her?
Arianna: That’s harassment.
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Alex: And then at the time, when I first heard that, I would stop texting her and be
like, “OK.” And then she’ll be like, “Dude, it’s not like you. What’s going on?”
I’m like, “Oh, I read this.”
Max: So now you’re text again?
Alex: Yeah, I still bother her. Like, “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.” I don’t
consider that harassment
Max: Yeah, I mean, there’s like --
Arianna: There’s a thin line between harassment and --
Max: Yeah, and there’s some gray area where it also depends on consent, too,
right? So if your friend’s cool with you texting all the time, then it’s --
Arianna: It’s that obsession, see?
Alex: Yeah, and then it’s weird, ’cause her obsession is for me to text back. She
like, “I need you to text back.”
Arianna: Yeah, no, and then my friend, he told me, he’s like, “If you don’t text
back in six minutes, I’m going to be mad at you, because I want you to answer.”
I’m like, “Is that harassment?” I’m like, “What?” I’m like, “That is harassment,
right?” I don’t know.
Debates like this, over whether or not some real life event counted or not under the
technical terms of the curricula, were common. These discursive markers did seem to
signal a meaningful engagement with the curriculum, but not one that could clearly
translate beyond the classroom context over the long term. This was clear watching a
performance group practice two sets of lines: the first were technical and conceptual
details from the curriculum, the second they had written about violence, masculinity and
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relationships in their lives. These young people lively and engaged as they wrote and
performed the script that they wrote, but they struggled with the curriculum language. I
watched as Donna quizzed the group, stretched out on the floor of the gym. “What are
warning signs of an unhealthy relationship?” The volunteer gave a long and twisty
answer about "irritability and fighting" Donna laughed at the end and said that he was
really reaching for it, but he didn't get it. Another young woman gave a correct answer
but Donna pointed out that she was clearly thinking while she said it. Donna explained
that they needs to study, that “this is as important as learning your lines.” In fact, this was
another second set of lines that they had to learn: lines about stats and processes, lines
with no "I" in them, no race or class or institutions.
The “learn your lines” approach to violence prevention seemed to be the ultimate
goal measured on evaluations. However, youth and implementers at POV often enacted a
different approach to situating the content of the curriculum within the lives of young
people, which I describe as recontextualization.

Recontextualization
During a presentation on healthy relationships, a trouble-making young man called
out, to no one in particular in his best deep radio voice, "don't drink and drive kids!"
While it seemed to come out of nowhere, I understood why he made that connection.
Curricula, when implemented as written, can have the feeling of older models of
“resistance” education. The kind that attempted to tell young people to “just say no.” This
young man’s interjection is a fitting reminder that young people are always active agents
in their education, making connections and challenging meanings. Take this excerpt from
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my fieldnotes of an interaction that was part of an ITWT implementation:
JJ asks Mark and Shawna to perform an unhealthy relationship scene. Mark
plays a distracted boyfriend to Shawna’s controlling girlfriend. From the front of
the room she held her thumb and pinky to her ear and mouth like a phone, in the
back Mark answers. She asked him where he is, but he won’t tell her. He is
mimicking playing video games. Some students begin to call out, “damn, that's cold”
one says. Others start to encourage Mark and Shawna to do one thing or another.
She says, frustrated that he needs to tell her, but he refuses. She screams at him
through the phone and then hangs up. Mark smirks. The audience laughs.
Afterwards, JJ asked the students in the audience what was wrong with that
relationship, the students responded that she was controlling, that she didn’t trust
him or communicate well, that she was isolating and being mean.
Shawna and Mark were then asked to “show us healthy” and perform a role-
play of what a healthy relationship “should” look like. This time, Shawna explained
that she is ok with him not explaining where he is going and Mark gladly, right on
cue, tells her his plans for the day. When JJ asked the students what type of
relationship it was, “healthy” and “boring” were both called out. Some students said
that she was acting “too suspicious” although she said almost everything the way
the program would describe it. It felt scripted, while the first felt realistic and
relatable.
It was rare that implementers had students perform improvisational skits like this. Few
curricula call for it, despite being one of the only chances to watch youth try to enact their
lessons. It would seem that this is because the outcomes can feel unclear or even
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contradictory as in the case of Mark and Shawna. It is telling that programs like Safe
Dates claim to change attitudes and behavior without witnessing those changes in action.
Curricula do not transplant fully formed meanings into the heads of youth - they
push towards a world of lived and contextual experiences within a racialized, classed and
gendered architecture. Unlike other school subjects, violence is made sense of in
everyday life in personal and institutional ways and therefore students already have
morally loaded preconceived ideas, some developed on their own and others culled from
family, teachers and older peers. Curricula meet youth in the course of their lives in
overlapping systems of power and privilege, which Collins describes as the “matrix of
domination” (2000), within which violence is a “saturated site” of meaning. That is, for
all the ways that the content of prevention curricula avoid and obscure social location and
institutional forces, teachers, administrators, textbooks and students these social forces
were undeniably present during implementation. I use the term abeyant intersectionality
to describe how race, class and gender existed in classrooms as a constant possibility. In
these moments, intersectionality is present, and is working to structure the interactions,
but in ways that are largely obscured.
Previous scholarship has shown how context is central for the ways that gender,
race and class are “done” and “undone” (West & Zimmerman 1987; Deutsch 2007; West
& Fenstermaker, 1995). New interactional dynamics and possibilities – the kind that
curricula try to promote - do not appear out of thin air: they are challenged and
transferred between contexts (Hollander 2013; Flores & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2012). Based
on my participant observation research, I argue that discursive and interactional
possibilities for gender transformation that arise in one context, in this case the content of
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the curriculum, must undergo a process of recontextualization if they are to be
meaningfully relocated into a different context, such as lives of youth.
Recontextualization signifies the process by which discourse, interactional dynamics, and
practices (or in the language of public health, awareness, attitudes and behaviors) from
one social context are made sense of within another.
Recontextualization could be very meaningful. Manny explained how he felt
comfortable “speaking out” in class in a way that he hadn’t been able to in other aspects
of his life:
I’ve never done that. I’ve tried psychologists, psychia-- psychiatric help -- the
counselors, I’ve tried, I guess all of it, and nothing really got my
attention. Nothing really, like, oh, it was either one thing or another, like, I
wouldn’t feel that person was interested in hearing what I wanted to say or that
person really wasn’t understanding me. But when you have a class of people that
come from where you come from, or have a similar background like you do, it
helps you like -- it helps you, like, the words just flow, like, you don’t have to
hesitate to say things because you know that you’re with people that understand
you, and you’re with people that can get you help, or you’re with people that will
try to understand you. So, it’s easier for me to speak out because of that and, I
think that’s -- that’s a big [thing].
As Manny’s description shows, the content of the curriculum was made meaningful
within the social context. In this way, recontextualization in the classroom context
provided a different mechanism for making meaning than counseling.

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In the classrooms I observed, youth were eager to recontextualize the messages of
the curriculum. Take this scene, a variation of which I saw play out dozens of times.
JJ takes the lead, first asking students “what is violence?” “Like dead people”
calls out a girl in the front “drive-bys” shouts a boy. Mikela writes “relationship
violence” on the board. Underneath it she writes “physical violence.” “What
else?” “Mental violence.” “Shanking” is called out and two boys at the side mimic
a stabbing scene. Mikela puts it under physical violence. “Yelling,” is written as
verbal abuse. A student in the back quietly says “rape” and Mikela writes a third
category, “sexual violence” on the board. This whole exercise involves coaxing
the youth to shout out different kinds of violence. Some youth catch a thread they
have heard before and give a technical explanation, for example of
bullying. Others give odd and disturbing specific examples, like “getting your
head chopped off.”
Youth’s contributions were clearly anchored in their social context. Drive-bys, shanking
and yelling, are, if not part of their lived experience, then at least part of the symbolic
world through which they understand violence and relationships.
Recontextualization also occurred in role-plays and scenarios. I asked Misty, a
Latino young woman, what she thought of these activities:
Misty: I like doing the skits too. I don’t know, I just feel like I’m in shoes and I
can think like them so I can understand them better. It’s sort of like being an
outsider and be like, “Oh, why did they do that?”
Max: So, can you give me an example of whose shoes you feel like you were in?
Misty: Yesterday we were doing about what was that, the abuser? Why do they
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abuse, sort of. So, I was the abuser’s friend and I had to turn a blind eye to what
he was doing. Before I was always like, “Oh, why did they even support that
friend, he’s like no friend at all.” But when I put myself in their place, now I’m
like, “Oh, he’s my friend, Scott, so I have to support him.” and I can feel sort of
power, kind of. It’s bad, but I kind of feel powerful like, “Oh, I can make them
feel inferior,” sort of.
Max: So, you could understand sort of why they would do that?
Misty: Mm-hmm. Why they would do that. And I felt so guilty afterwards. It
made me sort of feel guilty, I was also worried that, “Oh, I actually like can
understand them.” So I was worried if I, if I will become like them one day maybe.
I don’t know.
Relating to an abuser’s friend was not the goal of the exercise and no evaluation would
attempt to measure that as a positive outcome. And yet, Misty’s recontextualization
enabled a powerful statement about empathy.
Recontextualization was also a process by which young people reasserted
hegemonic beliefs, including those about racial and gender difference and
heteronormativity, into curricular contexts. Often, after reading David Brings Me Flowers,
a poem that recounts a partner’s desire to stay with and change an abusive boyfriend,
youth would blame the narrator for not leaving and for being “stupid.” In these instances
it seemed clear that youth have taken up a powerful message about personal
responsibility that shapes the way they see the decisions of others, if not themselves.
Implementers often asked for a volunteer before saying the name of the poem, in which
case boys often raised their hands. If the name was read first, then only girls volunteered.
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Boys reading the poem started to rush once they realized that they are narrating a
relationship with another boy. On a few occasions, male readers stopped. And even after
a boy read, the students would refer to the narrator as "she,” even though the gender was
not stated in the poem. Hegemonic recontextualizations could, in theory, serve as
valuable moments in which to challenge hegemonic beliefs. However, I found that
implementers rarely did this and instead often downplayed or ignored these comments.
The process of recontextualization clashes with collecting the kind of clear-cut evidence
required in evaluations of the visible curriculum. In the next section, I discuss the
tensions this caused for implementers.

The Problem of Evidence
Implementers knew that context shifted the meanings of curricula. All of the
implementers I talked with told me that evaluations don’t tell the full story about their
work. For example, Kim explained:
I understand from a fiscal perspective the importance of evaluation because you
have to prove that your program works and that's how you get funded to do the
work. It depends on the method. They like to do those question and answer forms
and Q&A's, which doesn't necessarily help because forced answers on filling out a
blank or fill in a bubble doesn't really get to the changes at the individual level;
which is how this program really works. These programs work in changing ideas
and thoughts and actions. It's not only about knowledge. You can know
something because you memorized it, but it doesn't mean that you actually
applied to your life.
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Joseph told me “I believe it’s effective for knowledge. I mean, I don’t want to say they
actually change, but some of them do, but some of them just grasp the information.” This
distinction, between “knowledge” and “actual change” came up repeatedly.
Many implementers believed that they could, as Rob put it, “do both,” meeting
the requirements of the curricula and engaging with youth about their lives. Others
believed that evaluations could misdirect priorities. Sean told me that they can cause one
to “lose site of what really should be going on. It could become a matter of numbers and
letters, rather than a matter of actually learning.” He continued:
I have always been biased towards numbers and statistics. They tell a story, but I
don’t know if they really tell the real story. It depends on I guess the results you
are looking for… We get so caught up in looking at concrete stuff. It is one of
things this is … it is not black and white. You can’t really gauge it, its a test so
they can cheat. Like, and you can’t … and then my problem with that is [the
difference between] multiple choice and someone is really learning. They got to
be able to really write an essay or paragraph or something to show you what kind
of information they are sinking in. A lot of what I do and people would be like,
“Well, that’s inadequate.” I go and feel. I feel things. I like to feel things. Feel the
room.
Every implementer I observed worked to engaged in classrooms as particular social
contexts, to “feel the room.” By the last session, facilitators had come to know many
students by name and some personal details about many.
There was a lot of pressure on implementers to show a change between the pre-
test and the post-test, so sometimes they struggled to squeeze in answers on the last day.
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On the last days, she would recap all of the key concepts as she handed out the survey
and she would say things like "do we remember the word for…?" or "what were the six
kinds of violence…" which were direct questions on the post-test. If no one knew the
answer, she would proceed to ever increasing verbal gymnastics so as hint at the answer
while not giving it away. At one point, trying to get a class to say warning signs, she
asked “what might you call a signal for something bad?” When there was no answer, she
said, “like a big flashing light.” “Camera,” one student said. She gave up after that and
just told them. Jennifer wasn’t the only one. Many implementers, in their own ways
helped students on the post-test. When I asked about this, they often explained that while
they were confident that youth have learned a lot, they worried that they had not have
picked up on the jargon. Joseph liked to spend the last day making sure that youth liked
him, so that they would take the test seriously. He often told jokes and showed off
pictures of his dog. Eleanor walked around and answered questions during the test. This
reads clearly to me as a reasonable act of self-interest and simultaneously the best thing
facilitators could do from a pedagogical standpoint. The system is set up so that the only
thing that gets counted, even if facilitators are engaging, charismatic and make lasting
connections, is what students answer on this post-test.
While implementers struggle to balance evidence and meaningful
recontextualization, policy debates about evidence-based programming rage on. Guerra,
Boxer & Cook point out, in their call for a new approach to evaluations, when the
“National Institute of Health (NIH) attempted to find a consensus on prevention programs
for adolescents based on a commissioned meta-analysis of studies since 1995. Only sixty-
seven of more than sixteen hundred studies of youth violence prevention programs were
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included on the basis of rigorous scientific criteria, and evidence for effectiveness was
noted in only fourteen studies” (p. 60, 2006). Evidence sets directions and often does so
in ways that are different than activists or practitioners would choose. Evidence-based
evaluations cost too much and therefore restrict what can and can’t get certification.
Programs that have shown evidence of their effectiveness have little incentive to adapt. It
is simply the manifestation of a market mentality.

Curricular-ization
I interviewed a teacher, Ms. D., a few weeks after we had finished In Touch With
Teens in her class. She had her students present on what they had learned. She explained
that most of the presentations were “exact carbon copies of what [the facilitators] did,”
but two weren’t. One student talked about healthy relationships with “a metaphor for a
working skateboard. The student brought in a broken skateboard and a really high
functioning, fancy skateboard and talked about how the broke down one was a bad
relationship and the other one was a good relationship.” The other presentation that went
beyond carbon-copy, “was these two young women [who] picked song lyrics from a
bunch of different songs. They went over physical, verbal, emotional and mental
violence.” I asked Ms. D why she thought so few had gone beyond what facilitators had
done:
We learn things the way that they’re taught to us and sometimes when we’re at
our most initial stages of comprehension, the best thing we can do is to reflect that
same thing back. As an educator, I know that that’s an initial stage of
understanding and grappling with something. It shows me that they got a really
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good basic grasp on what was being presented but I think there were only two
presentations that did something that were a higher level because I think it takes a
lot longer to internalize something and then be able to recreate it and capture the
essence of it in an original way.
I was glad to hear that at least three of the 20 or so students in her class had internalized
some of what facilitators had tried to teach them. That kind of feedback wasn’t available
through standard evidence gathering. But at the same time, I wondered about the
rationale of teaching young people about healthy relationships like it was a
straightforward facts.
Public Health curricula are systematic, short-term attempts to promote a measurable
change in knowledge, move towards prescribed values, and new behaviors. The allure of
a curricular approach is clear. They promise scaled, universal, reproduce-able, clear-cut
responses to massive social problems, but seem to avoid issues of legality, morality and
identity. And they do all this by changing individuals and cultures, while keeping
structures and institutions intact.
I call the process by which large-scale social problems come to be stripped of their
structural, institutional and intersectional contexts, and instead defined and treated as
educational and pedagogical problems of individuals, and thus, become the subject of
curricula design, campaign design, instructional training, exercises, and evaluation as
curricular-ization. By curricular-ization, I refer to both small scale and large scale
processes. For example, curricular-ization can refer to the specific way that an
organization like Hazelden creates a curriculum to deal with teen dating violence, called
Safe Dates, as well as the curricularization of teen-dating violence more broadly.
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In this chapter, I have suggested an extension of critical education theory onto
public health curricula as a means to make sense of a widespread process of
curricularization of social problems. I have focused on the classroom as a discursive
context, contested between discursive content of the curricula and the discursive process
of recontextualization. In the chapter that follows, I situate the classroom and students
within the larger power structure of the surrounding disciplinary institution.

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CHAPTER 6: TO DISCIPLINE & EMPOWER
A security guard leads me and Anne, a young White prevention volunteer, past
the keycarded door, through a maze of cubicles and attorney-client meeting rooms and
into the dim basement of the Children’s Court of Los Angeles. There is a long table with
five adults doing paperwork and beyond them the room opens up and about thirty Latino
and Black youth sit in rows of thin plastic chairs or stretch out on floormats, all facing
towards a big screen TV playing cartoons. An older Black woman introduces us, “These
folks are here to talk about a very important issue, violence, so please listen.”
Peace Over Violence maintains a standing monthly presentation on healthy
relationships at the court for young people who are waiting for their turn in the justice
system. Some young people are there for a hearing on criminal charges. Others are foster
youth waiting for news about their parents or guardians. As Anne and I walk to the front,
six or seven youth lean forward in their creaking chairs, others cup their head in their
hands face down on the mats in the front row, headphones in. They don’t register our
presence. To stand in this room, in the depths of a building that is the physical
embodiment of the entrenched structure of youth involvement in the criminal justice
system in Los Angeles, it is difficult not to feel the enormity of our goal.
Anne begins with the check-in. She asks the youth to say their name and how they
are feeling. She puts some enthusiasm in her voice, which echoes off the walls. She
points to students so they know when it’s their turn, moving up and down the columns.
Every couple minutes the loudspeaker crackles and we pause as another youth is called
out as their attorney arrives. If they are scared of what is coming, they don’t show it. I
catch sight of a young Black man towards the back, who smiles and leans in close to the
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girl next to him and they are both laughing and I wonder if relationships ever start here.
Then her face goes flat at something he says. “He’s being disrespectful!” she yells out
and she smacks her right fist against her open left hand, and sternly says, “I’m going to
have to take care of him.” The boy puts his hands out palms up and shrugs in a
performance of confusion. Despite the setting, this felt so much like the schools I had
spent the last year observing.
Anne waits a beat, and when it seems neither the young man nor the woman has
anything else to say, she continues the check-in. Most of the youth say they are “good,”
but some say “bored” or “tired.” One woman says, “I have no feelings.” A young boy
says that he is “frustrated” and pulls his hood close around his eyes. Implementers like to
use the check-in to “get the temperature of the room.” It lets them know if the energy is
low, if there is some bubbling trauma or a short fuse burning. After months listening to
young people describe how they were feeling, I knew how this would go. I had picked up
on the hidden grammar of emotion in places like this, which seemed to say, be vague and
unremarkable. Most of the youth described their emotional state as simply good, fine or
tired. On this day, waiting for their name to be called out in Children’s Court, I couldn’t
imagine they were good. In an interview Joseph, a twenty year old facilitator, described
the goal of the check-in at the start of a session: “creating that space where there’s an
understanding that this is all bullshit and like, I know that you have feelings there”
moving his hand in front of his briefly stern face. I recognized the face he made, his
performance of blank youth. I had seen it hundreds of times.
Today, as sometimes happens, a youth, in this case a young Black woman with
glasses, says that she isn’t good, “not at all.” This seems to set off an alarm in Anne. I can
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feel it too, a sense that I picked up in training and from watching implementers at work.
When a young person says that they aren’t good, in front of a classroom full of peers and
strangers, it really means that they aren’t good, so you should ask more. Anne pushes a
bit, “what’s going on that is making you feel bad?” Her drawl is smooth and soothing.
The girl, starts to answer, “my mom, she,” but then, like something catches her, she stops
and shakes her head, “never mind.” If this was my only peak inside a room like this, I
might have thought that her break had something specific to do with the court or with
Anne or with her peers’ eyes on her. But this happened nearly everywhere implementers
went. Implementers get used to this. They spend much of their working lives in the belly
of disciplinary institutions talking about empowerment and healthy relationships. This is
one of the first things implementers learn: the young people in those places want to talk,
often badly, but then don’t.
…
In her description of the “punishing room” Ann Arnett Ferguson explores the
schoolroom where students are sent by adults when they get in trouble (2001). The room
at the Children’s Court, and the dozens of other rooms I spent time in while studying
healthy relationship programs, were meant to serve a diametrically opposed purpose.
Much as the punishing room provides a window into the world of school discipline,
empowerment rooms provide a window into a parallel world of programs that are
universalized, decontextualized and largely discursive. They were the places adults sent
youth to learn the kind of lessons that would help them get out of trouble. I call these
spaces “empowerment rooms.”

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Empowerment rooms take on different designations and forms depending on the
larger institution in which they reside. At one school in northern Los Angeles, it was a
beige metal trailer on the outskirts of campus called the “Impact office;” the YWCA in an
office park in Pasadena; a claustrophobic health classroom on the east side of Los
Angeles. Empowerment rooms always seemed to be buried inside labyrinth-like
institutions and I trailed many implementers as they raced through hallways and between
buildings to find their room for the day.
Once inside, empowerment rooms look alike: cracked tiles, flickering halogen
lights, windows crossed with bars or no windows at all, heavy doors and industrial
furniture, a mix of cold institutional blue papered over with bright inspirational posters
shouting: Motivation! Respect! Leadership! Sometimes these places are health
classrooms, and posters on the walls scream out to youth to get tested or wear protection
or not bully, often alongside skeletons and models of brains. These spaces are liminal and
changeable by definition with folding chairs and white boards and no regular occupants.
In one empowerment room, someone had taped a sheet of paper with sky blue and clouds
painted on it onto the window, which had a thick film and bars that cast striped shadows,
As I spent time in empowerment rooms, I came to see this as a fitting metaphor; they
seemed to exist as a promise of hope within the bars and run-down conditions of
disciplinary institutions.
And they often were hopeful spaces, full of laughter, honesty, communication,
and caring. But unlike the high school punishing room, their effects were temporary.
They certainly weren’t places for young people to make a name for themselves. Ferguson
talks about the file cabinets that held proof of wrongdoing in the punishing room (2001).
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Empowerment rooms feel like the opposite. Youth show up in the room and then they
disappear, only to be replaced by another fleet of familiar strangers. Instead of a filing
cabinet, implementers carry with them a different form of evidence, a bag of worksheets,
pre- and post-surveys, sign-in sheets and a tattered curriculum, which have been wiped of
all identifying data. It means something that we keep track of everything wrong that kids
do, but won’t write down their names when they are involved in something meant to be
empowering.
If schools are total institutions that set out to discipline and control youth, then
empowerment rooms set out to seemingly counteract that process from within as they
teach youth that, as Lincoln, a Black youth, put it, “become a leader by becoming
yourself.” Empowerment rooms represent a larger system of meanings, relations and
contradictions in the lives of young people, who grow up within disciplinary institutions.
The programs I studied are just one of a number of empowerment lessons flecked through
the daily lives of youth; posters in the halls, videos shown in classes, curriculums, after-
school programs, social media campaigns and more (Eliasoph, 2011). These programs are
supposed to, and often do, feel like spaces where youth can “be themselves” and “be free.”
But, what happens when the bell rings the students leave the bracketed world of at-risk
and personal empowerment and walk out into their daily lives?
I interviewed John and Arianna, two POV youth leaders, both of whom are Latino,
after a long day of training at POV. They were feeling energized by all the exciting and
empowering things they had learned. The previous week, Arianna had decided that she
was a feminist and John was excited about learning community organizing. But they were
also frustrated and tense, as they prepared to get on the bus and head back out into the
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unequal world the experienced as youth of color in Los Angeles:
John: At [POV] they look at us as role models. And yet, when you’re outside of
that, you’re already stereotyped. You’re already, they already look at you as that
Latino or Black guy or girl.
Arianna: At [POV] they see us as more of the future. So they could educate us on
violence and then we could grow up and help others, like, educate them.
John: And outside they look at us as the next kid in prison, [or] working at a fast-
food restaurant.
Throughout my research, I found that inside disciplinary institutions, young people of
color were met with a collection of messages about themselves and their place in the
world that seemed contradictory to the discipline, policing and discrimination they faced
in their daily lives. They were told that they are free, that they are responsible, that they
can do anything they set their minds to. And at the same time, police officers, teachers
and administrators presumed that that they were up to no good. These conflicting
messages seem to be a defining factor of contemporary approaches to youth. Take for
example in New York City, where at the same time that the police criminalized young
men of color through a policy of “stop, question and frisk,” the City administration
launched the Young Men’s Initiative to empower young men of color – the same ones
who were being disproportionately harassed. Many schools are similar to the one Teresa
described:
There was always cops, like, in the school, so it wasn't really prevention. They
kind-of was just like, “Well if you're doing something wrong we're going to arrest
you.” But they also had like a clinic there, 'cause like, there was a lot of people,
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like, getting pregnant and stuff. So again, it wasn't necessarily prevention; it was
more like, if you need [it], if it's already happened you can come here. And then
also they have a gay/straight alliance, but there's barely any members. They don't
really talk. When they do talk about bullying it's kind of like…it's not really, like,
taken seriously. It's more of kind of like a thing where it's, like, they just want to,
like, tell you what bullying is, and then they're just like, “OK, if you see it, do
something.”
“If you see it, do something” is a particularly watered-down version of empowerment,
but in many schools there was an extensive investment in empowering youth and
promoting positive factors. This work is mostly done by social justice and public health
organizations, rather than in-school officials, and is backed by a data-driven and health-
focused approach to promoting “protective factors” such as empathy, positive
relationships and a feeling of school attachment (Vagi, Latzman & Hall, 2013). Lauren,
the head of policy at POV, explained how the organization worked to promote positive
factors and empower youth through their programs:
What we do is we use different tools that have been research-based. One of the
things we’ve used is Search Institute’s “40 developmental assets for adolescence.”
Those have both internal factors and external factors that affect a young person’s
ability to succeed in life. With youth development as one of our goals, we believe
that if youth are empowered as leaders, their voices are heard, if they feel
connected to adults, and have trust in adults that care about them in their lives,
they’re going to make better choices. If they don’t make a good choice they’re
going to have a safety net to experiment, and rehabilitate, and move forward and
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that’s going to reduce violence against women. It’s also probably going to reduce
drug use. It’s also probably going to increase likelihood of finishing school. It’s
also going to make you maybe more happy in your life and more able to succeed.
What’s wonderful about the protective, risk factor kind of framework is that
there’s lot of interconnectivity with a lot of the risks and high-risk behavior that
young people experience. Self-esteem is a big protective factor for both being a
victim or abuser in a relationship, also for drug use, also for capability to finish
high school and succeed in college, so just focusing on that one kind of covers a
lot of different intersecting issues. That’s our theory of change. What are those
things we can hold up? What things can we try and negate to create the change in
the individual level and then support that through organizational change and
systems change that supports the positive development and negates the risks and
the negative?
At POV, the protective factors often overlapped with and were folded in to a larger goal
of youth empowerment. As more school districts move away from zero tolerance policies
and towards in-school programs for youth seen as troublemakers, it seems like
empowerment programs are poised to extend to even greater degrees (Alvarez, 2013).
The contrast between the messages in empowerment rooms and the institutions
that surround them can be deeply ironic. I couldn’t help think as much while going over
the “teen relationship equality wheel,” a list of traits that “promote good relationships.”
The wheel includes a number of laudable qualities for relationships - honesty and
accountability, communication, shared responsibility, negotiation and fairness, non-
threatening behavior, trust and support and others. The first time I read it, I thought about
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its applications for the relationships in my life. And if one imagines interpersonal
relationships as free-floating dyads, it is helpful. But when we used the relationship
equality wheel in classes, I wondered how students understood their relationship to the
school and wider systems of authority. Those relationships, which dominated their lives,
included few if any of the traits laid out on the relationship equality wheel. What did it
mean for youth to be empowered in their interpersonal lives, but disciplined in their
institutional lives?
In this chapter, I explore how disciplinary educational institutions constrain and
enable the workings of empowerment. First, I explore how the disciplinary practices and
structural organization of modern schools disrupts interpersonal relationships between
youth and adults, as well as between peers. Second, I examine mandated reporting as
representative of a larger institutionalized system that silences youth experience.

Interpersonal Relationships in the Shadow of Discipline
Programs like those put on by Peace Over Violence are designed to drop in to
existing contexts, and therefore require an institutional sponsor – a teacher, counselor or
administrator – to organize their space, students and paperwork. On the ground, sponsors
often seemed to be everywhere at once and nowhere for very long as they worked with
multiple outside programs as well as school-based clubs. Despite this impermanence,
many youth viewed the adults who served as sponsors as reliable and trustworthy. One
sponsor, the counselor at her school, I must have interacted with nearly two-dozen times -
I could recognize the rapid clunk of her power walk around the corner – but we never
said more than two sentences to each other while trying to track down a particular young
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person or find an open room. I asked one of her students, Steven, a shy and consistently
frustrated Latino junior, who he trusted at school, he said: “At school, my counselor. She
knows a lot about me.” But for most students I talked with, and according to other studies
for many youth of color, there were no adults they trusted or whom they felt knew them.
To some extent, this is a numbers problem. In 2010, there was just one school counselor
for every 654 students in Los Angeles (kidsdata.org). I asked Valeria one thing she would
do to reduce violence in her school and she told me: “I would recommend a lot of
counseling. A lot of people to talk to, and have more women to come and talk to the
students, and guys to come and talk to the guys.” Facilitators couldn’t replace counselors,
but they did operate outside of the entrenched rules and practices of schools. Eleanor, a
former youth participant turned implementers, put it this way: “We’re like this weird in
between. We’re an adult so we can help them but we also are not like in this crazy
position of power that it’s like they can’t talk to us or they can’t trust us.” This put them
in a position to talk to young people about their lives in ways teachers and administrators
couldn’t.
In this section, I argue that school discipline, coupled with the deconstruction of
low-performing schools, undermines the development of healthy, trusting interpersonal
relationships. First, I show how young men and to a lesser extent young women
experienced police officers and school administrators not only as a system of disciplinary
control, but as symbols of interpersonal distrust. Next, I explore how an increasingly
fractured system of programs and tracks in public schools provides openings for youth to
cultivate interpersonal relationships with peers and romantic partners in the cracks and
gaps. I began to think of schools and community centers as increasingly deconstructed,
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struggling to piece together overlapping and contradictory requirements, impermanent
staff and students, and a wide array of outside organizations. Finally, I examine how
empowerment programs both provide vital spaces in which a different form of authority
is modeled, at the same time that they fail to significantly challenge the underlying
system of discipline and social distance.

Police officers: "No one respects them, but they still have that badge."
Scholars have shown that the use of crime control policies and the presence of
police officers and school safety officers within schools can accelerate what would
otherwise be small incidents into juvenile justice concerns (Kupchik, 2012, Nolan, 2011).
The Los Angeles School Police Department is the largest of its kind, with over 470 on-
site officers and a budget of $52 million (Community Rights Campaign, 2013).
According to a study by the Community Rights Campaign, LAUSD ticketed, cited or
arrested one out of every 100 students – 8,993 in total – the highest rate in the country
(CRC, 2013). Ninety-three percent of those tickets went to Black and Latino youth and
70% to males (CRC, 2013).
While hyper-policing criminalized young men of color on a systemic level, young
men made sense of these actions at the interpersonal level. I had gotten to know Alan, a
quiet and thoughtful young man in a program at a small charter school. He and I had set
up a time to talk, however as I was on my way to meet him the counselor walked briskly
by, trailed by a police officer, "Peace over violence, right?" she says smirking, "well, I'm
on my way to a fight." After waiting an hour for Alan to show. I found out the next day
that he was one of the people in the fight. When we rescheduled for a few weeks later,
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after he had returned from suspension he told me about his first run in with the police and
how that changed the way he saw authority. A few friends, the “wrong crowd” he called
them, were out spray-painting graffiti and he went with them, but didn’t do any “tagging”
himself. When the police came, he didn’t run like the rest of his friends:
Honestly, I was a good boy at that time. So I just stopped. I was scared, you
know. And ah, they pull us over. They handcuff us and stuff. And then I guess
one of the cops was I don’t know, he was a dick. He was. It was me, it was five of
us, but especially me and this one Black kid. The Black kid he got, well, he
didn’t get beat up, but like they, he was already in cuffs and they dropped him to
the floor. They kneed him to the floor. And then me, well, I didn’t do anything so
like they didn’t hit me or anything but you know they were like being rough on
me and stuff. And they were just saying you know like they were saying ‘oh, we
got reports of you guys you know vandalizing and whatnot.’ And they just kept
threatening us with stuff like ‘show us where you hid the knife.’ We didn’t have a
knife. We didn’t have any weapons so we're just, so we're confused. We're just
like no, we're just you know, doing, yeah, you have us you know doing graffiti
but that's it. We didn’t have any knives. They were saying ‘oh, we know you guys
have weed and all that stuff. ‘We didn’t have anything. That's all we had, well,
that's all they had. They had the spray cans, that's it. But they [the police officers]
were looking around, trying to pin something on us. And then at the end, I was
one of the ones that ended up getting, it was me, a black kid and this other guy
that they, we ended up getting arrested. And because of that, yeah, I got, I was in
like, I guess, jail for two days. But I mean, ever since then I just, I just had this
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thing with police. It's not – I don’t hate them – but it's just, I just felt like that
shouldn't be happening to kids, you know. Especially kids, like, this shouldn't be
happening. So I just think you know, police needed, they need to have some sort
of regulation, you know. First of all they didn’t have evidence. And second of all
they can't be abusing us the way they did. Like they kept dragging us, like talking
shit to us you know like saying stuff to us and it was, even if they, if I was with a
group that was doing something bad, you know it shouldn't have been the way we
got treated.
Given what he and his friend went through, and my own scholarly reading on
criminalization and police as a means social control, I would have expected Alan to speak
in larger terms about justice or to try to justify his own actions. Instead, much to my
surprise Alan spoke in very interpersonal and interactional terms. He didn’t take away a
lesson about an institution, but about a group of people. Lincoln, a Black youth with a
ready smile, told me about a time that two police officers pulled him aside while he was
walking with his “hoodie on.” Without clear cause, the officers “put the cuffs on” and
searched him. I asked him how many times he had been stopped:
A: I’ve been stopped a couple of times. They always let me go though. I’ve been
stopped before, yeah.
Q: And so how do you feel about that?
A: I guess, it’s, ‘cause there is some people that, you know, make them feel that
way, ‘cause you never know. So I understand they doing their job, but it’s, it’s
like, I don’t know, to me it really don’t matter no more as long as they don’t do
too much like, trying to be [inaudible] with the -- with it, or whatever but yeah,
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they, it, it takes up your time most times. Sometimes -- it kind to make you
irritated, but me, now I just, I’ve been through it so much it just, I got used to it I
guess.
Lincoln’s story sounded traumatic and frustrating and I wondered how often someone
had to be stopped, handcuffed and searched before one got used to it. But instead,
Lincoln tried to understand it from the police officer’s perspective. He explains that he
understands, that “people make them feel that way,” I think he means afraid.
Many young men told similar stories of being harassed, detained and ticketed by
police at school, and yet, most were conflicted about school police. Angel said this about
police, “Like sometimes you feel like a little crumb and sometimes they like give you a
reason not to like them. Like, well, like last time at my house, like they just came, just got
us, red lights, put handcuffs on us in front of, in front of my mom for no reason.” I asked
him he felt about that. “Like I don’t know, it makes you feel like you got no protection
and you can’t call nobody for it” he responded. And a few minutes later, Angel told me
that the only place he really felt safe was at school: “there’s security so that you always
have somebody to watch your back or to do something about this or that situation going
on.” I was glad to hear that he distinguished between the security at school and the police
officers which handcuffed him in front of his mother enough to feel some sense of safety,
but his words have stuck with me, “it makes you feel like you got no protection and you
can’t call nobody for it.” Angel’s interactions with the police were not only part of a
system of criminalization, but of isolation and distrust, which showed Angel that he was
on his own.

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For many young men, including those who had never had ben pulled into a crime
control measure such as stop and frisk or handcuffing, simply having police on campus
was still difficult. When I asked Tony what he thought about having police officers on
campus he told me: “I guess it's a good thing at times because there's kids that are
troublemakers and we need them, but at the same time, sometimes they're too, how do
you say [it]? They're too hard. Like if you do something they come all hard at you.” The
term “hard” refers to a particular kind of aggressive masculine toughness often used to
talk about young men involved in crime, not when talking about police. John, a Latino
youth built like a defensive lineman explained how a school police officer consistently
singled him out:
Well, it’s been three times where that same cop has stopped me because what I
wear is baggy. So, “Oh, I’m gonna get you. Oh, why you tagging?” I’m like,
“Whoa, whoa, bro, I just got out of the bathroom. Are you serious?” Then he’s
like, “Oh, you’re giving me attitude.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m not doing [that].” And
then that’s when he comes over, “Detention.” Then he was like, “Oh, I’m
suspending you.” I’m like, “What? What? Why? I just got out of the bathroom,
man.” [It was] for talking back, they take it as willful defiance. So that’s when all
that happens, when they’re doing random searches. He knows I’m coming
through that gate. So he pulls me aside. Random, sure, 50 people just passed and
automatically you stop me? Smart. Then I’m like, “Dude, I don’t want to go to
school and get searched every freaking week.”
John, like many young men, referred to police officers in casual terms like “bro.” It is
tempting to see this as simply an act of opposition on John’s part – that seems to be how
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the officer doing the search took it, but that didn’t seem to be the way that John intended
it. “Bro” is after all, not an insult, but a slang term of endearment. This is not to say that
John mistook the officer for a friend, but that in that moment he was trying to appeal to a
sense of relationship as a response to being mistreated.
During one classroom discussion about forms of power and control in their lives,
a small group of Black and Latino young men on probation for various crimes, including
robbery and assault, listed parents, teachers, the president, the principal and police. One
Black young man, Wayne, shook his head vigorously at the mention of police and said,
forcefully “the police don't have power.” Two other students nodded and several spoke
up to disagree. Another young man, Oscar tried to clarify, saying, "no one respects them,
but they still have that badge." This seemed to be an agreement that pleased Wayne and
the others. Wayne’s argument, that police lack power because they lack respect, was
surprising coming from a young man embedded in the probationary wing of the juvenile
justice system. Oscar’s suggestion boiled down to a validation of the difference, but
superiority institutionalized power when compared to an interpersonal form of power,
such as respect. These two forms of power were both clearly important to young people.
It seemed that while youth tried to understand where police where coming from,
they didn’t believe that the police tried to do the same for young men. For example, once,
while I conducting interviews at a small charter school for at-risk youth, a school officer
watched me give out several bags of chips to youth. Several students I didn’t know had
seen their friend with a bag and asked if they could have some and I obliged. Afterward,
the school officer, a middle-aged Black man, walked me out the front door and out to the
sidewalk. "You see that lab rat mentality?" He asked. I didn’t know what he was talking
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about, so I asked him to say more. “They’re always looking for stuff,” he told me. I
shrugged and he continued, antipathy in his voice. He told me that students would hang
around asking teachers for money for weed after school. He says the staff won't give it to
them, but they wait around anyways. He goes on to say that when he was a kid, his
parents worked, and he never took food from nobody, that wasn't how he was brought up.
He sees these kids as having a "take what you can get" attitude, and a laziness and
unwillingness to work. I was confused by his description, and fairly sure he had missed
something. I doubt that youth would ask teachers for money for drugs. But more than his
general confusion, I walked away with the strong sense that this guard seemed to truly
disrespect the youth he worked around every day. And I worried that he didn’t like me
either. I always saw him when I came in and when I left, and often on my way to and
from the bathroom. He was always cordial, but I came to believe that as I gave out more
bags of chips to the youth, he saw me as an enabling their “lab rat mentality,” when I was
just trying to hear their stories.

School discipline as relational
The institutions where one finds youth across Los Angeles are highly policed and
surveilled spaces, often bracketed by chain link fences, and rigorous sign-in procedures.
Most of the schools I spent time in felt to me like being trapped in the strange geometry
of an M.C. Escher painting; the result of underfunding and temporary additions made
permanent. Some newer schools seemed to have adopted the lessons of situational crime
prevention, a school of criminological thought which arranges the built environment to
maximize visibility and to funnel people towards public areas as a way to reduce rates of
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crime (Garland, 2001). One new school in downtown Los Angeles, for example, was a
towering concrete box, with a gated belowground parking lot. Once inside, it was a
panopticon (Foucault, 1977), classrooms ringing the outside, the interior open, with the
basketball court and open stairs. But, most high schools, especially the older campuses,
were vast and uneven and full of spaces hidden away from adult eyes. The first time I
went to the impact office, where empowerment programs took place at a northern Los
Angeles High School, I got lost on campus. I weaved in and out of buildings, catching
vignettes of kissing couples, snacking girls and hard-leaning boys. It was the first time
since I began observing empowerment programs that I saw the hidden spaces that
characterize so much of the relational life of schools. Thorne described the relative free
spaces youth develop within the disciplined structure of schools, “like grass and
dandelions sprouting through the cracks” in cement sidewalk blocks (p. 20, 1994). In the
era of discipline and deconstruction, I found those blocks in disrepair, paved over
repeatedly with short-term fixes. Youth still managed to find the cracks. Goffman’s study
of men on the run from police showed that systematic crime control didn’t internalize
their surveillance and become docile, instead it pushed wanted men to develop new
means of hiding (2014). Similarly, youth in hyperdisciplinary and deconstructed schools
learned new ways to avoid disciplinary action.
While young men reported more interactions with police and school officers than
young women, men and women alike most often interacted with discipline in the form of
school administrators and teachers. When I asked young people how they got into or
avoided trouble at school, the stories were always shaped by and in turn shaped young
people’s relationships – skipping classes to spend time with someone they were dating,
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passing notes to friends, play fighting. It is easy, from an adult perspective, to forget that
schools are not just places where youth learn about math and history, but where they
make friends, fall in love, develop mentors and enemies and learn about social relations. I
began to see the small troubles of school not just as overly strict discipline, but as a
system which interrupted the building of interpersonal relationships in raced and
gendered ways. In eighth grade, Flora told me, her friend “was trying to bully a sixth
grader” and Flora was there. She continued:
And then days later the Dean comes and he's like, ‘you three have to come with
me’ and I'm like, ‘what did I do?’ And he just started like telling us ‘we're going
to call your parents because you were bullying a sixth grader.’ I'm like, ‘I didn’t
do anything.’ And at that time I was being bullied by some other girls and he was
like, ‘well you were doing this.’ I'm like ‘I'm not doing it and I'm being bullied
and you're not doing anything to them.’ And he was like, and he started like
telling me like, ‘you know what? You should learn English.’ I'm like, ‘I just came,
how am I supposed to like speak English if I just came here?’ [He said] ‘Like well
I have a cousin that just came and in 30 days he just speaks English.’”
In this case, it seemed like the dean, frustrated and lacking clear grounds for disciplinary
action, blamed Flora for the lack of school intervention when she brought up her own
experience with bullying. This story and others like it made school police and
administrators look less like a concerted and powerful system and more like a group of
people justifying institutional failures with appeals to personal responsibility and reactive
disciplinary policies. Youth often experienced these interactions as racialized. Randy, a
Filipino youth told me, and his Latino friend corroborated: “It was a joke, but I've
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thought about selling weed at school, because I'm Asian, and every single one of the
teachers, the administrators, they're so nice to me, and they wouldn't even search me. I
had already thought about that. Random search, really? An Asian? That's unheard of.”
Take for example the story recounted by Misty, a Bangladeshi youth. Because graffiti is
heavily policed, when Misty brought paint to school to put handprints on friends’ clothes,
she put herself in the line of discipline.
Everyone at school said [when] they saw that paint, they will get you and they’ll
suspend you. And they [administrators] were like, “Who did you see with the
bottle?” and I had it and I was like, ‘I don’t know about that.’ And they’re like,
‘You’re gonna get in big trouble.’ And these girls lied for me, they’re like, ‘Oh,
it’s this little Black boy running around.’”
Misty avoided punishment. Young people learned that blaming others was an easy way to
protect them from harsh discipline.
It seemed unlikely that young men of color would have experienced this in the
same way. Young men were consistently worried that they would be blamed and
punished for things they hadn’t done. I heard several times from young men that they
believed that young women were more violent than they were. One young man seemed to
be speaking from experience when he told me "Females hit you and hit you hoping you
will hit them back, but if you do then they call the cops on you.” And while I am
skeptical of claims to gender equality in the use of violence (Kimmel, 2002), it was clear
that for many young men of color, disciplinary control influenced their relationships in
profound ways. At the same time, many of the same men who professed a fear of being
manipulated by women’s use of disciplinary authority, also wanted badly to have healthy
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and trusting relationships. I sat to the side of the room while group of young Black and
Latino men in a program for high-risk youth lamented the impermanence of relationships.
Oscar exclaimed, "Our generation, we can't stay together for three years." "One month!"
Dante interjected. Everyone laughed. Then they went on to talk about all of the things
that they felt got in the way of forming lasting relationships: peer pressures, weed,
chasing the latest trends, social media. They echoed many of the concerns marshaled by
school administrations.
In a program meant to cultivate youth leaders at a school near downtown Los
Angeles I saw how the scattered threats of administrators could accumulate. During a
discussion with about ten youth, most Latino, about engaging the principal in an
awareness campaign, students expressed doubt. The new principal they said was not just
a stern disciplinarian, but he showed no investment in the students. "He doesn't seem to
care" Susie said, "he has to go." Students went on to detail the lack of working water
fountains in the school and the perpetual absence of toilet paper. What was most startling
was that they were confident that this was a punishment from the principal, but they
didn’t know what for. That is, the system of discipline and punishment in the school
seemed so obscure and manipulative that they believed a lack of toilet paper and working
water fountains was a punishment for some unexplained issue. Teachers and
administrators did not feel like institutional forces, to youth they felt like living, deeply
petty adults who they saw every day.
During an ice-breaker, Jennifer would ask the class to split up into groups of two,
with one student in each pair making a fist. When she said go, the other student had 30
seconds to get the fist open. Students would command, pry, jam, tickle and offer cash.
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Most would fail. Maybe three times out of hundreds of pairs did I witness a student ask
their partner to open their fist. Whenever Jennifer did this activity, I would wonder, why
is it that youth didn’t think to ask? At least part of the answer, I believe, can be found in
the lessons they’ve learned at school.

Scattered Systems
Taken together, the stories of discipline that youth told me resembled the youth
control complex as Rios defined it (2011). But, individually, it did not feel “ubiquitous”
or “synchronized.” The youths I talked to engaged in various ways with the youth control
complex a dozen or more times a day, and while it was a significant organizing force on
their lives, it was characterized by unpredictable attempts at discipline, hidden spaces,
evasions by youth and authorities, and confusion over rules and laws. I found that in most
schools, there was at least a small but steady bubbling of aggressive teasing, pushing,
sexual harassment, bullying and play fighting, which was only occasionally met with
disciplinary action. The mechanisms of policing and social control seemed always to be
just out of sight, emerging to the forefront sporadically and, when then did emerge, they
tended to intervene excessively. Authority figures in schools were distant, overwhelmed
and trying to maintain an illusion of control. In one case, a long-term substitute teacher
read a statement from the principal following a fire alarm. The letter emphasized how
great the students are, except for the one bad apple that set a fire and how lucky the
principal feels to work at the school. After reading it aloud, the sub added his own
addendum: "so if you did it, they will find you, you will be arrested. They have cameras
now." If it was true, this threat seemed unnecessary. After all, the fire-starter would be
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caught regardless. Fighting, bullying and other acts against school policy, understandably,
happened away from administrators. This put administrators in the difficult position of
needing informants and interrogations if their goal was to dole out punishments.
The schools and community centers where programs take place are understaffed,
crowded and scattered places. Physical materials were often missing or not working: a
TV might be in the wrong classroom, markers might be dried up, or the air conditioning
might be broken. Time itself seemed broken or fragmented: was common for school time
to be interrupted by fire drills, campus events, loudspeaker announcements, counselors
pulling students, state-mandated testing, absences, scheduling mix-ups and more.
Frequently teachers or administrators mis-scheduled, cancelled at the last minute or
forgot entirely about programming. As one teacher told me “I sign up for everything, I
don’t look at what it is.” Students miss notes written on the board or sent home, they
transfer between classrooms or schools regularly or are simply confused by the constantly
shifting schedule. These were all routine troubles to which students became accustomed.
For implementers, this meant that they rarely knew what they would find when they got
to a school, what the teacher would be like, the subject matter of the course, the age,
gender, race or size of the class. It was common for a full quarter of the students in a
class to be absent for one reason or another. This makes it difficult to build up
connections with some of the youth who might benefit most from empowerment. One
young man couldn’t make it because his mother had put him into a mental institution,
other times youth just disappeared, and when I asked, the teacher would say that they had
moved, or that they didn’t know. Deconstruction shaped the school lives of high-risk and
probation youth more than it did the school lives of average students. I found that the
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more “risky” a youth is deemed to be, the more his or her school world fractures into
specialists and punishment and class time. While the uncertainty and scheduling mix-ups
and lack of care from the campus officials infuriated the implementers, the youth seemed
practiced at getting shuffled around and dropped into programs.
These disciplinary measures outline the shape and tenor of life for young men and
women of color in marginalized urban schools and communities, those same youth who
are most commonly enrolled in violence prevention programs. However, alongside the
surveillance, policing and punishment that has exploded into the lives of marginalized
youth in the past several decades, a parallel process has emerged which receives little
examination - the build-up of a universe of programs, metrics and nonprofit organizations
dedicated to intervening into the lives of youth deemed at-risk. While discipline, on it’s
surface, runs counter to the logic of empowerment, these programs exist alongside and
often within disciplinary regimes. In the programs, the heavy weight of punishment,
which lurks behind every move or word in the daily life of school, justifiably or not, is
pushed away, but remains a powerful organizing force. There are institutional threats and
promises built-in to the school experience. Implementers try to subvert them to an extent,
encouraging youth to speak their mind, talk out of turn and risk giving the wrong answer.

Control in the Empowerment Room
Early on in my research I began to notice the importance that teachers played in
the room during empowerment programs. Their absence signaled an opening up of the
space, at times for chaos, but often productively for implementers and youth alike.
Teachers’ presence often brought with it the weight of the school as disciplinary
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institution. But teachers represented this authority in different ways. A male baseball
coach, who also taught health, would bark out strictly at students to stop moving and to
listen, which they largely did. A tired-looking substitute said one word, even as the class
spiraled into play fights and shouting. An energetic woman and veteran health teacher,
who explained that if students behaved they would have fewer laps to run the next day,
was quick and compassionate with young men who acted out. One teacher, a social
justice activist in her life outside of school, valued the program as “in the best feminist
tradition of consciousness raising and political education, watered down in our current
society and non-profit structure.” A veteran teacher in LAUSD, a late middle aged white
man with a mustache, who spoke with a genial tone, told the class that his dad was
verbally abusive but he just “didn't listen.” One day, his brother and he told their father
that if he did it again they would “take care of him.” This runs directly counter to the
message that programs try to give to young people in abusive homes. A science teacher
with sharp red hair told her students that she thought this “would be good for them” even
though she believes that “dating is something you do because you want to meet someone
to marry.”
What these teachers had in common was that they represented the rules and
authority of the educational institution to youth (Nolan, 2011). This institutional
discipline could easily undermine facilitators’ work. I watched as Jennifer, a white female
facilitator, responded to several students that began jotting notes as she went over the
definition of consent. Jennifer, seeing it as a teaching opportunity, said, “you don't need
to take notes, we aren't going to make you do anything you don't want to." But the
teacher interjected: "I do want you to take notes, there will be a quiz and you will get
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points for it." The more the teacher ran the classroom like a regular class, the more it
seemed that youth acted like it was a regular class. For some this meant raising their
hands, even though implementers didn’t require it, or asking for definitions which
weren’t needed. For this reason, facilitators hoped that teachers wouldn’t stay around for
their lessons.
Like teachers, managers and staff at education-focused nonprofits represented
disciplinary and management styles to youth in those organizations in a range of ways.
Small community-based organizations in general took on more personal and encouraging
organizational styles than classrooms. The national organizations such as the YMCA,
YWCA, and Big Brother Big Sister seemed to suffer from financial challenges and high
staff turnover which could lead staff to mimic the disciplinary style of many schools. I
recall one after school program where the staff sat in the office and we could hear them
laughing on the other side of the wall. They would dart in and out of the room, shouting
seemingly randomly, when they are moved to exert some control on some behavior.
But I came to see that it wasn’t just the teachers or nonprofit staff that structured
the class. Rob, a implementer, while talking about the benefits of working in schools
described it this way: “We are invited in to classrooms where kids are basically prisoners,
so we get to talk to the prisoners and that is very helpful actually.” Rob cares about social
justice and is critical of the criminal justice system, and was at least partly joking. But his
statement points to the ways that the school lives of youth are structured by forces
beyond their control. The simple fact is, if youth had a choice in the matter, they might
not choose to be there. The strict rules of the school were more than helpful, they were
necessary aspects of the way that empowerment programs operate.
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When the teachers weren’t there or were barely active, implementers prided
themselves on not resorting to disciplinary measures. Youth, predominantly young men,
disrupted the class on several occasions. Students called out “bullshit” during
presentations and advocated that sexual assault was justifiable or enjoyable. Others put
their heads down, swung their backpacks at friends, or abruptly walked in and out of the
room. I never saw a facilitator send a student to the office, despite swearing, yelling,
fighting and other incidents that would have merited it. Facilitators are deeply aware that
when they are in schools or other institutions, they are in places where youth are often
met with harsh discipline. Kim, an African American implementer, explained:
[It’s] different from regular in-class education where they are talked down to and
they must listen to authority. Similarly, their lives, they don't have the opportunity
to speak up. Kids are to be seen not heard. You know you've heard all those
things. We actually encourage them to have a voice. We tell them that their voice
is important and what they are saying means something. Where other people go,
"Shut up. You're a kid. Sit in the corner and this is what you need to do." We don't
do that. We come from a place of empowerment.
The implementers did “come from a place of empowerment” when it came to youth, even
as it ran up against the larger system of school discipline. Yet they often failed to notice
the ways in which school rules structure their own work. Programs must fit into the
school block schedule, which limits time. The school also determines the size of the
class: even though teachers and facilitators agree that small class sizes dramatically
improve the impact of programs, schools are inclined to fit as many students into a class
as possible. In short, empowerment programs were fundamentally embedded within the
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institutional structure of the school.
In this section, I examine the ways that implementers managed the classroom
context while holding to their values of positive youth development and empowerment
and avoided discipline. To some extent, these strategies are informative - it seems clear
that such an approach, at least in terms of talking about violence and relationships, is
possible and productive. And at the same time, I draw out the ways that the larger school
discipline apparatus also constricted implementers, even while they sought to undermine
it. As I tried to make sense of this dynamic, I kept thinking back to a question that had
stuck with me, one that I had heard asked many times since by youth. A young woman
said that she had a friend who was in an unhealthy relationship, but that friend didn’t
want to get out of it. The woman telling the story, asked what should she do - she was
proud of herself for recognizing the pattern and she had gone to her friend to explain it,
but that wasn’t enough. Now, she didn’t want to tell her friend what to do, that would be
taking away her power. She felt stuck. The answer was to get her friend to make the
choice without forcing her. The same could be said of of empowerment programs: they
set out to enact a form of social control on their audience, but one of their own choosing.
In regular school life, students were rarely if ever asked to talk about their
personal relationships, so implementers needed to work to, as Eleanor put it, “get them to
feel more relaxed and comfortable just because of the issue that we’re talking about,
because it’s like they never get to talk about this stuff and we’re here saying, no, it’s
totally cool, like let’s have a conversation about your boyfriend or your girlfriend.”
Facilitators understood that youth, even if they had close relationships with teachers,
often felt hesitant to talk to them about their relationships. Jose explained,
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Well, I'm there to implement a curriculum of preventing violence against women.
But I want to say I'm more there to be a friend, someone that they can come to in
counsel, a counselor, a guy who is there to empower them. I come there just as a
regular guy. I am not coming with any authority. I'm not their teacher. I might
share my title, but I think a lot of these youth have enough with people
of authority. I'm just coming like, "Hey, this is who I am. We're going to talk
about a subject, and we are at the same playing level. Nobody here should have
more authority than others, and nobody's less than or more than." I'm there to just
have a open and safe space.
Later in our interview, I asked Jose how he managed to fulfill this role, while also
keeping control in the classroom. He told me, “it is tricky to be like sure, I'm there to be a
friend, and I'm there to be someone who empowers you, but also I have some authority
on what I'm saying. Therefore, like, ‘Hey, let's listen up, because maybe you can carry
this and you might learn something.’ You know?”
Because facilitators dismissed top-down power and control as authoritarian and
aligned with the unfair discipline of the school, they needed to use a variety of strategies
to maintain order in the classroom and get through their lesson plan. The art of these
presentations was in validating and ignoring unhelpful questions into the air without
dismissing them and in giving leading responses that were designed to make students
think that they came up with it. Facilitators learned these skills in training. Take for
example this excerpt from my fieldnotes:
Ida, a young Black woman implementer, is presenting on the first three sections
of the ITWT curriculum. She has a wide smile and an infectious energy. She is
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going to show us what the presentation would look like. She switches into what I
recognize as a teacher tone and rhythm and asks for definitions of power and
control, writing them up on the board as we go. She shows us how to shift the
focus in order to “guide the audience towards the answers” she wants. An answer
that is correct, but doesn't contribute to the lesson, like "energy" is written down,
and validated, "that is a really good one" and never returned to. When someone
calls out "force" Ida says “good, say more about that.” She describes this as
"putting it back on them." She explains, "one of my strategies is to say ‘what else?’
and then pause and then I say it [the answer], I know I'm going to say it. It is a
way of controlling the audience."
Ida explains how to "work them around" a disruptive or “tricky” response.
For example, in response to the question "what is a healthy relationship?" we
might get "jealousy." "I say, what do you mean by jealousy?" "showing you care"
and “being protective" are both called out. "Those can be good things: protection,
safety,” Ida says. Then she goes back to an earlier answer, "but jealousy means
that there isn't respect."
Moving on to talk about control in unhealthy relationships, Leona emphasizes
wording again: "we never say "take away your power" we say, "make us feel like
we don't have power." Ida tells a story of a girl who threatened to leave her
boyfriend if he didn't stop using drugs. The story is meant to show that all threats,
even one's that have the person's best interests in mind, are using power and
control. Her point is a good one; there are better, less controlling ways to help
someone - work with them, tell other friends, etc. - that don't set up that power
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inequality. I worry that this cuts off the realm of possibility for activism - if we
aren't supposed to exert power, how can we change institutions?
The distinction between power and control felt unearned when I came in to
POV 3 minutes late on the second day of training. Sarah and Isabella spoke in low
slow tones. They really don't want to start keeping track of who comes in
late. They explain that it is only two hours today and coming in late means
missing a good chunk of it. They gesture at the possibility that they might dock
half a session for lateness, and missing more than one session prevents one from
earning the credential. We are being scolded even though half the class isn't here
yet and we are on time, but that is beside the point. The very fact that we can be
scolded says something about the dynamic, we may not be paying, but POV is,
this training (as we are reminded on the group agreement) costs them money. And
we are there for credentialing. Empowerment talk is different from empowering
contexts.
The irony is of course that Ida is teaching about power and control from the front of a
room. It is a lesson. The students have to be there, have to pay attention and have to
contribute. Ida’s advice works well on the ground and nearly every facilitator developed
his or her own range of mechanisms of informal classroom control. However, this is not
the way the facilitators think about it. To them, their mechanisms of informal control are
largely invisible. Implementers have power, even if they like to pretend that “we are all
equal.” Joe liked to begin his classes by clapping his palms together and saying “Good
morning.” He repeated this until every student faced forward and echoed him back. Then
he said "stand up" and with a slow grown the students all would rise, "okay, sit down" he
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would say to more groans. But implementers were conflicted about how best to enact
power. At one point, when cold-calling people, Jennifer asked a younger boy in a hooded
sweatshirt to read, when he hesitated she asked, "do I have your consent? No? No
problem, you don't have to." More often implementers didn’t provide that choice,
especially if students were distracted or not listening. I found that the discourse of
empowerment, while it held the potential to let students say and do things in new ways, it
was often used as a set of tools to consolidate control in the classroom and manage
disruptions.
One of those tools was the semi-democratic creation of class “ground rules.” The
facilitator would ask the group “do we have any ideas for ground rules?” and would write
the answers on a ream of newsprint. If no students jump in, they offer their own additions,
like they are a part of the group: “What about ‘don’t interrupt,’ do we think that’s a good
idea?” The specifics varied by class, but many rules came up consistently: step up, no
violence, be respectful, be honest, and let others finish. Facilitators and youth did not pick
these out rules of nowhere; they chose them out of a shared interest in discouraging
aspects of the institutionalized school structure, marked from there perspective by blame,
aggression, dishonesty and competition. This process worked through a sort of
performance of consensus. Facilitators could ask for ideas and then write the ones they
wanted on the board or ask for ways to revise ones they didn’t like. One student
suggested, “no talking back” as a ground rule. Rob wanted to get further into this,
encouraging the student to explain what he meant. The teacher encouraged this rule,
which I understood; it seemed like a good rule. Rob didn’t think so. He wanted to create
a trusting space, in which men could be critical to each other. They try to manufacture a
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democracy within a dictatorship. If a student acted out, they would point the “ground
rules” that the class had collaboratively laid out and say “we all agreed” – which is an
overstatement of the democratic process that goes into ground rules.
Facilitators don’t want to tell any students that an answer is wrong or a
contribution is unhelpful or off-topic, because they feel that the students should be
encouraged to answer and feel that their contribution is appreciated. This is easy to do
when students give the correct answer, but more difficult when they give any number of
responses that are outside the parameters of the program’s goals. This includes incorrect
but well-intentioned contributions, bizarre responses that may or may not be jokes at the
presenters’ expense, and racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise troubling responses. Rob
referred to these strategies as “management styles.” He explained that, “they can talk for
four minutes. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds of what they say is complete
bullshit and stupid. Then they can say twenty-five seconds of something that is smart, and
I’m not going to say oh man, you crazy. I’m going to zero in on that twenty five seconds
and say I really appreciate that.” Facilitators actively work to validate all answers, no
matter how out there or offensive, because participation is more important than right
answers. Rob, calls this “sitting in the ignorance,” half-joking. Implementers see
validation as a vital antidote to the way youth are so often invalidated. Rob told me, that
often guys, “they’ll say stupid things and if you react to that, you are going to put them
on shut down.” Thus facilitators also take jokes as serious recommendations and rephrase
them, which serves to undercut the class clown. In one class, a student suggested going to
TGIFridays with a survivor of violence to cheer them up, the facilitator responded by
saying “yes, you could spend time with them and support your friend.” Validation is
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important to youth and it does seem to help. But it doesn’t mean that those issues or
thoughts are being dealt with. Frank and Joanna open up for questions. One of us asks
what to do if youth ask about their stories. "I never say yes or no." They thank the
person for the question and "refocus," saying, "we're not talking about personal stories,
we're talking about power and control."
Disruptions occurred in two broad types. The first were programmatic troubles.
Classes were cancelled or interrupted by testing. Audiences hadn’t been taught what
words meant or they misunderstood them. I once heard a student explain “sexism” meant
“who is sexier.” Often, examples or scenarios weren’t culturally relevant or were
confusing. A role-play about two young people going to a movie was immediately
dismissed because the students said that they didn’t have enough money to go to the
movies. Often, students who had missed the previous week's class struggled to keep up.
The second type of disruption was interpersonally-felt problems. Topics or stories caused
students to have intense emotional responses, which implementers called “being
triggered.” Other times emotional events outside of class carried over into class and even
though they weren’t related to the topics, students were sad or angry. A beloved teacher
died. A half dozen times, young women were comforted by their friends over a breakup.
Other times, students were angry at their teacher or a classmate and made a show of
acting out. Students distrusted or didn’t respect implementers. I have seen students play
fight, yell out, sing, and simply walk out. Or they were interested in personally
connecting with the implementer, asking about their lives, their relationships or their
relationship status.

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Programmatic disruptions required implementers to explain formal educational
concepts, but they often did so by appealing to youth’s lived experiences, while avoiding
giving off a sense of “know-it-all-ness,” they have to “check that at the door.” Tori
explained how implementers had to approach youth, “I don't know all the information
about what's happening for you. What it looks like for you may be different, but then you
tell me. I ask you, "What does it look like?" Then I go, "Oh, OK. According to what I
know from my expertise that is blah, blah, blah, blah." I can label it. Maybe you call it
something different, but based on my expertise I know that that is really X, Y, and Z, and
that's not, "Oh, he just loves you." No, that's kind of control and abuse. Definitely can't be
having a know-it-all attitude, but they can't ask you a question and you say, "I don't
know." Then you lose all credibility.”
Empowerment, as enacted by implementers, signals the outlines of a meaningful
alternative mechanism of social control, one which actively involves youth in making
sense of and constructing the structure in which they find themselves. That implementers
were able to accomplish this, while situated within the larger disciplinary structure of the
school is not only a signal of their skill, but of the viability of empowerment on a larger
scale. However, the limits of empowerment as a means of social organization while
situated within disciplinary institutions are also visible. Perhaps, this is nowhere more
clear than in the case of mandated reporting rules.

Mandated Reporting
Eleanor, Ben and I were in a small classroom in a storefront charter school in south
Los Angeles, light pouring through the big window that looked out on the main street. It
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is Ben’s first presentation after completing violence prevention specialist training a few
weeks ago. He is excited to speak to a room of young people. He has volunteered to “do
the mandated reporting bit” of the standard introduction and he wants to get it right. He’s
a young white man and he wants this room of young Black and Latino men and women
to trust him and he thinks this topic might put them off. After we give our names, and a
short explanation of the organization, it is his turn. “We want this to be a safe place,
safety is our priority.” He pauses, letting that settle, “but we are mandated reporters.”
Violet, a Black female student in the front row chuckles and finishes his sentence “which
means that if we hear that you or someone else is getting hurt, then we have to inform the
authorities."
Mandated reporting is a system of rules for specific professionals that work with
youth who are required by law to report to authorities if they have any suspicion of abuse.
The list of professions is long and covers many of the people that youth interact with: all
school employees, law enforcement officials, any certified health professional, religious
leaders and more.
Before hearing Violet’s comment, I hadn’t thought much about the role that
mandated reporting played in violence prevention work. It seemed like an inconvenient
but necessary disclaimer. In classrooms, implementers talked about violence and
relationships and it would be reasonable for young people to see it as a chance to talk
about something they had experienced. Implementers weren’t trained for that, so it made
sense to pass the information on to authorities. But as Violet repeated it perfectly, it
became clear that she had heard it many times before. I began to ask youth about
mandated reporting and nearly all of the youth I spoke with knew it, not just from our
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organization, but others, and many could recite a version of it. It was part of the
background noise of their lives.
I asked Violet’s teacher about mandated reporting and she told me “Every year in
LAUSD, I had to take that ridiculous online training that’s: Here’s who you report to. It’s
not your job to research and evaluate whether it’s an issue for mandated reporting. Let
someone else handle it. I appreciate that from the perspective of you don’t have to do
200% of the work…I did the whole spectrum of free, completely accessible to $40,000 in
debt, completely inaccessible and not a single program does anything to equip us as
educators to think about [mandated reporting].” Implementers received training on how
to be supportive, but the ultimate take away message was similar: “let someone else
handle it,” someone who was trained to deal with trauma. As Kim described
implementers’ work, “It’s not counseling. Its just education.” Curricula provided a
similar message, as seen in these guidelines from the Safe Dates curriculum: “Make sure
students do not use real names or too many details when talking about other people,” “be
aware that some students in your class may be experiencing dating abuse or other abuse,
perhaps at home. Don’t force students to answer questions if they’re uncomfortable doing
so.” “It’s difficult in a class environment to guarantee complete confidentiality. Warn
students of this fact, so they don’t reveal too much.” Behind all these guidelines and
trainings about mandated reporting there seemed to be an implicit message: try to keep
students from putting you in a position to report. And if they do hint at something
suspicious, you shouldn’t talk to them about it.
School professionals seemed trapped by this rule. For example, a school
counselor told students that if a friend was experiencing violence, they should go to an
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authority figure. But then she paused, and clarified that sometimes that may lead to more
violence. One student responded that the authorities "can give a rats ass" and only care if
they can make money. Sarah, an implementer, validated this point, saying how authorities
aren't always the best ones to contact, "sometimes they let us down.” Ms. F, a veteran
gym teacher with spikey blonde hair speaks with authority. She emphasized the gravity
of sexual violence, focusing on the fact that “someone in this room definitely has
experienced it.” Then she would catch herself and explain that as a mandated reporter she
has had to report violence, and one time that led to a child being taken away from his or
her family on Thanksgiving. She seemed to repeatedly get caught in a discursive bind,
saying both that she knew someone was experiencing violence and that she didn't want to
know, because then she would have to report, but also, that reporting was always good.
Many implementers worried that even explaining their role as a mandated reporter
would be lead young people not to trust them. Sean explained, “You go in there and
immediately, ‘Oh, I am a mandated reporter.’ It is like, ‘Oh what the fuck is that. I am
going through violence so I can’t even come talk to you even though you are dwelling on
the subject and I got a lot of emotions and a lot that is important in my life. I would love
to disclose to somebody, but you’re mandated reporter — reporter, what the fuck is this
going to be on Channel 7. Who is going to notice? Is my dad going to know?’” In
addition to joining the list of adults who had broken the trust of youth, many
implementers were deeply skeptical of the system they would be reporting to. I had heard
horror stories about the Department of Children and Family Services and the foster care
system or how reports on abuse at home, when brought to the attention of parents could
cause more violence. Implementers knew that reporting a suspicion was likely to open
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that young person up to even more scrutiny from institutions that didn’t always treat them
with care and respect. And implementers often had to juggle what happened when
schools were informed. One principal reportedly asked a woman who had been sexually
assaulted why she had gone to the party in the first place. Another principal expelled a
male student who was stalking a female student. The man continued to stalk the woman,
but now outside the confines of the school he was no longer accessible to counselors and
adults. Donna was one of the few implementers to have actually filed a report. And as a
former youth in POV programming, she provided an insightful view:
The adult of me understands that it’s there to protect the youth and to help them
and to make sure that whatever unspeakable act that’s happening, try to resolve,
try to stop it and I understand all that. The part that I don’t like about it is the fact
that here’s this young person who is confiding in me to tell me this secret or tell
me this problem and that now has to turn around and go tell some other adult and
who’s now going to go tell another adult, who’s going to tell another adult and
then now it’s going to come back to their parents and their parents are going to be
super-pissed at them.
There’s all this internal trauma and drama that happens in your home that
[they feel like] ‘fuck, I wish I never would have told you’ kind of happens with
them. So, that initial anger that happens from young people towards you when
you have to do that, it really sucks. The idea is that the proper agencies can step
in and do their work, right? But when it comes to DCFS, they suck (laughs) and
so sometimes I feel like is this going to do more harm than it is good and then I’m
like required by law to report this and I’m just like, mmm, do I really have to?
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Those are my inner struggles with it of breaking the trust that this young
person is now building in me that I can never regain, which most of the time
that’s what happens. Of then having an entity step in that I know historically and
presently doesn’t do a very good job of doing what they’re supposed to do, even
though that is the only thing that exists that’s supposed to help or knowing the
fact that now I have this information and this young person is going to continue to
go through this dreadful thing. Either way, it sucks.
Implementers described being “afraid” and “freaked out” about the prospect of reporting.
They worried that reporting could expose youth to added scrutiny and humiliation or
worse, put the young person in harms way if a parent is abusive. And in the long run,
implementers fear that reporting will push the youth to have even less trust in the system
than before, as implementers seem to betray them. While implementers trust that major
instances of abuse will be reported, they know that many of the youth they see have had
some form of violence, often minor, committed against them.
It’s not that implementers didn’t care. They viewed the traumas experienced by
youth as the most moving and serious part of their work. Rob explained one story he
heard while working in a juvenile impact program: “these are kids that have gotten in
trouble with the law. And this one young man shared a really, I won’t tell his story, but a
very gripping, frightening, dramatic story. And I was so shook by his story that when I
left, driving home I cried, and when I got home I could not shake this visual image that
had come to my mind when this guy told his experience and it haunted me, it still haunts
me.” Rob talked about this story often, but as he did here, he refused to recount the story
itself because he believed that it wasn’t his story to tell.
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Implementers were required to actively remind youth that they were mandated
reporters. Sometimes this backfired, Marvin, a young Latino man in a high school class,
joked that a female peer was abusing her boyfriend. “Come on, be honest, we are all
family” he said, laughing. Eleanor interjected; "I know you said we are all family, and
this is your class and we can talk about whatever you want and I want this to be a safe
space, but I want to remind you that all of the adults in here are mandated reporters,
which means that if we hear something that has to do with your safety we have to report
it." Marvin jumps in laughing, "aw no, you're not family no more. I don't trust you now."
Eleanor looked a bit taken back, "I'm just telling you how it is, you can talk about 'a
friend' but if we get the sense that your safety is in danger, we have to say something.
And I'm telling you this because I want you to know, I could just not tell you if I wanted
to." Eleanor tries to spin it as a way that we are close to them, describing us as the parents
in the family. Marvin says that "parents don't snitch though" and Eleanor tries to explain
that it isn't snitching, it is looking out for their safety. Variations on this scene play out
regularly in violence prevention programming, as implementers navigate their conflicting
relationship to mandated reporting rules.
The tensions around mandated reporting are a byproduct of larger contradictions
between widespread distrust of the state as a means to deal with youth people’s troubles
and the need for a larger system of youth support. I asked Violet’s teacher how she felt
about mandated reporting: “I don’t think that mandated reporting is benign. I think that it
does suck people up in particular ways but I also think that there are real moments where
we need something bigger than what a teacher or a school or family can figure out. For
me, it’s not a particularly clean answer.” In this way, it seemed that an uneasy stasis had
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been reached: If youth told stories which included clear danger, then implementers would
report, but they did what they could to avoid these stories, and by extension, discussions
of the lived experiences of youth. Mandated reporting rules are one aspect of a system
that hides the experiences of youth from adults, from institutions and from each other.
Youth learn that their personal stories shouldn’t be told and further, that they are not
justifications for their actions.

Youth experiences of mandated reporting
Most youth said that they had felt betrayed by adults in positions of authority at
some point. And while very few youth I talked to report that they had gone through the
mandated reporting process, most young people’s understandings of mandated reporting
were mostly filtered through their general distrust of authorities and adults in general.
Leah seemed frustrated at the mandated reporting rules, “Like, you know, the person is
going to feel kind of like, whoa, like I just told her this. It was really hard for me to tell
her this and automatically she’s going to go, you know, snitch. So it makes you feel like
I’m not going to tell anyone anything anymore.” Leah was adamantly against “snitching”
except in extreme circumstances, like murder. I pushed Leah to explain how mandated
reporting was like snitching, and she explained it using another example of
institutionalized monitoring based on race and class:
OK, like I don’t like when I walk into a store and because I’m black they think
I’m going to steal something and they like walk around and be like, you know,
like that’s annoying. Like that’s the kind of monitoring that I feel like
automatically, oh, you’re assuming, you know. And that makes me feel some
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kind of way because I’m far from that. Like, you know. So it’s just like -- do you
get what I’m saying? But I get it on another level because I’ve like run stores and
stuff and I don’t want something that I bought stolen, you know, so there’s a way
that you can monitor people where they don’t feel uncomfortable and they feel
like you’re not discriminating against them or like, you know, making them feel
little, less than, you know, walking around feeling like, oh, is it just because of the
way I look that you think automatically something.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what Leah was getting at. Following a young black woman
around a store seemed clearly an act of profiling, while mandated reporting was, in my
mind, an act of protection. But as I thought more, I came to see things from Leah’s
perspective. To her, both were forms of monitoring by authorities based in part on
assumptions about her social location. And she did not trust the institutions that were
reported to any more than the storeowners who followed her.
I found that most youth did not want to involve authorities in any aspect of their
personal lives. More than anything, they wanted just to be able to talk about what they
were going through with a trusted adult. They wanted to connect with adults and to share
their experiences, but felt that it was adults and their dedication to authorities that
undermined these goals. Kashmir captured this general sentiment when she explained, “a
lot of people might have stuff done to them and nothing changed about the situation. [So]
they’re scared to tell [authorities] about it for, so they could tell [the facilitators] and
express how they feel about the situation if they don’t have anybody to tell.” Most of the
youth I talked to about mandated reporting put it in these personal terms - youth want
somebody to “tell,” but not police and not an institution. Mandated reporting, as well as
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the push to have youth call a confidential hotline, run against this expressed desire.
One of the few stories that I heard from youth who had actually been through the
experience of mandated reporting confirmed many of the fears about the system. Alice, a
Muslim youth who wore a bright red headscarf the day that I interviewed her outside her
school library, moved to the United Stated in 8
th
grade, and felt very isolated. She told
me:
I have got in trouble several times with the school when I felt depressed and I
actually told a friend, a teacher that I really trust that I’m feeling like that I need to
end myself or something. Then I got in trouble badly, like my parents got called
up and all that stuff. My parents got a conference. Like, at the beginning of this
year again, and I was with a, like, counselor or psychiatrist, like, talking, like, she
was talking to me, like, every single Tuesday she would talk to me. But I felt like
that I don’t need it but, you know, the school I just -- I’m just, like, 24 hours
monitored, but, you know, I’m in trouble and I’ve been. But I really liked [the
psychiatrist] because she was somewhat like she was Indian, and she could, she
could speak my language so my parents felt, like my mom really felt good about it
and I had less pressure at home.
Alice, as well as her mother found working with the psychiatrist extremely helpful. But,
Alice’s wording was telling. She understood the interventions as “trouble” and she felt
“monitored” around the clock.
Monitored meaning because the -- she’s like someone’s there with me.
Someone’s coming from the -- the school organized this person to talk to me.
That means they’re getting records for me every single day. From the health
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office there are people that see -- looks at all my records, what am I doing, how
my grades are, attendance, so they report it to the organization that the
psychiatrist from and then they communicate and I’m feel that I’m really watched
like, you know. I feel whatever I’m doing here this and that like whatever I’m
doing even if I’m just there in front of the camera over there just putting
something in my backpack. I’m being watched like seriously, because I’ve been
in trouble because they always feel like oh, I’m gonna kill myself, you know?
This was far from the outcome that the school likely wanted to invoke with its
psychiatrist and engagement with Alice. Instead, Alice told me this felt like a betrayal
I thought that whoever I spoke to would keep it to herself. But, you know, they
expressed it to everyone. Now everybody’s like oh, you’re -- because
everybody’s also like oh, ‘you might not hurt yourself, you might hurt someone
else,’ you know, I would never do that like this country is all I -- I -- we’re
already, on the media, my group with terrorism and all that stuff. I rather not
even go there like even bully someone like saying something. So I’m already
portrayed in this school, like, yeah, on the media and everything, Fox News, you
know, so I’m already under a lot of pressure.
Feeling already stereotyped because she was Muslim and wore a headscarf, the added
pressure from authorities and then her peers when they heard she had talked about hurting
herself, caused her to feel even more uncomfortable at school in ways that led her to hold
back emotions and not to form lasting connections: “I try to act not myself in this school.
I try to act like as much as polite I can, you know, not to express anger or anything even
if I’m like mad or something I wouldn’t cry or anything, you know, don’t make a drama
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queen out of it.” Alice explained that she felt this way everywhere, and that there was
nowhere she felt like she could be herself.
In this way, mandated reporting, even though it didn’t involve the state, but rather
the school, actually ended up pushing the student further away from the valuable social
connections that are vital to youth development.

How to Avoid Stories
On the third day of class at a charter school for young people who had been pushed
out of traditional high schools, Anthony, an 18-year-old Latino I had never spoken
directly to, held back tears, pulled me aside in the bathroom. He explained “I did
something I’m not happy about, but that I don't like telling people." He loved his
girlfriend, but they were always yelling at each other and he worried what he might do if
she “kept pushing him.” His girlfriend made him cut himself and he got really mad at her
and he didn’t know if he could take it. He wanted to get counseling. He didn’t want to
call the hotline because he didn’t trust them. He also explained that he was nervous that I
might “get him in trouble or something,” but he desperately wanted to know what to do.
Anthony’s revelation illustrates the pressure that the school put on young men to embody
un-emotional masculine standards and distrust authority figures. I talked with Anthony
for a couple minutes and asked if I could talk to his teacher about this and then the three
of us made a plan. Disclosures like this were rare, but when they happened I was always
impressed by the way that implementers handled them.
Part of what draws prevention programs to a particular school or community is
the understanding that the youth there are likely to have experienced some form of
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trauma, which puts them at risk for violence. Data has shown that at least one third of
youth, and even more in poor marginalized neighborhoods have some experience of
violence (Department of Justice, 2012). And yet, during my entire time in the field, with
at least 2000 youth across Los Angeles, I never saw an incident that led to a mandated
report to be filed. One might imagine that low rates of disclosure are simply because
youth don’t want to talk to strange adults about their lives, but that wasn’t the case.
Instead, implementers actively avoided stories while working to support youth.
In training, implementers were taught that if a youth starts to tell a story which
might lead to a disclosure, they should "pause" the conversation because it is hard to talk
with a full room. Implementers should thank them for what they have said, and encourage
them to speak after class. I did see this happen on several occasions. When talking about
how to help a friend, a young woman raised her hand and said, "I don't usually tell
anyone this, but I was molested when I was younger, like 8. I don't like to tell people
because I'm worried they are going to use it against me." This hangs in the air for a few
seconds before Eleanor spoke up. She thanks her for sharing and then validates her fear,
saying that we live in a "rape culture.” The young woman explains that she hasn't talked
to her school counselors about it because she doesn't trust them. Eleanor thanks her again
and returns back to the scenario at hand. The woman begins again, this time a bit fragile
looking, and explains that she thinks about this everyday, that it has a big impact on her
life. Eleanor validates these feelings and gives an explanation of PTSD. Then moves back
to the scenario. This is the way POV trains implementers to deal with these situations.
And this practice seemed difficult practically and emotionally for Eleanor. She wanted to
be able to talk to the young woman, she later told me, but not in front of the whole class.
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While Eleanor suggested that the young woman stay around to talk after class, as is often
the case, she didn’t show up.
Implementers have a number of strategies to keep youth from telling stories that
may include violence in the first place. One method is to encourage youth to frame their
experiences as those of vague friends as third parties, instead of themselves, as JJ, for
example explained: "Just don't give us too many details, tell us about your friend." He
lingered on friend as a way to hint that the story can actually be about them. The students
pick up on the hint, and begin their story again, “so my friend…” If students are trying to
determine if something is abusive, implementers encourage them to use “hypotheticals,”
and to say “what if” before asking their question, instead of describing lived experiences.
This method of talking about private troubles is clearly modeled by the presenters and
taught to the youth. In one instance, a high school student asked if hitting someone with a
ruler counted as abuse. When the facilitator explained that technically it did, the high
schooler began to say “well, my dad…” but the implementer jumped in, asking if the
student was about to tell a personal story. When the student shook his head no, Sarah
nodded at him to continue and he began again, “what if my friend’s dad...” This ruse
tricks no one, but skirts the rules in ways that allow for a conversation to happen.
When students ask about presenters’ lives, many respond in similarly vague and
hypothetical terms. A student asked if Jennifer was in a relationship. She says that she
doesn't think that is important. The youth then says well, I wanted to know because you
know all this stuff if it is good. She says that hypothetically, if she was in a relationship,
she would say that she has learned a lot, but that it takes practice. A boy yells out that she
is making it obvious and Jessie says making what obvious, with a playful smile.
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As schools are deconstructed, criminalization seems to be used as a means to hold
things together. The major casualty of all this has been youth’s interaction with adults,
which fall under a logic of crime control (Simon, CITE). And beyond that, youth don’t
have access to counselors, whose positions are often cut when budgets dwindle. Students
seem to learn from the persistent avoidance of discussing their personal lives. They learn
how to talk about themselves so that it doesn't make a trace on paper in ways that might
fall under the radar of institutional authorities. Because youth often don’t know what
counts as reportable, or just because they feel that the less information authorities have
the better, it is not just reportable stories that are avoided, but nearly everything else. This
avoidance of experience runs counter to the findings of feminists and social science
scholars, who have found that talking about experience is a core aspect in building
consciousness and in developing critical thought (Reger, 2004; Collins 2000). But youth
are not simply casually deciding not to talk about their experiences, they are making
choices based on the fact that they have had bad experiences with authorities and
institutions, and are protecting themselves from future such experiences.
Sarah, a young White implementer, put it this way, “Because you're going in and
even when you're doing presentations that you're just talking about prevention, you're
never just talking about that, these kids, especially the kids in inner cities, are openly
talking about experiencing [violence]. If they're not talking about experiencing it, they
know exactly what you're talking [about]…it's too late to start from the beginning [of the]
discussion.” Implementers are in an amazing position to give youth a chance to talk
openly and honestly about their experiences. Instead, the system stigmatizes those
experiences and encourages implementers and youth to hide them.
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Beyond Empowerment
Implementers, teachers and students told me that empowerment rooms allowed
for more openness and honesty than the regular world of the school. Kim, an implementer,
explained how she saw the rooms as different from regular classes:
They don't have to raise their hand and answer. We can be for real. Everybody let
go of your guard. You can be authentic. You can be yourself. You can talk about
your relationships. They don't have that opportunity anywhere else. You can talk
about your own personal problems, your own issues. Kids are dying for times like
that because that doesn't happen. In math class, it's not like, "Oh, just tell me
whatever you think." No. We got to answer this formula. Answer this equation.
Only under specific circumstances did I see empowerment rooms live up to these
lofty ideals: only after at least four weeks of work and when the facilitator wasn’t trying
to show official evidence of change. This excerpt from my fieldnotes covers such a
moment:
During a discussion about issues that can arise in relationships, Byron, a Black
senior exclaimed "some guys act like bitches." Rather than agree or ignore this
statement, Sean the facilitator asked Byron what he meant. After Byron explained
that he meant that some guys act overly emotional, Sean explained, “that demeans
that man by saying he is a woman and that demeans women.” Byron, nodded,
then countered, “not all women are bitches though.” The other men nodded. The
conversation went back and forth like this for a while and young men began
sharing stories to make their points.
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I don’t know if that conversation had a lasting impact on the youth in the room. I doubt it
would have shown up in any way on an evaluation. But it felt different. It didn’t feel like
“empowerment,” at least as it is often defined in the curriculum that implementers are
taught to deliver to youth. Instead, it was a rare moment where youth and adults
connected to talk about the social and structural forces on their lives.
While research has shown that connections with caring and supportive adults are
what matters to school success, the structure of schools actively undermines these
relationships. Taken together, school discipline and mandated reporting established a
system of social control and social distance in the lives of youth. Attempts at positive
youth development, and empowerment worked within, not against this system. It was in
this small arena that creative implementers were able to enact meaningful dialogue, often
by actively skirting the rules, by providing meaningful connections, and by simply
providing a rare space for youth to talk about what matters in their lives. However,
implementers were often undercut by school discipline on one side and the requirements
of the program market on the other. In the next chapter, I examine young people’s
perceptions of the impact the program had on them. Young people learned unintended
lessons that can show us both the possibility and pitfalls of empowerment programs
aimed at promoting healthy relationships.

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CHAPTER 7: WHERE WE’VE BEEN

“Today is my last day,” Joseph, a young implementer said as he put his hands
together, “so I won't ever see you again.” The 25 eleventh graders let out a ritualized
chorus of “awww,” which I came to recognize after a half dozen last days with
implementers. Most young people seemed accustomed to last days. Still, the class did
seem genuinely sad to see Joseph go though. One young woman asked if he would be her
friend on Facebook and he smiled, “of course.” A few young men stopped on their way
out to shake his hand or thank him. This scene played out often, not just with Joseph, but
with all the implementers. I didn’t like this ritual. Maybe I just hadn’t been thoroughly
inured to it, but to me it felt like a cold reminder of what is a casual fact of life for many
young people – too often, adults are temporary. From afar, the clutter of change programs
and nonprofits that dot the lives of young people seem unconnected and sporadic.
However, when viewed close up, a pattern becomes visible. Change programs exemplify
a range of governmental projects that target at-risk youth within disciplinary institutions,
and use implementers to encourage freedom, responsibility and health through short-term
doses. This system is not designed to support young people. It is designed to change them.
In this chapter, I explore the unexpected outcomes of the interconnected system of
nonprofits, school personnel, foundations and media that set out to change and empower
youth within the gendered disciplinary context and structural inequalities of Los Angeles
schools and communities. In this context, young men used empowerment talk as a way to
avoid school discipline, while young women used it to avoid the stigma of dependency.
In both cases, empowerment talk increased social disconnection from vital social
institutions. In conclusion, I draw from my fieldwork to suggest how meaningful
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outcomes arose and suggest structural reforms.

Talking Empowered as Social Disconnection
I often wondered as this study progressed what empowerment meant to young
people. Funders, facilitators and administrators within and beyond POV often talked
about it, but I couldn’t pin down a consistent set of practices that they were trying to
encourage. From the organization’s perspective, empowerment described a range of
disparate actions, from implementing a curriculum, to teaching self-defense, to working
on a performance, to providing funding for participating in a summer institute.
Empowered youth were described as possessing agency, making choices and becoming
capable of change. It seemed to me that these are all things that young people do no
matter what, and often to the frustration of adult authorities. What did empowerment
have to do with it?
In several instances, young people appeared to be acting empowered and yet
weren’t celebrated or acknowledged. In one instance, a Latino youth told his teacher,
after one day of a program on healthy relationships, “I’m not coming to your class. I’m
not being lectured at by a bunch of white people about what I should do in life.” This
seemed to me to be a harsh, yet clear enactment of empowerment. This young man was
taking control of his education and clearly explaining his thought process to his teacher.
And yet, when the teacher explained this to the facilitator, she shrugged, annoyed but
resolved, “that is his choice.” By acknowledging the young man’s agency, the facilitator
departed from the usual disciplinary response of punishment. And yet, in this instance,
agency and choices were not deemed worthy of celebration. The lauding of agency, I
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found, was reserved for specific types of choices.
In a second instance, a young black man in one of the classes raised his hand to
answer every question posed by a facilitator. He was not only correct, but also thoughtful
and respectful each time. Not only were his actions not celebrated, but he became “a bit
of a problem” in the eyes of the facilitator, moreso than another young man in the class
that the teacher described as a "distraction" and "not here to learn.” Even though this
young man seemed to possess the knowledge and behavior that facilitators look to
encourage in youth, he took up too much attention, which meant that other youth had less
chance to be empowered.
In a third instance, a young Latina woman recounted a story to her class about her
experience with punitive school discipline. She stood up to get a pencil she dropped, and
her teacher asked why she was standing. When she explained he told her not to talk back.
She replied that she was just answering his question. He, seemingly viewing her actions
as defiant, asked if she wanted him to send her to the principal’s office. She said no, but
if he did, she would go and explain to the principal what happened. One would be hard-
pressed to consider this woman as not showing some of the lauded aspects of
empowerment – confidence, self-awareness and respect, even in the face of an
unreasonable teacher. It isn’t surprising that this got her into trouble within the
disciplinary context of the school. But I expected the facilitator to laud her actions.
Instead, she shrugged. Empowerment was only celebrated when it didn’t run up against
the teacher’s or facilitator’s authority. If it called up the hidden inequalities of the system
or the school it was downplayed, or viewed as a problem.

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It is worth comparing these three instances to one that was widely celebrated as an
example of empowerment. During the run up to an end of the year funding push, POV
polled their more involved youth about “why people should listen to you” when it comes
to violence prevention. One response, “I am the change I want so see” was used in
promotional materials for the organization. This riff on Ghandi’s famous quote “be the
change you want to see in the world” was a powerful statement against apathy and for the
power of individual youth to change the world. Having spent time myself with many
young people who saw the world as immutable and corrupt, this did indeed seem to be a
powerful statement. And at the same time, I didn’t know what it meant beyond being
very good messaging. How could someone do empowerment? If we take a clear-eyed
look at empowerment, not as it is talked about, but as it is experienced, what is it we see?
What do young people, who spend their lives in systems outside their control, learn when
you teach them empowerment?
As a means to explore notions of empowerment, at the end of most of my
interviews, I asked the young person what they wanted for their future and what stood in
their way. Young people’s answers fell along gendered lines. Men, inundated by
messages from police and school discipline that viewed them and their friends as
dangerous, said that they themselves or their friends were the only things keeping them
from a “good path.” Women, steeped in post-feminist culture and facing a threadbare and
stigmatized welfare system, often told me that nothing stood in their way. In this chapter,
I explore the gendered discursive performance of empowerment used by a subset of
young people in this study. This discursive strategy allowed young men and women to
talk about themselves in ways that shielded them from disciplinary and stigmatizing
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forces. However, in the process, these youth also further disconnected themselves from
social institutions that could be valuable means of support.
Feminist scholars, building on work by Foucault, have argued that women’s
empowerment in criminal settings can enact a particular set of therapeutic techniques
intended to teach individuals to enact responsibility (Haney, 2010; McKim, 2008;
Foucault, et al, 1991). The use of empowerment with at-risk youth suggests that, in line
with previous research, similar strategies are being extended both to young men, and to
groups not marked as criminal. Yet, my findings also suggest wrinkles in how scholars
have conceptualized the enactment of empowerment. Previous literature has largely
focused on organizational strategies to produce empowerment and, at times, forms of
resistance to institutionally-based empowerment discourses. In this chapter, I discuss
ways in which youth use the messages of empowerment, combined with messages from
adult authorities, as a means to navigate their institutional context. I argue that youth use
empowerment talk as a particular discursive strategy that allows them to navigate the
current system.

“I Changed as a Man:” Talking Empowered to Avoid Authority
Ariel moves like he hasn’t grown into his body yet. It doesn’t help that he hurt his
leg on a diving board the day before our interview and is trying to cover his limp with
slow purposeful gate. He is Black, a 17-year-old sophomore when we talked in the
courtyard of his large public school after a session with a group of youth on probation.
He speaks in an even and crisp tone, like he is on a job interview. Ariel’s story is a well-
known one. He grew up in a difficult part of the city with two brothers and two sisters.
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He described his youth this way:
I've been through a lot, like, going to elementary, I had stitches, falling, like, a lot
of violent stuff. Falling off bikes, fighting and all that. I grew out of it because I
noticed that fighting is not a good thing. Fighting is not good at all. It's just, to just
[do that] for no reason. When I realized that, I changed. I changed as a man.
This was the kind of answer that facilitators loved to hear. It showed a clear change from
violence and towards a new definition of masculinity. I was excited to hear how this
transformation had occurred. He told me, “My mom passed away, so, you know, my dad
worked as a parking enforcer. Yeah, and we'd be going out to eat, having family fun, he'd
buy me stuff. We'd just be having family fun.” I was struck by the way Ariel narrated his
childhood, marked with violence and loss, with relentless, albeit discordant, positivity.
This continued as he explained how he came to be on probation for robbery,
I regret that I did that, because I was, I wasn't supposed to be the robber. Why
would I rob stuff that I could get? I noticed that when I, 'cause I was little and I
wasn't thinking. But now that I got older, I started thinking about it, like, I don't
need to be stealing when I could get the stuff that I want.
This was a very rational response from a 17-year old, but one that didn’t quite make
sense to me. Not only can I imagine a number of reasons why a young person would steal
something, but also his argument seemed to justify stealing if the thing you steal is
something that he couldn’t otherwise get. Ariel’s responses followed this arc, from
negative to positive, even when it didn’t seem to fit with the story. It was clear that Ariel
had a lot of interactions with disciplinary authorities throughout his life, including police
officers and administrators. While on probation, he often interacted with his probation
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officer. He explained,
He helps me with stuff, he writes good reports, writes stuff that I do good, the
stuff that I do bad. Like, it all combines. And when they see that I'm doing better,
they see that I'm trying to help myself, and when they see that I'm trying to help
myself, they provide me with stuff to, like, for the programs to provide me to not
be a violent person and to succeed in life.
Ariel was practiced in the logic of juvenile control. He knew that he had to demonstrate
that he was working to help himself in order to be provided with programs, which would
then help him further. And while he was up to the task, it could be daunting. He told me,
“You have to do everything right. I do everything right but, like, they want you to do
everything right. You gotta stay in task.”
Given this pressure, I could imagine why Ariel seemed so positive and dedicated
to convincing me that he was doing “everything right.” Maybe he imagined that his
probation officer’s reach included me. Or maybe he was just so practiced at it, that this is
how he learned to interact with adults. I asked Ariel to describe how he would talk to his
friends about the healthy relationship program he was in, and his response had an
intentional quality that I heard in several of my interviews.
Ariel: I'll tell them it's a nice program. That they should join. Because the stuff
that we talk about is really, just makes people think about it, about the violent
stuff and about the racial stuff that happens.
Max: Is there anything that you don't like about it or that you're not sure about?
Ariel: No, I like everything. It's making me learn more stuff about, like, not to be
violent, and, like, about, like, girls, about everything.
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This is the kind of positive evaluation that many violence prevention programs hoped to
contribute to, but Ariel’s tone seemed vague and distant. I wasn’t sure how much he had
actually taken away from the program. Later, I asked him about times he had seen
unhealthy relationships and he recounted this scene:
There was a car flying so fast down the street, like, when they stopped, he [the
driver] just, like, threw the girl out of the car and he got out [of] the passenger and
started hitting her, and I'm like, "What is going on?" Like, "What is this?" And
I'm just looking, like, shaking my head, like, he's doing that to a girl for what
reason? It don't matter if she make you mad. It's a girl. Girls will do that. Girls,
like, want that to happen, and then the dumb boys that lead to the violent stuff
start hitting them.
Ariel seemed eager to show me that he knew that what he had seen was wrong, but his
rationale revealed the complicated role of violence and masculinity in his life. Needless
to say, “girls, like want that to happen” was not the message about relationships that the
curriculum set out to send. In fact, this was perhaps the most victim-blaming response I
heard during my interviews.

“Don’t Make a Difference:” Equality Talk
While I talked with Ariel in the courtyard of his school, their mascot, painted on a
massive wall, caught my eye. He was a giant muscular man with a raccoon cap and a
beard. Every student I had seen on campus was nonwhite and the mascot, while his skin
was painted gray, seemed to be white. I asked Ariel about this:

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Ariel: Yeah, that's really a white dude.
Max: Yeah, I mean, what do you think of that?
Ariel: I think, no, it's not that it's a white dude, it don't make a difference if it's a
white or a Black, because it's just all the same thing. It's like, be a person, find the
pride. He went to school. Think about, like, that we got power and that we could
do it.
Max: He's really muscular.
Ariel: That's just to give us the sign that we could do it and we could make it
somewhere.
Ariel responded with a colorblind discourse when I brought up the race of his mascot. He
also told me that “there’s a lady one too” who isn’t as muscular. But at other points in the
interview, nearly every young man who pointed to a colorblind ideology, also talked
extensively about race as a central aspect of social life. Later in the interview, Ariel
vented about the way his friends talked about race:
Why do people like to start violent stuff for no reason, just because you a different
race? That don't mean anything. Only reason is gangs. That's the only thing, that's
part of the gangs. I have Hispanic friends. I got a Hispanic girlfriend. Like, why
do people have to be racist? Oh, you can't talk to no Hispanic. Like, my friends
tell me, like, my Black friends tell me, "Why do you got a Hispanic girlfriend?"
Because I want to. She's a nice girl. My girlfriend, she's a nice girl. She trust me, I
trust her and we have fun together. Like, we just went out to eat, like, on Saturday.
I took her out to eat. Like, we'd be doing a lot of having fun. And they just think
that Black girls is the best. No, it's not. Everybody, all the girls is the same. You
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just got to pick the right one.
Ariel’s assertion, “everybody, all the girls is the same” seemed less like an assertion of
colorblindness and more like a way of showing his friends, and me, that he didn’t believe
in essential racial differences even while he understood that race mattered. At the same
time, most youth expressed an acute awareness of racism. On several occasions during
in-class discussions, when talking about events in the news or personal stories, one or
several young people would proclaim, “that’s racist!” in a seemingly practiced way.
When asked about difference, most young men told me that they saw no
differences between men and women or across racial or class lines. And on several
occasions, young men brought up equality when I asked an unrelated question. When I
asked Zephire what he thought the main message was of the healthy relationship program,
much to my surprise, he said “Everybody's equal. Men and women alike, all equal.” I
know the curriculum well, and I was present for most of the session and this wasn’t a part
of the curriculum he had gone through. In fact, that curriculum begins with an extensive
discussion of systemic inequalities, including racism and sexism, which the curriculum
refers to as the “roots of violence.” I asked Hendrix what mattered to him, and he told
me: “Everyone’s equal. Everyone has the same opportunities. Anyone can do anything.
Just ‘cause I come from this doesn’t mean I can’t be up top like in Beverly Hills, you
know?” At first, I thought Hendrix was telling me that he wanted more equality and
better opportunities, but the case he was trying to make was that he had equal opportunity
and that he shouldn’t be underestimated. Or as Hendrix put it, “anyone can do anything.”
It is difficult to know whether or not young people talked this way when they weren’t
talking with adult outsiders. In the course of my research, some youth spoke passionately
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about racial injustice and others didn’t speak. Regardless, colorblindness and to a lesser
extent gender-equality seemed to be discourses that many young men had access to and
were practiced at deploying.

“My Biggest Obstacle Is Myself:” Taking Responsibility
During the course of my participant observation, I saw that one thing adult
authorities loved was when young men of color “took responsibility.” These adults said
things like “take responsibility for your actions” or “your actions have consequences.”
But in my fieldwork, adults rarely focused specifically on the individual’s actions.
Instead, they wanted young men, and sometimes young women to take responsibility for
any negative event. Adults had little patience when young people denied their
involvement or blamed others. Facilitators also sometimes made appeals for
responsibility. They asked youth to “watch out for red flags” or told them, “you need to
check yourself, the other person doesn’t know, you know because we told you.” Young
men were told to take responsibility so often, some developed a skewed concept of
responsibility. When I asked Zephire if he thought he was responsible, he explained:
I don't know. Like I'm responsible enough to watch over my youngest nieces and
nephews, babysit them, I'm responsible to know the importance of watching over
another life. Responsible for my own affairs, though, oh, no, I don't think so. I
don't think I'm very responsible. I use up cash far too much too fast on things that
really don’t matter, but to me it felt like it matters because the main reason why I
buy games now is try to study those and try to study the scripts, study how they
present their story to their audience. And that's the main reason why I buy games
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now, that and the fun.
This distinction, between responsibility for others and responsibility for one’s “own
affairs” came up often in my interactions with young men. Many young men had taken
on work or childcare at an early age to support their families. And many of those same
men also said that they weren’t responsible when it came to making decisions about
themselves.
For some men, the message of responsibility became a way of talking about
others as well. In one class, a group of young men wanted to talk about a story their
teachers had talked to them about. A young woman had killed herself because her ex sent
around pictures of her naked. The teachers had used it as an example of cyber-bullying,
but Oscar disagreed and argued that "it was her fault" for sending the pictures. "What is
blaming the victim” Sean the facilitator interjected, “if someone shot you is that your
fault?” One young man called out from the back row “no, because he didn't do anything.”
Sean amended the example to more closely parallel the story, “what if they shot him
because they didn't like his Adidas shirt, would that be his fault?” he asks. One young
man argued back, “it would be if he knew they didn’t like the shirt.” Another young man
piled on, “if gangbangers get shot for wearing their colors, it's their fault.” Several other
men echoed this sentiment.
This scene was disconcerting, in large part because the young men so easily
rationalized blaming the victim. But, it was easy to see the source of their logic. The
young men were simply reiterating the messages that they or their friends or loved ones
had received so many times. Several times I heard adult authorities admonishing young
men wearing for wearing gang colors or sagging pants or warning them not to post things
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that might get them in trouble on Facebook. It wasn’t surprising that some young men
said that everyone should take responsibility for their clothing and their actions on social
media.
Some young men told me that the only way to truly take responsibility and stay
out of trouble was to avoid friends. Ariel told me that had stopped hanging out with his
friends because they were a bad influence on him. Hendrix told me that,
I stay out of trouble. I don’t, I try not to talk to a lot of people. Not that I’m tryin’
to be, like, you know, antisocial. It’s just that I just have to be. But I know a lot of
people, but I just have to, I mean, ‘cause you talk to other people, they’re gonna
talk you into stuff.
Given the gang injunctions that prevent groups of young men from congregating and the
experiences of many young men being told that they couldn’t enter a store with their
friends, it isn’t surprising that so many talked about self-imposed social isolation as a
means to stay out of trouble.
I asked all of the youth what might stand in the way of accomplishing their goals
in life. Zephire said, “My laziness, I have to really push myself.” Hendrix told me
Definitely not my race or anything like that, but what could stop me is myself.
Like, I could be real lazy, ‘cause your biggest obstacle is yourself. You could, like,
really put yourself down. You could be like, nah, like, I’m really not gonna be
able to do this. But you could. I think my biggest obstacle is myself.
Several young men talked about themselves in this way. This split-self echoed something
that Ariel told me about how the administration at his school talks: “They tell us to find a
path or make one, if you find a path, find a good path. Like, find a path that you want to
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go on, a good path or bad path. And as soon as you find [one], just make it.” Similarly,
Lincoln explained what life is like for a young man in Los Angeles: “If he go [on] the
right path, then he going to know. But if he go the wrong path, then sooner [or later]
when he get to actually becoming a man, he gonna realize what he did wrong.” Only
young men used the “two paths” metaphor. They described a “good path” which led to a
normative life of, as Ariel put it, “a good family, good car, and a good house, and don't
worry about nothing else, you just have a good time” and a “bad path” which lead to
prison or “the streets.” Empowerment talk seemed to be a way for young men to signal to
adults that they were on the right path even as their actions put them in the line of
disciplinary action.

“Violent people don't make a lot of friends:” Assuaging Fears
After we finished the interview, Ariel told me, with a proud smile on his face, “I
answered the questions nicely.” Several young men I met, when we concluded the
interview, asked me how they did. They told me they were interested in being
interviewed, in part, so that they could practice their interviewing skills. And it showed.
Many of them were practiced, focused, and professional. Several of the young men, in
particular the young Black men, talked about their personal qualities during the interview.
They described how friendly they were or how much they loved talking to people in ways
that most other youth did not.
For Ariel, his expressed desire to be seen as friendly – at which he succeeded
from my perspective – contrasted with the occasions where he described needing to be
violent. Ariel told me early in our conversation that “I don't like to fight, but if people
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push me, I would fight. But I just love making new friends.” The tension between the
person that Ariel talked about being and the way others reacted to him came up often as
we talked. He told me about a scenario that often plays out when he enters a store at the
same time as other young black men.
I seen it before plenty of times. Like, say I didn't know the people, but they
walked in a store and I walk in behind, and they'd [the store owner would] be, like,
"Oh, are they coming..." but I'm just buying stuff. I'm not even with the violent
people. I'm just coming to buy my stuff to get at the store. I'm going to get no
problems, no problems with nobody. I just want to be a friendly person.
This dichotomy was central to the way Ariel interacted with others. He explained:
I switch my attitude a lot, like, it depends on, like, if we chilling, and then if
somebody say something dumb. Like, I was really, I'm not a soft person, but I don't
like people talking stuff to me, like, "Oh, you this..." I don't like people who do that.
I tell people, like, don't do that because I would get mad fast, 'cause I don't like
people talking to me.
The version of himself Ariel described here seemed miles away from the professional,
awkward young man I was talking to. One of the underlying assumptions about programs
aimed at changing youth is that there is continuity between how a person acts in one
context and how they act in another. Ariel seemed to have missed that lesson.
I walked away from my conversation with Ariel feeling content to see him “on a
good path” as he put it, but ultimately, feeling like I didn’t know Ariel at all. He had
managed to talk for nearly 45 minutes about himself and give little personal detail and
avoided saying anything overtly critical. In addition, he had shown an ability to talk from
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a colorblind perspective, take responsibility and be friendly. If I had been an adult with
any authority in his life, I would have felt like Ariel was on a good path.
Scholars have shown that young men of color learn lessons about how to avoid
police and authorities (Ferguson, 2001; Rios, 2011). I propose that in addition, some
young men learn a discourse of empowerment, which provided productive ways to avoid
being noticed for interventions and disciplinary action. Young men learned ways of
talking about personal responsibility, friendliness, and colorblindness, while avoiding
talking in detail about their lives. It is unclear how aware Ariel or others were of this
discourse. I am confident that this was not the way that he talked with his friends or
family.

“We Just Like A Man, But More Empowered:” Talking Empowered to Avoid
Dependency
I talked to Kashmir, a sharply dressed young African American woman in a
teachers room at the small charter school she attended. She sat straight up, with her legs
neatly crossed and spoke with steady pace. On the walls around us were students’ dream
collages, pictures cut out of magazines and pasted to construction paper showing images
of what students wanted for their future. I saw one covered in fast cars and a swimming
pool; another with models in swimsuits. Early in our interview, I asked Kasmir what it
meant to be an adult. “Well, letting me do what I want, like, let me spread my wings and
let me go do whatever I want” she said. Kashmir told me that she planned to go to beauty
college once she graduated high school, and when I asked her if anything might get in her
way, she told me, emphatically: “Nothing’s going to stand in my way, because it’s what I
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want to do, so I’m going to do it.”
Susie, a young Hispanic woman expressed a similar answer to the same question:
“Be independent. To not rely on others, and to look after myself.” While young men
often told me that being an adult meant being able to “handle your business” and support
yourself, young women more often framed adulthood as independence. To Kashmir,
doing what she wanted, didn’t necessarily involve being rich: “It’s you having knowledge
of yourself, so that’s what brings you up, is your knowledge of yourself, bringing
yourself up. It’s not money, it’s what you think you’re going to do.” Young women of
color in schools and educational organizations across Los Angeles faced a different social
landscape than young men of color. They were far less likely to be surveilled, policed and
disciplined and instead, were more often seen as helpless, dependent or at-risk for teen
pregnancy (Garcia, 2012; McKim, 2008). In order to avoid being stigmatized as in need
of help or protection, some young women used a discourse of “female empowerment.”
Many of the young women I spoke to connected their self-confidence, to their
confidence in women as a gender category. Kashmir explained:
We have the power to do what we want because we want it and I guess we can do
more than a man can do. That’s what I’ve been told. We take care of kids, we
clean, we do work, like we just like a man, but more empowered of doing more
things than a man can do.”
Arianna, an enthusiastic young Latina, put it, by way of Beyonce, this way: “girls run the
world.” When I asked her what she meant, she told me, “Well, we are what make the
world go round. We run everything. Without us, what’s going to happen? We are the
best at everything. OK, that’s kind of sexist, but it’s true. Just saying.” Kashmir and
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Arianna’s confidence was inspiring and infectious. I found myself imagining Arianna’s
campaign for president, which she planned run in about thirty years. At the same time,
that confidence seemed to be constantly tested by inequalities in their daily lives. Arianna
recounted a crushing story in which she had gone to a store to try on a prom dress. Not
long after she put it on and was stepping in front of the mirror, the manager began yelling
and proceeded to kick her and her mother out, claiming that they didn’t have the money
to buy the dress.
While most of the programs I studied were coeducational, there were two
programs that were gender-specific. The men’s program, My Strength, developed by a
group called Men Can Stop Rape encouraged young men to develop a healthy
masculinity and to use their strength for good. POV developed what Kim, one of the
authors, described as a “female counterpart,” called Be Strong that was a “female
empowerment curriculum.” Kim explained the differences this way:
It had to think about the different relationships that they're [young women] in. My
Strength is really about defining masculinity and redefining it or exploring it, and
this one was about building girls' capacity to assess themselves as individuals and
then in relation to others. Then their place within the community and then in
society. It looking at, it's not only defining femininity for them, it's about defining
what it is for them and then having them navigate themselves through those
different relationships. It's about comprehensive empowerment.”
Kim’s description illustrates a post-feminist, soft essentialist discourse, which sees girls
as navigating a “socially contextualized field of choices” (Messner, 2011). Whereas men
are told to use their inherent strength differently, women are encouraged to be strong. As
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post-feminist discourses have entered the mainstream, young women repeatedly receive
the message that they can do anything they want if they set their mind to it. A message
that the young women I interviewed seemed to have absorbed. At the same time, young
women of color are stigmatized for their choices.
While young men of color learned to fear the police, young women of color
learned not to rely on them. Kashmir explained how she felt about the police:
Kashmir: I think it should be the force, the police to make sure that I’m safe on
the street, because it’s their job to keep people out on the street like that…But at
the same time, I’m keeping myself safe, so it is my problem and their problem to
keep myself safe, so.
Max: Do you trust the police to do that?
Kashmir: No I don’t.
Max: Why not?
Kashmir: Because, some could help you, and some don’t want [to], some just
could watch you just get beat, or get snatched up.
It was clear that Kashmir believed that the police should be responsible for keeping
people safe, but she had learned that they couldn’t be trusted. In response, she marshaled
a discourse of personal responsibility. Martha, a young Asian woman explained that she
felt like she couldn’t trust anyone:
That’s just how society and life really works, because you may lean on somebody,
but you never know when they’re going to disappear. And so yourself is really the
only person you should be caring about 100% of the time. Someone else is
maybe like 95% of the time. But you never know when they’re going to turn. And
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self-defense and protecting yourself is really important, because if you fall, you’re
the only person who can stand up.
Both Martha and Kashmir seemed to have thought and talked about personal
responsibility before. Martha’s phrase, “if you fall, you’re the only person who can stand
up” has the ring of an adult’s repetition. But underlying these practiced statements was a
well-worn distrust of social institutions and social networks. Given this distrust, and
without a systemic critique or collective options, a discourse of personal responsibility
seemed like the best way for them to answer my questions. And while they had reason to
doubt the institutions that surrounded them, this individualistic discourse closed off the
capacity to critique or even petition those institutions.

“It Is Their Fault:” Blame As Symbolic Boundary
On the ground, one of the central goals of empowerment plays out paradoxically.
Some women come to take up the messages of choice and empowerment so strongly that
they find it difficult to understand why other women would ever make decisions that they
wouldn’t. I asked Kashmir about women who stayed in unhealthy relationships: “Yes, it
is their own fault, because they could get out of the relationship if they choose to, but
they choose to stay in the relationship, so yes, it is their fault.” Susie told me about a
heated debate she had with a facilitator about whether or not it was a woman’s fault if she
was assaulted while drunk. According to Susie, the facilitator argued “that it’s like, it’s
not the girl’s fault when she’s, like, drunk. But I said it is, because it’s like, it’s her
responsibility whether she drinks or she doesn’t.” While I was discouraged to hear Susie,
Kashmir and other young women take up this perspective, I wasn’t surprised. This was
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they way that adults had often talked to them about what it meant to be responsible.
Some women used the discourse of personal responsibility to distinguish
themselves from women that required forms of surveillance and discipline. Leah, an
charismatic young Black woman told me that the drug use in bathrooms at her school
used to be “a big problem” but had decreased now that “there’s more monitoring of like,
the bathroom and stuff. But girls used to like go in there and like do their thing or
whatever.” I asked Leah how she felt about the monitoring, and her response echoed
something I heard often from young women about forms of surveillance: “I don’t mind. I
mean, it’s not me so I don’t care.” I heard several variations on this theme, including “I’d
never be in that situation” and “she shouldn’t have done that.”
While Leah didn’t care about monitoring, she had learned a lesson about
empowerment through the program. Her friend was in an abusive relationship and Leah
worried that at first, she had “come off [as] judgmental.”
Like literally like one day a long time ago we went and we looked up stuff on
shelters and stuff and like tried to like find a plan for her because she really
doesn’t have family out here. She just lives with him so it’s hard to always like
[be] trying to help her, but she like made excuses down the line so that just made
me understand that it’s up to her. Like I can’t force anyone. Like they have to
wake up on their own.
For Leah two perspectives that I thought of as contradictory were possible at the same
time: “it’s not me so I don’t care” and “I can’t force anyone, they have to wake up on
their own.” Young women were able to use the discourse of empowerment in various
even contradictory ways. For instance, while empowerment talk allowed young women
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to symbolically differentiate themselves from their peers who were in need of monitoring
or help, it also let them justify their own unhealthy choices. Alice told me about her
relationship with a guy, who could be verbally abusive:
Alice: I value my relationship more than anything. The relationship I have that’s
with this guy and he lives in my country. So I left him when I came, and I feel
that I want to go back and get together. It’s my target for a long time, but I know
my -- my relationship is a red light, but I love him so much, but it’s a red light
also. So I never know what will happen. So I would never, like, stop my
education to earn money and go to . I would not do that. I would always have a
second backup, like, if let’s just say we broke up forever. I need to be staying
here, being here, and do a good career so I can -- I know we have financial
problems so I can take care of my family and work out --
Max: So when you say a red light, what do you mean?
Alice: That it’s an unhealthy relationship. because we get like we -- a lot of fights,
I mean because I know, ’cause I’m trying to get it -- to get it together. I know
people telling me oh, we stay long distance relationship, don’t be in it. You don’t
tell me what to do, OK, it’s my relationship.
Talking to young women, I often found myself impressed at their confidence and
responsibility. This is, after all, what we hear so often that young women lack. It is what
Be Strong and many other empowerment programs set out to teach. But as I thought
about the ways that these messages were picked up and used by young women, it seemed
to be missing a way of thinking critically about structure and interpersonal relationships
in a way that felt similar to and yet different from the way that the young men talked
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about it.

“It’s Changing Little By Little:” Beyond Empowerment
Empowerment talk can help young people avoid the imposition of adult discipline
and stigma in productive ways. But it also limits avenues for meaningful collective action
and connection grounded in social context. If there is one take away from all the
conversations I had with young people, it is that they so often feel like they are in it alone.
This wasn’t just part of being young, but was the intended outcome of a system designed
to discipline and isolate youth, especially youth of color. Therefore, the lessons that
mattered the most to youth were the ones that were interpersonal, supportive, and honest.
In my experience, and in the stories recounted to me be facilitators, men were more likely
to describe having had a powerful and transformative experience in change programs.
Women were more consistently positive about the programs, but largely described them
as a means to gain skills. This may be a function of these programs’ operating
assumptions, that women are both already empowered and capable of change.
While some youth used empowerment talk, I also came across many young
people who hadn’t picked up on the discourse of individualism and responsibility. Within
the logic of empowerment, this might make them seem disempowered, dependent,
defeated, or lacking confidence. But I didn’t experience them this way. They were open,
honest, trusting, and clever. Of the young people who were unskilled at empowerment
talk, a disproportionate number had been involved in supportive aspects of the state. They
were in and out of foster care, or on probation. Perhaps they had nothing to lose. But for
some, it was because their interactions with the supportive arm of the state had been
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helpful.
Angel was one such young man. He was 19 when we talked in an empty
classroom at the small charter school he attended. Angel’s dad, he told me, “works for a
good company. He does like statues and things like that.” And his mom “she’s like, she’s
on maintenance. She works, just cleans, like a janitor.” Even with steady jobs, money is a
concern for Angel’s family: “it’s a concern because my mom, she got car bills. My dad,
he got to pay rent. It’s pretty expensive rent: pretty expensive one room house. That’s for
six people.” This puts pressure on him at home, where his family gives him a hard time
for still being in school at 19 years old. “They’re putting me down, so like -- I’m trying to
do this for them and they’re telling me now to like stop going to school and find a job.” I
asked Angel if he was getting anything out of the course:
Angel: I know everything about violence. So, like when it comes to, like when it
came down to peace, like, I really didn’t know a lot about it. So this was like, it
was kind of like just changing my mentality about the violence.
Max: So when you say you know everything about violence, what do you mean?
Angel: Like that’s all I know. Like all I know is about violence. Like everywhere
I’m surrounded by, it’s like violence everywhere. There’s no peace.
Angel talked about seeing violence “everywhere” in his neighborhood and in his family.
He continued: “I feel like violence was just there for me.” Angel told me that “certain
mistakes from the past” meant that he had to watch out for violent people in his
neighborhood. I asked Angel if there was anything he did to stay safe, he answered: “Just
stay in my house.” I didn’t put it together then, but that means staying in a small one
bedroom house, with parents who aren’t supportive.
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Angel didn’t think of our interview as a job interview, nor did he think of the
program as training. He told me of the program, “it helped me out a lot ‘cause like it
showed me like how to make a relationship better. How to have a good relationship with
somebody.” Angel’s frame of reference for the program wasn’t like an empowerment
program, it was like counseling. He told me:
Angel: When you all were here I felt like you were counseling me. Like I had like
a bad experience on a relationship like where it did get kind of into violence. So
like this is why, this is why it kind of affects me a lot ‘cause like all this violence
and I knew I was at that place, like I was doing like violence was going on in my
life and in a relationship, too. So like, and like I felt like this will like, this is
helping me.
Max: Do you feel like, have you been less into violence?
Angel: Yeah. I like, I control my temper now, like. Yeah, like, like every time I
say I get angry, I notice like it’s going to come down to violence because I’m just
like I don’t care at the moment.
Max: Yeah. Do you feel like that’s changing [for you]?
Angel: Yeah. It’s changing little by little.
Max: How does that feel?
Angel: It feels good. It feels like I just used to have like a bad temper where like I
just start punching walls. I’ll punch anything. Like I punched some glass and I
just messed up my hand. Like yeah, but. Like, this is like, I don’t know, it calms
me down a little bit, thinking about peace.
Stories like this and others led me to wonder if Angel had PTSD. I asked if he had ever
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heard of it, and he hadn’t. I explained that sometimes when people go through something
really scary or painful, like in a car accident, they remember it sometimes and they have
flashbacks. His eyes widened,
Like what you just said, like right now like, like things that come back like a
flashback, like in a car accident, like, when I get angry like with my ex, like I
don’t know, like, well, like I always seem to like get this flashback when like, it’s
like I put hands on her like, I like ripped her dress. And then like I don’t know, it
gets me kind of angry, like sometimes I just don’t know how to control it. And I,
like its kind of hard getting over it, ‘cause like, she always has, she always has
that in her head, too, like in her mind.
Angel seemed remorseful at his past actions and also seemed stuck, unable to figure out
how to move on. As he kept telling me about his ex, it seemed clear that he wanted to get
back together with her.
There’s a couple of things that I did to her that she will never forget. Like it
haunts me a lot. Like it bothers me that I even did that. Like there was once that
we got in an argument and I ended up spitting in her face. Like I don’t know, like
it always bugs me like she always brings it up, too, like, I don’t know. I’m trying
to like, I don’t know like it happened out of anger, too, like I regret it so bad. But
like I don’t know how we like get over that.
We live in a moment in our society, when young men like Angel don’t have many
options. We know that their social environments can put them in positions to do things
that hurt others and themselves. And yet, once they have done harm, there are few
avenues for meaningful change. They are constantly told that they have two paths. It
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seemed like Angel had spent a good chunk of his life on the “bad path.” But now, he was
trying to change course, but there didn’t seem to a way to make sense of his time spent on
the other path.
For Angel, his change was bound up with his conceptions of gender and his social
context. He explained that the way he thought about women was changing:
Angel: Since I grew up…I was always taught that females were always like less
than us
Max: You don’t feel like that anymore though?
Angel: Nah. After like the, after like the couple experiences and like getting my
things together like and like moving out, and getting my head out the
streets.
Angel’s phrase, “getting my head out the streets” provides an apt way to think about the
connection between the personal and the contextual that is often stripped out of in
empowerment talk. I took Angel’s description, “the streets” not to mean his literal
neighborhood, but a particular way of thinking about masculinity and violence that exists
in urban communities. “The streets” was a relational and intersectional place that shaped
how Angel thought about himself and others.
After the formal interview ended I gave Angel the chance, as I did every youth, to
ask me any questions they had. Many young people took this as an opportunity to ask me
the same questions I had asked them, or about concepts from the course, such as what I
thought a healthy relationship looked like. Others simply didn’t ask anything. A few
asked me something similar to what Angel did, “what made you get into this?” I told
Angel that a college girlfriend of mine had been raped and I wanted to be able to support
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her, and myself and to better understand why this happened. “Yeah. My, my ex been
through that, too.” He nodded, “Can I ask you a question? Like how can I help, like,
somebody go through that?” Angel and I talked about this for 20 minutes. He kept asking
questions. Personal ones. And he told me details about his life. He was energized and
engaged.
This wasn’t counseling, nor did Angel and I have any kind of magic connection. It
was a chance to talk about hard aspects of lived experience, and to work through
complexities. Moments like this are made more difficult by the larger system of
racialized and gendered discipline and stigma, which encourages distrust on both sides.
The discourses of empowerment that youth use enable them to better avoid institutional
involvement, but is that a worthwhile goal? The ability to make and sustain social
connections within social institutions can be a vital tool for accessing resources. In the
sections that follow I suggest that implementers and organizations use a variety of
strategies to promote social connections with youth that are critical of institutional
failures and contextualized.

Beyond The Program Market
Implementers and organizations often worked outside the framework of the
program market to accomplish incredible things. When I first met Scott, a Black youth,
he eagerly told me about his pet snakes. He wanted to be a reptile breeder one day. He
had been largely home schooled, I found out later, because his mom moved often in order
to stay away from an abusive man. I saw Scott around POV often. He was involved in
POV’s youth institute and then later in a performance troupe. He was extremely awkward
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on stage but brave and intentional with his lines. It was in a practice for the performance
that we first talked. He had heard that I was doing interviews and he wanted to be
included. We exchanged emails and wrote a few times, but we could never make the
schedule work. A year or so later, his mom took a job in outside of California but Scott
didn’t want to leave his friends in Los Angeles, so he moved into a small apartment with
his best friend. Like the dozen youth who became heavily involved at POV, Scott seemed
to grow up before everyone’s eyes.
Scott and his friend were shot leaving their apartment complex to get pizza in
what seems to have been a case of mistaken identity. His friend died and Scott was shot
in the leg, which he almost had to have amputated. He was devastated. He couldn’t go to
his friend’s funeral because he was in the hospital. His mom flew back to town, but didn’t
have a car, so she had a hard time getting back and forth between the hotel and the
hospital. Plus, she was spending money she didn’t have and had to keep driving several
hours each way so that she wouldn’t lose her job. The prevention team at POV rallied
around Scott. The day of his friend’s funeral, several stayed with Scott in the hospital,
and several others went to the funeral livestreamed the proceedings to a laptop. POV
staffers drove Scott’s mother back and forth and out for errands and raised over $1000.
This wasn’t the only time that a young man who worked with an anti-violence
organization was caught up in violence. A man from another youth organization in Los
Angeles, who Eleanor worked with, was murdered, she told me “found in a dumpster
with his throat slit. He had moved past that place of being at risk. And it’s just — with
these kids its disturbed geography.” A few months later, a young man at another anti-
violence organization was shot. These stories reveal both the promise and the limitations
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of violence prevention programs. They can’t change a “disturbed geography,” but they
can, if those on the ground are willing to work beyond the program market, provide
invaluable means of social connection and support.
…
On their face, change programs represent a rational approach to violence
prevention: at-risk youth go in and empowered youth come out. However, as theories of
change are translated into concrete programs on the ground, tensions and possibilities
emerge.
The historical forces of marketization, criminalization and rationalization that
transformed a grassroots group into 3-million dollar a year nonprofit and feminist
consciousness-raising into violence prevention programming, are also aligned with a
reorganization of the way the state approaches interpersonal violence amongst youth. As
the program market has extended the reach of movement organizations into public
institutions, it has also formalized approaches to social problems. In this dissertation, I
have examined how program implementers perform neoliberalism in order to navigate
the formal mechanisms of social control they experience from the market and the state -
grant deliverables, extensive training, program evaluations - and their seemingly
contradictory social movement goals of empowerment, equality, connection.
While scholars have largely described the at-risk label as an extension of school
discipline and hyper policing, using interpersonal violence programs as a case study, I
have shown that the nonprofits, funders and service agencies that constructs and ascribes
the at-risk label and sorts young people into programming is a defined system for
organizing resources and bodies, with distinct mechanisms and outcomes. I refer to this
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system as the at-risk complex, a loosely-connected, grant-funded matrix of organizations
and institutions that uses risk data to enroll young people and to create programs to
intervene into their lives. The at-risk complex decontextualizes and universalizes
experiences into risk factors, erasing the variety and social embeddedness of
interpersonal violence within lived experience. By applying critical education theory to
public health we can see how gendered, raced and classed social context is obscured in
curricula as a visible curriculum uses discourse and performance to change knowledge,
attitudes and behaviors and a shadow curriculum, invisiblizes social context.
In the scattered context of Los Angeles public schools youth learn to build
relationships in the cracks and gaps in the institutional structure. In the empowerment
rooms where change programs take place, the practices used by program implementers
allow for more democratic forms of informal control. However, the harsh school
discipline constrains the possibilities for change, as it forecloses youth leadership and
honest conversation. In this context, young men creatively used empowerment talk as a
way to avoid oversight and discipline from school authorities and young women used it
to avoid the stigma of dependency. In both cases, empowerment talk, while useful for
individual young people, increased social disconnection from vital social institutions.
Throughout this dissertation, I have drawn out the inherent contradictions of change
programs. Implementers have informally established a training process that fills in many
of the gaps in the formal training. Youth, instead of focusing on risk and protective
factors, provide alternative life histories that provide a better way to think about their
lives and obstacles. Together, youth and implementers actively challenge the
decontextualization built in to change program curricula and actively recontextualize the
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messages of the curriculum, an approach that echoes the consciousness-raising roots of
the programs. Meaningful outcomes arose through contextually-situated dialogue and
point toward structural reforms that would provide an infrastructure for empathy and
social connection.

An Infrastructure for Empathy
This dissertation is, in large part, a story about how social structures can make
social connection difficult, increase distrust, disrupt relationships, and undermine student-
mentor connections. But in my time at Peace Over Violence, there was a lot to be hopeful
about. I began to think about the ways that structure can encourage empathy. That is, how
can we establish approaches to social problems - preventative and responsive alike - that
foster connection, empathy and meaning-making. What would that look like? Not a
culture, not campaigns and curricula, but a framework of implementable policy.
In the world of curricular design, questions of culture have largely swirled around
“cultural competency,” being sure that the curriculum being used makes sense within the
specific cultural context. But a focus on competency keeps intact the rigid curricular
approach to culture change. Instead, curricula could focus on encouraging youth to make
sense of their social context through structured discussions and assignments. This is, of
course not a dramatic innovation, but a return to the consciousness-raising roots of
violence prevention curricula. The greatest asset of curricula is that they approach youth
on the ground, in the course of the daily lives, and yet, most programs treat young people
like consumers to be marketed at. Marketing of unhealthy behaviors is a complex,
constantly shifting multi-billion dollar market set to music and image. Some creative
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ways to approach curricula would be to focus on content creation, reviews of institutional
policy, youth interview projects, youth-led ethnographies and more.
This would require considerable changes to the way that public health funding is
allocated and evaluations conducted. Evaluations of some sort can be helpful tools for
guiding programs and allocating resources. However, the push towards evidence of
behavioral and attitudinal change limits the possibilities for innovative approaches.
Instead, new means of evaluation must be accepted, including narrative evidence.
On a larger scale, schools can play a powerful role in recontextualizing public
health and other forms of education. Other scholars have discussed the need for less harsh
discipline in schools (Nolan, 2011; Kupchick, 2012; Ferguson, 2001). However, I have
tried to show that to some extent, harsh school discipline seems to be a means to hold
together public schools which are increasingly torn apart by underfunding, testing, and
the impermanence of adult authorities. In this way, stability of funding and adults in long-
term, reliable roles hold potential to reduce discipline. Second, schools should begin to
reevaluate the ways that they deal with the social and emotional lives of students. Instead
of quarantining these aspects, they should work to incorporate them into more spaces in
school life. This would be facilitated by a revision of mandated reporting rules to allow
for spaces where young people could talk openly about their lives.

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APPENDIX A: PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

Table A.1 Youth
Pseudonym Age Sex Race/Ethnicity
Adrian 17 Male Black
Alan 17 Male Hispanic
Alice 18 Female Bangladeshi
Angel 19 Male Hispanic
Arianna 17 Female Mexican American, Chicana
Ciel 16 Female half white and black
Cleo 18 Female Black
Courtney 20 Female African American
Crystal 18 Female Hispanic
Flora 17 Female Latina
Hendrix 16 Male Latino
Hoxton 16 Male Latino
Joe Moses 15 Male AA
John 16 Male Latino
Kashmir 18 Female African American
Leah 17 Female Black
Lincoln 20 Male Black
Manny 17 Male Latino
Martha 18 Female Chinese
Misty 17 Female Bangladeshi
Paula 17 Female Hispanic
Randy 17 Male Filipino, Asian
Rose 15 Female Mexican
Ryan 18 Male Hispanic, Salvadoran
Sky 17 Female Mexican and Honduran
Steven 16 Male Latino
Susie 18 Female Hispanic
Tony 15 Male Latino
Valeria 18 Female Latina (Honduran)
Venice 17 Male Mexican, Latino
Yuri 15 Male Latino
Zephire 20 Male AA/Trinadad

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Table A.2 Peace Over Violence Staff
Pseudonym Position Sex Race/Ethnicity
D Teacher Female Southeast Asian
Donna Implementer Female Latina
Eleanor Implementer Female Latina/Russian (White)
Ella Manager Female Latina
Jennifer Implementer Female White
JJ Implementer Male African American
Jose Implementer Male Latino
Joseph Implementer Male Latino
Kim Implementer Female Black
Lauren Manager Female White
Nicole Volunteer Female Asian American
Rob Implementer Male White
Sarah Implementer Female White
Sean Implementer Male African American

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Asset Metadata

Creator Greenberg, Max A. (author)

Core Title Red flags: youth at-risk and the making of gender-based violence prevention

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 07/24/2017

Defense Date 05/08/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag gender,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,violence prevention,Youth

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Messner, Michael A. (committee chair), Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee member), Valdez, Avelardo (committee member)

Creator Email Greenberg.max@gmail.com,maxgreen@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-609934

Unique identifier UC11299090

Identifier etd-GreenbergM-3707.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-609934 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-GreenbergM-3707.pdf

Dmrecord 609934

Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Greenberg, Max A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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