Office of The Surgeon General: Youth Violence

Two teenagers entered a high school in Colorado and opened fire on their classmates. The young gunmen end their lives, but not before taking the lives of fifteen students, and injuring twenty, finalizing the tragedy. In recent years we have experienced a rampage of violence in our schools. Researchers have yet to pinpoint the answer to this plague of violent disorders. The National Institute of Mental Health, and The Office of the Surgeon General have focused their research to the areas of stages of violence development, prevention and intervention, and methods of identifying the most effective treatments.

Studies by the Office of the Surgeon General have concluded that there are two paths for the materialization of youth violence. One is identified at an early age of puberty, the other in the adolescent stage. The research shows that if there is violence demonstrated in the early childhood stage of a child, the degree of violence in the child rises, as the child grows older, concluding in severe violent behavior. The group that is said to be in the early-onset group, or before puberty, is s

· In October 1997, in Pearl, Mississippi, another sixteen year-old shoots nine students, two of them die including the shooter’s ex-girlfriend. The shooter’s mother is also found shot in her home. The youth is sentence to life in prison, and other students could be found guilty of accessory.

aid to have a greater and more serious number of violence incidents during the adolescent years. This also leads to a determining factor for violent behavior during their adulthood, (see research by Stattin and Magnusson, 1996; and Tolan and Gorman-Smith, 1998). Research has shown that violence offenses committed by young men, between the ages of sixteen or seventeen, can be traced back to their puberty stage (D’Unger et al., 1998; Elliot et al., 1996; Huzinga et al., 1995; Nagin and Tr!

· In February 1997, in Bethel, Alaska, a sixteen year old opens fire with a shotgun. He kills the principal and another student. Two others students are injured. The young man was sentenced to two ninety-nine year terms.

Scientists have two different methods of identifying school violence. These are a meta-analysis method, and an empirical method. The first is a statistical method in which results of various studies are combined in order to achieve an estimate. The second is a review of the first in order to identify broad distinctiveness, and make recommendations on them. Statistics and the review of research is not the only practice in identifying the causes of youth violence. The National Institute of Mental Health has been studying a more scientific approach in the genetic research of brain development. Steven E. Hyman, Director of The NIMH states that “ An understanding of the timing of brain development, and the types of environments in which it can proceed in a healthy trajectory have important policy implications. This awareness is a very important beginning in which we should built. For example, we know that brain development continues to throughout childhood and adolescence, but for success in school and life, we need t pay attention not only to cognitive development, but also to emotional development. The negative effects of neglect and abuse, poor adult supervision, and the influence of deviant peers and of exposure to violence are important, but have been well documented; less well understood are the emotional disorders of childhood that may lead to the violence that seems to come “out of nowhere”. The causes of this violence; indeed the reasons for the frequency of depression and other emotional disturbances in our society are complex and not fully understood. A profound truth that we have learned about brain development and vulnerability to mental disorders is that as complex as the gene-gene interactions are providing to be, they do not explain everything; equally complex gene-environment interactions are also involved. The interactions of genes and environment permit the limited information in the genome to be read out in as way as to pro

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