CE25-021 - Rise Up! A Youth-Informed Video Program To Prevent Community Violence Before The First Shot

About This Grant

ABSTRACT Community gun violence (assault or homicide) is the leading cause of firearm injury and death in urban youth in the United States, yet upstream primary prevention efforts are lacking.1-3 Risk factors for community gun violence include aggression and violent conflict resolution, gun carrying, and living in socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with high prevalence of violence.27-30 Youth are not always equipped to make smart or safe decisions regarding fighting, retaliation, and gun use. Additionally, they are easily influenced by social perceptions regarding gun carrying, especially vulnerable in communities where they could easily be victims of violence.20 Mentorship and conflict resolution skills for high-risk youth provided by school-based or community violence interruption programs are effective at reducing community gun violence; however, these services are limited resource-intensive.9-11,36,37 We propose development of a video-based program (“Rise Up Against Gun Violence”) that is informed by youth ambassadors with lived experience and leverages the expertise of violence interrupters to influence adolescents to avoid risky behaviors that lead to community gun violence. The video topics and messaging will be developed by the youth ambassadors and a multidisciplinary team of content experts, and refined through community feedback. The series will focus on risk-reduction topics such as non-violent conflict resolution, avoiding retaliation, and posting safely on social media, and will deliver hard facts about the dangers of firearm injuries and other salient topics that youth identify. Our study design includes youth ambassadors and violence interrupters from two cities with high levels of community gun violence (Houston and Memphis) to work with experts to develop a series of videos. The video program intervention will be tested with youth cohorts (community testers) in diverse settings in high-risk communities in both cities, and a mixed-methods approach will assess attitude change about the consequences of gun carrying and use (primary outcome), behavior change in gun carrying and fighting, increased awareness regarding risks of gun use, and establishment of adult support (secondary outcomes). Our proposal is a novel and innovative, multi-faceted approach, a “plug- and-play” program that could be disseminated to diverse community youth programs to utilize as part of their programming to tackle primary prevention of the leading public health problem for American youth.