| Abstract: Street gangs and community violence remain among the most pressing social issues within the urban landscape. Recent spikes in shooting and killings in a number of cities during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and following the social upheaval in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, moreover, have given the topic of urban violence renewed traction in national public discourse. Yet much of this discourse is based on crude characterizations of gang members, the nature of this violence, and the dynamics fueling it. Unsurprisingly, public officials typically have little idea how to effectively address such violence, and ostensibly evidence-based interventions routinely fail to produce their intended—and often loudly mis-touted—effect.
Drawing on years of community-engaged research on Chicago's South Side and in East St. Louis, Illinois, this presentation will provide clarity as to the complex and interrelated conditions fueling gang membership and collective violence as well as the structural nature of these conditions. Specifically, street gangs constitute a form of social organization that provides material and psychosocial benefits to their members, including modest economic support, protection in navigating a violent social landscape, emotional support, a sense of identity and meaning. Membership in such collectives represents a compelling prospect for young people facing desperate circumstances, ongoing traumas, and few prospects for even a minimally stable life. Within this context, vendetta-style collective violence—that is, gang warfare—constitutes, most centrally, a manifestation of solidarity among group members. Interventions that fail to account for the structural determinants of gang membership and for the solidaristic nature of gang violence are likely to fail, and generally have. The presentation closes with a discussion of an alternative framework for intervention firmly rooted in these realities. |
 Dr. Roberto Aspholm is an assistant professor of social work at the University of St. Thomas. Dr. Aspholm's research program, which has been directly shaped by his community work with young people in marginalized urban neighborhoods, focuses on street gangs, community violence, and violence prevention. His dissertation research, which he completed at Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explored the shattering of Chicago's corporate black street gangs, their reorganization as independent neighborhood groups during the first decade of the twentieth century, and the implications of these developments for violence prevention on the city's South Side. This and subsequent research form the basis of Dr. Aspholm's recent book Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago's South Side, published by Columbia University Press in February 2020. More recently, Dr. Aspholm has been conducting research related to his involvement in violence prevention and communities organizing initiatives in East St. Louis, Illinois, an industrial suburb of St. Louis and the murder capital of the United States. |