Violent youths' responses to high levels of exposure to community violence: what violent events reveal about youth violence

Abstract Recent work on the relationship between adolescent violence and its outcomes has posited that aggression by adolescents who are exposed to violence can be viewed as an adaptive strategy that seeks to order dangerous and unpredictable environments. Using reports from 416 active violent youth, we analyze lifetime exposure to community violence and reported involvement in 780 violent events to investigate under what circumstances violence can be viewed as adaptive or transactional. The results show that among individuals with high levels of exposure to community violence, violent behavior is bound up and contingent upon the interactions between personal characteristics and situational factors in violent encounters. Using event narratives to identify the schemas that highly exposed youth bring to violent contexts we find that the link between violence scripts and moral disengagement hinges primarily how actors read contextual cues related to the opponent, interpret the harmfulness of the opponents actions, or the assess the opponents' blameworthiness. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.