Adjustments to gang exposure in early adolescence
| Author | Krzysztof Krakowski |
| DOI | 10.1177/00223433211017204 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Adjustments to gang exposure
in early adolescence
Krzysztof Krakowski
Collegio Carlo Alberto & Department of Culture, Politics, and Society, University of Turin
Abstract
The article investigates how exposure to gang-affiliated peers affects social behaviors and attitudes of early adolescents.
Much of the literature finds that exposure to gangs contributes to adolescents’ antisocial behaviors. According to other
studies, however, gang exposure can also promote prosocialbehaviors. The present articlere-examines this contradictory
evidence, exploring potential complementarity of both reactions to gangs. Using a survey of 1,782 adolescents aged ten
to 13 from rural Colombia, I compare adolescentswho are and are not in a school classwith members of youth gangs. I
exploit the fact that schools in rural Colombia are unsegregated. Moreover, the presence of youth gangs across these
schools is linked to incidence of historic armed conflict rather than typical forms of social disadvantage. This compara-
tive settingthus allows me to establish an unconfounded relationship between exposure togang-affiliated classmatesand
social outcomes. The analysis reveals gender differences in the effect of youth gang exposure. I find that girls react to
male gang classmate by increased involvement in prosocial organizations. Boys, by contrast, adjust to male gangs by
expressing more antisocial attitudes. There are no gender differences in the effect of gang classmates on alcohol
consumption (an indicator of antisocial behavior). The article shows that the well-documented antisocial adjustments
to gangs are – population-wide – complemented by prosocial adjustments, with gender being a key moderator. I discuss
the implications of these findings for theories of violence and social change after conflict.
Keywords
Colombia, conflict, prosocial/antisocial behavior, violence, youth gangs
Introduction
Youth gangspose a global security threat(Decker & Weer-
man, 2005; FederalBureau of Investigation,2011). Gangs
are groups of youths who have a territory, name, andsym-
bols that distinguish them as a grou p. Gang members
engage in crime and violence, contributing to high levels
of homicidesand theft. Much existingscholarship discusses
the causes of gangs (for overview, see Decker & Pyrooz,
2015). While it has long been argued that gangs affectthe
lives of people not involved in crime (Papachristos &
Hughes, 2015), studies using gangs as the independent
variable remain relatively rare. There is particularly little
evidence on howgangs shape social relations, thatis, if and
how exposureto gangs affects pro- and antisocial behaviors
and attitudes.
In this article, I investigate how exposure to gang-
affiliated peers at school affects social behaviors and
attitudes of ten- to 13-year-old adolescents. I focus on
adolescents’ participation in youth organizations, atti-
tudes toward violence, and alcohol consumption (indi-
cators of prosocial behaviors, antisocial attitudes, and
antisocial behaviors, respectively). The difficulty in iden-
tifying the effect of gang exposure in this case comes
from the fact that gang members are not randomly dis-
tributed across schools and adolescents do not randomly
choose where to study. Exposed and unexposed adoles-
cents may thus differ with respect to individual and
environmental characteristics irrespective of gang expo-
sure. Also, these differences could be correlated with
social outcomes, confounding the relationship of
interest.
Corresponding author:
krzysztof.krakowski@carloalberto.org
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(3) 337–352
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211017204
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To overcome this problem, I compare adolescents
exposed to gang-affiliated classmates to those who are
not, focusing on variation within schools in rural Colom-
bia. Exposure to gang-affiliated peers within Colombian
schools is likely to be exogeneous with respect to the
outcomes of interest due to an as-if random assignment
to school classes and extreme constraints on school seg-
regation. These constraints include the lack of schooling
facilities, high costs of travelling to the second closest
school, and single-class-per-grade arrangements. What
is more, the distribution of gangs across Colombian vil-
lages is linked to the unpredictable development of his-
toric armed conflict. As a result, both rich and poor,
central and peripheral, majority-white and majority-
black/indigenous communities had been affected by war
and the consequent problem of youth gangs. Unlike in
many other contexts, the Colombian case allows me to
study the impact of gang exposure on a rural adolescent
society at large.
What do we know about the consequences of gang
exposure for pro- and antisocial behaviors and attitudes
of early adolescents? The current evidence is limited; at
best, it provides mixed findings. Some studies show that
adolescents exposed to gangs are more likely to engage in
antisocial behaviors (Gordon et al., 2004; Tack & Small,
2017). Others, by contrast, find that affected adolescents
can develop greater prosociality (Harding, 2010; Mon-
cada, 2020). To address these contradictory findings in
the present study, I draw on the literature investigating
the consequences of political violence.
1
This literature
has made strides in explaining heterogeneous effects of the
threat of violence (Rozenas & Zhukov, 2019; Wang,
2021). As such, it may help me navigate through the
current controversies regarding the ambivalent effects
of gangs.
To illustrate, some political conflict studies emphasize
the moderating effect of gender (Annan et al., 2011;
Garcı
´a-Ponce, 2017; Haer, 2017). Hadzic & Tavits
(2019) find that priming people with the threat of vio-
lence decreases women’s willingness to engage in aggres-
sive and combative behaviors, while it has the opposite
effect on men. Other studies stress the moderating role
of family background (Annan, Brier & Ayremo, 2009;
Lupu & Peisakhin, 2017). Sander & Putnam (2010)
find that the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA and the
resultant threat of violence perceived by many US citi-
zens led to the resurgence of civic and social engagement.
Yet, this resurgence was only observed among affluent
young white people, but not among other social classes.
Translating these insights into the context of adoles-
cents exposed to gang-affiliated peers at school, I
hypothesize that girls are more likely to respond to gang
exposure by engaging in prosocial behaviors. Boys, by
contrast, are more likely to imitate gang members’ beha-
viors and attitudes, and exhibit greater antisociality (see
Bottcher, 2001; Cobbina, Miller & Brunson, 2008). I
also hypothesize that these adjustments to gangs are
moderated by family resources, with more resourceful
adolescents being more likely to engage in prosocial
adjustments (see Harding, 2010; Warr, 2005).
By testing these hypotheses, I aim to contribute to the
two interrelated strands of literature. First, I contribute
to the criminological literature on the consequences of
gang exposure (Cobbina, Miller & Brunson, 2008;
Papachristos & Hughes, 2015). I provide the first quan-
titative test of both pro- and antisocial adjustments to
gangs. I then explore how these adjustments can be
complementary at the population level, looking at gen-
der and family resources as potential moderators. My
goal is to uncover heterogeneous gang effects and to help
reconcile some of the contradictory findings in the
literature.
Second, I contribute to the literature investigating the
relationship between armed conflict and prosociality. I
point to an overlooked, indirect channel through which
conflict may affect prosocial behavior – namely, via its
impact on post-conflict crime and ‘social violence’ (Riv-
era, 2016). Robust evidence links the termination of
armed conflict to the emergence of gangs and gang-
related crime (Deglow, 2016; Rivera, 2016). Given that
exposure to crime seems to affect prosocial behaviors
(e.g. Bateson, 2012), gang exposure can be an additional
channel through which conflict exercises its long-term
impact on prosociality.
Third, I also provide evidence on the ‘real-time’ con-
sequences of exposure to the threat of violence. This is
rarely done in conflict settings, given that researchers are
usually unable to observe individuals in war zones during
ongoing fighting. By focusing on youth gang exposure, I
can thus study ‘real-time’ consequences of the threat of
violence along with its more lasting effects. This adds to
the literature on political violence insofar as some
mechanisms linking conflict to changes in prosocial
behavior could not work in the absence of continued
1
While there are undeniable differences between being exposed to
adolescent gang members at school and being a victim or a spectator
of wartime and terrorist violence, both exposure to gang classmates
and experiences with lethal political violence are associated with fear.
Fear in turn has been highlighted as one of the mechanisms linking
changes in social behaviors and attitudes to the threat of violence (see
Bateson, 2012; Velez et al., 2016).
338 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 59(3)
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