Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
UH project University of Hawaii researchers will receive more than $8 million in federal funds over the next five years to work on ways to reduce youth violence.
to prevent youth
violence wins
$8 mil grant
Asian/Pacific Islander
and Hawaiian youths are
especially in need of helpBy Helen Altonn
Star-BulletinThey will share the money with a California partner, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland. Their goal: to create an Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center.
The Honolulu part of the project will be housed at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children.
"One reason I think we were funded is this is an understudied, underserved population in the United States," said principal investigator Gregory Mark, UH associate professor in ethnic studies.
The National Council approached Mark to conduct a study because he has worked extensively on youth violence in Hawaii and Oakland. His background in criminology includes 13 years as head of Chaminade University's criminal justice department.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded a total of $7 million to 10 colleges and universities to begin setting up National Academic Centers of Excellence on Youth Violence.
UH-Manoa will receive more than $1 million the first year. The other institutions include Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
"One act of violence is one act too many," Mark said. "This gives us an opportunity to work on decreasing violence. We need to start when people are young. It could have a meaningful impact on the quality of life in the islands."
Nationally, the number of Asian/Pacific Islander youth arrested during the past two decades has increased by 726 percent, Mark said.
In Hawaii, he said, native Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians accounted for 39.8 percent of juvenile arrests for criminal offenses in 1998. Filipino youths accounted for 12.4 percent.
Dr. Naleen Andrade, who heads the UH medical school's psychiatry department, said she's excited because the project is "a logical extension and integration of our Native Hawaiian Mental Health Research Development Program."
A recent statewide survey of 7,000 Hawaii kids by that program found both Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian youth at risk for depression, anxiety and disruptive disorders, and substance abuse, she said. It concluded that "Hawaiian youth, especially Hawaiian girls, are at high risk for mental disorders."
"The center will be the means through which, as we find some of the problems going on with Hawaiian kids, we can make recommendations on what we can do in the way of intervention and prevention in targeted communities," Andrade said.
Mark has been working in areas involving gangs, violence and prevention for more than 30 years. He was a community organizer in Oakland before moving here in 1977 to join Chaminade. He also worked part time in ethnic studies at UH until 1990, when he became a full-time faculty member.
Andrade said the bulk of the money will go into communities for assessment of youths and their families and looking at cross-cultural ways of designing strategies to decrease violence.
A new medical school curriculum also is being designed to address youth and family violence, "so early on, we can train practitioners to do assessments of family adversity measures," she said.
A community advisory committee will be formed to insure cooperation and sensitivity to communities being studied and gear up to apply the findings, Mark said.
"That's why I'm involved. I don't just want to study things -- I want to do something about it."
University of Hawaii
