Don’t Love No Fight: Healing and Identity Among Urban Youth

A neighborhood in Philadelphia, PA, hard hit by violence, approached the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility on behalf of its youth. The chapter responded by developing a psychosocial after-school intervention for early adolescent males, which participants named Peaceful Posse. Youth showed up consistently for the groups, after school and on their own, sometimes for years. Yet the program recognized that there was a great deal not fully understood about the lives of its participants. The present study used a careful analysis of individual interviews conducted with a sample of boys to extend the program’s understanding. Including the perspectives of these participants offered a deeper appreciation of the challenges youth face when exposed to chronic violence and of their resourcefulness at finding relationships to help themselves through these challenges. Their perspectives helped the program to broaden its understanding of healing. The key role of identity as an embodiment of the hopes of the young men helped the program to better appreciate this particularly important locus of healing for urban youth exposed to violence.

Key Words: Adolescence, Urban, Violence, Trauma, Identity

Responding to the Community

In 1993, the Philadelphia chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) launched a campaign to address interpersonal violence and organized a number of initiatives city-wide. In response to training the organization offered to community health centers throughout Philadelphia, one center, serving the 4500 residents of two public housing communities, became concerned with a growing number of personal injury visits by young males. The center was particularly concerned that these males, hurt by violence, were at risk to become perpetrators of violence themselves.

In Philadelphia neighborhoods, as in those of many other major US cities, there had been a marked deterioration in civic life. Anderson (1999), who chronicled street life in neighborhoods near these housing communities, argued that a "code of the street" had gained ascendancy in the city as a result of macroeconomic trends: deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban centers and globalization. Similar to many other large US cities, there were nearly two times more serious crimes in Philadelphia than in the rest of the state. Along with rising crime rates, the extent of poverty in the city had grown: over the course of the previous two decades, the percentage of high income households fell 20% while the percentage of families at the lowest level had increased 15% (Gorenstein, 2004). A shrinking city tax base and multiplying needs created community conditions that challenged public safety.

For children in cities like Philadelphia, especially in the most under-resourced neighborhoods, these conditions meant an increase in exposure to the traumatic stress of chronic community violence. As Anderson wrote, "Of all the problems besetting the poor, inner-city black community, none is more pressing than that of interpersonal violence and aggression" (1999, p. 32). According to a recent report card on children’s well-being in Philadelphia, providing safe communities to youth is the goal that has received the lowest marks, rated as "problematic, with a long way to go" (Philadelphia Safe and Sound, 2003, pp. 13-14).

Taking these factors into consideration, the PSR chapter focused on the "traumatogenic" impact of these conditions as they created their Peaceful Posse model, referring to the "intimate connection between traumatizing behaviors and the social conditions which support them" (Bloom & Reichert, 1998, p. 17). The group conducted several rounds of needs assessment research to ascertain actual levels of exposure to violence among youth in the community. This research found that 74% of youth in one sample had witnessed a violent act and 48% had been hurt directly by some form of violence; 81% had known someone hurt by gun violence; 75% had known someone hurt by some other form of violence. These reported levels of exposure to violence led the program researcher to write: "The frequency of some of the most serious forms of violence that was reported (for example, hearing gunshots, knowing people shot or stabbed, witnessing threats of violence with guns or knives and begin stabbed themselves) is, quite frankly, chilling" (Spence-Coffey, 2000, p. 8).

But these findings matched national reports (Osofsky, 1995; Layne, et al., 2001). Overall, a growing body of evidence on the effects of children’s exposure to the stress of chronic community violence compelled the physician group to the view that these experiences are often traumatizing (Singer, et al., 1995; Stein, et al., 2003). Disrupted attachments and developmental processes, a host of emotional, educational and behavioral reactions, as well as accelerated trajectories towards delinquency, were common outcomes of children's exposure to community and school violence (Spencer, et al., 2003; Garbarino, et al., 1992). The group concluded from both their needs assessment research as well from their review of literature that, for children growing up under conditions of community violence, the most pressing tasks of adolescence can be adversely affected.

In particular, the PSR group was concerned about the impact of such traumatizing stresses on adolescent boys’ developing senses of self. Over the last decades, particularly since the Vietnam War, trauma studies have shed more light on the human reaction to stress. Hard-wired, primitive emotional states induced by threat—fight, flight, freeze—are central to these reactions. But, just as important, the ability to process the information of experience, when abilities are compromised by intense fear, has received more recent attention. A strong, integrated, confident self rests upon a faith that certain bedrock assumptions which individuals take for granted about themselves and their worlds will continue to apply. Janoff—Bulman (1992) argued that traumatic experiences challenge three of these assumptions: that the world is benevolent, that it is meaningful and that the self is worthy. Roth and Newman (1991) added a fourth: that people are trustworthy and worth relating to. When these assumptions are challenged by overwhelming experiences of traumatic stress, adolescents forming their identities may come to negative conclusions about their own worth and sense of optimism. "These underlying valuations constitute and cohere the self—its relation to itself, its being attached to itself. The psychological damage in the traumatic loss of the assumptive world is the self’s breaking up" (Kaufman, 2002, p. 206).

A trauma perspective, then, led the team to believe that urban adolescents’ adjustments to chronic community violence —"normal reactions to abnormal stresses" (Bloom and Reichert, 1998)—might negatively affect their long-term development. Based on this concern, the Peaceful Posse intervention was designed to provide contexts in which adolescents could recover a confident sense of themselves and their worlds. The program’s curriculum emphasized positive opportunities for connection and relationship, emotional expression, especially to debrief experiences of violence, and new peer group norms permitting alternatives to identities steeped in a street code.

The first element of the program’s curriculum, mentoring, was premised on abundant research showing that connection to a caring adult can be a primary "protective factor" in youth prevention programs (Resnick, et al., 1997; Clinton, 2002; Rink and Tricker, 2003). For a program with a healing ambition, in which a boy's faith in people may have been shaken, the program designers believed relationships of trust and self-disclosure were essential (Herman, 1992).

The second element, healing, stemmed from the premise that children exposed to violence must find opportunities to acknowledge and to express the systemic nature of their responses (Saltzman, et al., 2001). The curriculum designers incorporated practices from Reevaluation Counseling (Jackins, 1994), a "process whereby people of all ages and of all backgrounds can learn how to exchange effective help with each other in order to free themselves from the effects of past distress experiences" (www.rc.org), as the particular healing orientation, for several reasons: (1) The mutual self-help structure empowers self-healing, builds safety in groups and creates new norms of trust and interdependence among participants; (2) Emotional as well as verbal expression, representing an integrative mind-body approach to the anxiety reactions common with traumatic stress, is central to the model; and (3) Its basis in peer sharing lent itself to the training and mobilization of youth workers, facilitating dissemination of the model to a broad range of communities (Somers, 1972; Scheff, 1972).

For the third domain, strengthening of self-concept, the program’s planners hoped that as the Peaceful Posse groups became reliable spaces for personal sharing, participants would find room for a fuller and healthier sense of who they are. The group support for a boy’s personal voice was intended to be at the heart of the program’s healing work, because recovery from traumatic experience not only requires the telling of stories but a reaffirmation of self.

Caveats and Concerns

These intentions, and the body of theory they represented, guided the program’s implementation. The intervention became a popular one with other community groups, local foundations and city agencies and expanded from its first group to partnerships with organizations in other parts of Philadelphia and nearby towns. Yet even with its popularity among youth and community groups, and despite the encouraging results of its program research, program designers continued to worry.

Designed for urban adolescents, a population not well understood or often included in developmental studies (Way, 1998), Peaceful Posse risked understanding its youth only within the "boundaries of a somewhat proscribed conversation adults have about young people and violence" (Powell, 2003, p. 198). Of greatest concern was the risk of "coloring in the outlines" of urban youth violence with preconceptions and biases, especially with respect to race (Mahiri & Connor, 2003). Boys of color, in particular, might ultimately resist any prescription, often implicit in many well-intentioned but uninformed interventions, that they learn to "act white":

As discerning observers and participants, the boys know they must be actively engaged in discarding or making up for these unbecoming elements of their biography. They must get rid of unwanted baggage of the streets, the family, the neighborhood. They must shed the distinctive features of "Blackness" by approximating whiteness, by acting ‘white’ (Ferguson, 2001, p. 203).

On a broader level, if the intervention was to serve as a model for urban communities, program planners needed to come to terms with the systemic nature of the violence in young people’s lives and the creative range of their responses to these systemic pressures. As Daiute & Fine have written, "It is understandable that we, as adults—parents, educators, researchers, youth workers, and policy makers—find it difficult to accept youth violence as our social responsibility. It may be far easier to view violence as an individual problem of youth" (2003, p. 2). This intellectual problem can create a more serious one of perpetrating "symbolic violence" on young people when it becomes the basis for policies that serve merely to dominate, marginalize and repress youth’s reactions to the impossible conditions of their lives (Bourdieu, 2001). However programs aim to "fix" individual boys who exhibit a propensity for violent acting out, unless they also address the roots of behavior in hurtful social experience, prevention is not likely to be effective.

For these reasons, to extend its research about the program, a finer-grained understanding of the lives of its participants was sought. The needs assessment and program research previously conducted had utilized standardized scales and survey methodologies which aimed to test, rather than to generate, hypotheses about the participants. But by undertaking a qualitative study of youth in the program, the program could discover new perspectives about their lives. How could boys’ stories add to what was already understood about this program designed to serve them? How did their exposure to violent neighborhood conditions affect how they see themselves and imagine their lives? How did participants respond in healthy and creative ways to these conditions?

Study Method and Results

For this study, 10 boys from the larger population of 60 boys who were enrolled in the groups during the school year of 2003-2004, nominated by group leaders, were individually interviewed by the lead author, who has played a central role in developing the program. The group leaders selected interviewees who had attended their Peaceful Posse groups for at least two years and who demonstrated, thereby, a sturdy commitment to the group, its norms, and its leader. Thus this was a sample of boys representing the most dedicated of program participants. Among the 10 boys, ages ranged from 12-17, with most in their last years of middle school; 6 were of African heritage; 4 were Latino. These informants resided in communities geographically quite diverse, representing 2 states and 3 separate counties around Philadelphia. Still each interviewee resided in an urban neighborhood which was poorer socio-economically and more racially marginal than the norm.

The protocol for the interviews was semi-structured, based on a set of open-ended questions intended to describe critical features of their lives (home, school, neighborhood, etc.) and allowing room for them to tell stories as they might choose (Appendix 1). Anonymity was assured by the use of pseudonyms. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and then coded for theme by two researchers using the qualitative analysis software program, Atlasti 4.2. The coding process was iterative, with the first set of themes deduced separately and the second representing a synthesis of the previous two. From this analysis, we discovered the following five themes, representing boys’ perspectives on aspects of their lives related to the program's intention and goals. It should be underscored that these were single interviews and thus do not offer a longitudinal perspective. Still, the themes deduced from these conversations offered important insights into the lives and needs of urban boys seeking help from youth programs of this sort.

You’re going to fight during your life

The threat and experience of fighting were prominent features of boys’ lives in their communities. As Drew, 14 years old, said, even though he may "try to stay away from people that like to fight", "You never going to avoid, like, you can try to avoid a fight, but you're going to fight during your life - You got to fight your own battles so you know how to defend yourself." He told a story of walking down a neighborhood street, passing a female cousin hanging in front of her house with a bigger boy who was dating her:

Drew: He said he was going to beat me up because I called him a name.

Interviewer: Were you worried?

Drew: A little bit, cause he’s bigger than me - I was trying to figure out why he would want to fight me, cause I don't even speak about him - I think, cause my cousin, she’s 14, that’s his girlfriend or something, and like he’s always over her house on the porch and stuff - So I was talking to her one day while I was walking past and he said I called him a name or something.

Each of the boys we interviewed had many stories along these lines. Calvin, for example:

We were walking home one day from school, these two other kids were fighting. So we was all laughing at the one boy that got beat up. And he just pointed to me and said, ‘If you got something to say, say it to my face’. And I was like, ‘Get out of my face because I don't want to fight you’. And he just swung and missed and that's when we started fighting.

Or, Miquel, who told the story of his one fight, which was with a friend:

This boy was, like, a switch. On, he would be my friend. Turn it off, he wouldn’t be my friend, he would hate me. One day, for some reason, we went outside in the playground, he beat me up the whole time. Didn’t play or anything, just beat me up all day.

Youth violence programs may assume that less fighting on the part of participants is a sign of success. But our interviews offered a more complicated picture. In the context of a testy, even predatory, street life, boys explained that they needed to fight sometimes just to maintain a modicum of safety and personal dignity. Anderson (1999) explained fighting among urban poor youth as a "campaign for respect" in a neighborhood context in which it is in scarce supply:

In this often violent give-and-take, raising oneself up largely depends on putting someone else down - There is a general sense that there is little respect to be had and therefore everyone competes to get what affirmation he can from what is available. The resulting craving for respect gives people thin skins and short fuses. (1999, p. 75).

We discovered that the motives and objectives for fighting ranged from playful exuberance to contests for dominance to the preventive assertion of toughness in order to secure safety to, finally, perpetration of meanness and hurt. At its core, as Anderson has asserted, was the act of claiming a public identity in a context in which respect seems scarce, danger and humiliation ever-present and masculine identity threatened. Ferguson concluded, from close observation of fighting among the boys at an urban school: "Fighting is the emblematic ritual performance of male power. Participation in this ritual for boys and for men is not an expression of deviant, antisocial behavior but is a profoundly normative, a thoroughly social performance." (2001, p. 193). This realization was the first major lesson from this qualitative project: boys in the program were "going to fight during their lives".

I don't love no fight

Yet, despite the ever-present pressures to fight, many of the boys we interviewed went to great lengths to avoid fighting. Jacob, for example, the son of a local minister whose family life revolved around his father’s role, seemed committed to following his father’s example: "There’s like some people, who, like, are bad and stuff. But I don't play with them." Despite his efforts, which included staying close to an older, football star brother, peer violence inevitably came his way. He described a group of boys typically encountered on the way to and from school:

Jacob: They curse a lot and they, like, throw rocks at people.

Interviewer: Have you ever had anybody throw a rock at you?

Jacob: Yeah. They missed, they have bad aim - I try to stay away from them, like, when I see them in the alley I just turn the other way.

Where Jacob would try to "turn the other way" and Calvin would "only fight when I have to", Miguel seemed to pull off the remarkable feat of mostly avoiding fights. He made no bones about his motivations:

When I grew up older I would hate to get hurt. I don’t know why. As soon as I got older - I was scared to do many things cause I wanted to be safe and I didn’t want to get hurt or anything. And that’s how I am pretty much now.

Such stories as these helped us to realize that boys’ responses to fighting were situational and fraught with conflicting needs and pressures. In fact, we came to feel that their responses to fighting and violence highlighted a more fundamental issue: how to find room for identities that satisfied their sense of who they hoped to be. Their choices about fighting, in this sense, were mediated both by their situations as well as their hopes. Juan, as an illustration, had made a determined effort to develop an identity quite distinct from street and school norms. He explained: "Usually, I’m a person that doesn’t like to fight. Like, I’m like a ladies’ man. I don’t fight. Usually, well, I’m a lover not a fighter, right? So I write poems, I do different stuff." But still, Juan experienced limits to maintaining himself as "a person who doesn’t like to fight":

Basically, I don’t get in trouble unless you push me too far. If you push me too far into a corner where there’s no other way to go except to you, I’ll do it.

There was this 5th grader who kept bullying me - came up to me and I just punched him and he fell to the ground. Then I just kept on going - The teachers were trying to pull me away, I pushed the teachers away from me and jumped on the boy again - He was bleeding. His eyebrow was cut, his nose was bleeding, his mouth was bleeding.

We found that most of the boys had to define themselves against such ubiquitous pressures to adopt conventionally violent behaviors. The pressures were often quite close to home. The examples and messages of their families, for instance, mattered a good deal. Terrence told a story of a fight in a park:

I’m playing in the park. Someone just hit me from behind. My Mom came out of the apartment with a long knife. She cut the boy, right? I went and got all my cousins, because the boy had a lot of family.

Terrence plainly saw violence and a willingness to escalate as consistent with the sense of self encouraged by his family. Felipe, one of the gentler ("I try to be nice.") boys in our sample, described his father, in contrast to his mother, modeling a nonviolent response. When he would complain about being bullied at school, his parents would give him the conventional message:

Interviewer: When you go back and tell your father and mother that people are hurting your feelings and making you feel bad, what do they say?

Felipe: She says, ‘Hit them’.

But when a boy "hit me with a stick right in my face, and punched me" on his way to the corner store for milk, he came home to tell his father, who called the police rather than urge him "to hit him". Felipe described how he had adopted that lesson when he encountered the same boy the next day at school:

The next thing, when we was at school, I told my teacher…He was in the lunchroom, I had to pass through - Then he started running over and said, ‘Why you telling? Why you telling?’. And I said, ‘I don’t want to fight.’

More severe responses to violence were found most commonly among the boys who seemed to have fewer options, who could endure the challenges to personal safety and respect with less elasticity. In contrast with Miguel, Felipe or Jacob, there were boys like Terrence, who claimed to have had about 75 fights in his 12 years, including a time in which he himself had used a knife:

Boy just came up to me - I didn’t like the boy, but I mind my own business, so then he came up to me and he was going, ‘You know that stuff that you talking about?’. And I was like, ‘Get out of my face.’ So then he pushed me - He pulled a knife on me so then I was, like, ‘This ain't over’ - I was like ‘Well, I know he’s got a knife so I’m going to get a kitchen knife - If he pulled his knife out on me, I’d pull my knife out on him - stab him.

Among those in our sample, Brian seemed most comfortable with an identity in which street-fighting was a prominent feature of his identity. He told stories of fighting over girls, being involved in gang fights, nighttime drug trafficking, school riots. Asked if he had ever been shot at, he answered: "No, but a dude pulled a gun out on me." Asked whether he had ever used a gun himself, he answered "No", but explained that he "always carries a knife with me".

Interviewer: Why do you carry a knife now?

Brian: Just in case I get jumped or something.

Interviewer: So, what have you done with a knife?

Brian: Well, I pull it out on people. Like - I don’t like fighting, man, cause when I fight I, well, I don’t love no fight but I know if I lose I keep on fighting - That’s why I don’t like fighting - So I’m like, ‘I don’t want to fight, man’, but when they get closer I just pull my knife out. They just leave me alone.

From such comments, we understood that experiences with violence had, indeed, frightened many of the boys ("I don’t love no fight"), even those frequently involved in fighting. Some responded to such fears with an aggressive, protective stance. Like Brian, they had learned to escalate their own level of violence to ward off threats. All of the boys, gentle or tough, those who confessed to being "weak" and those who carried knives in hopes of threatening away assailants, drew from the material of their lives—relationships, models, threats and pressures—to reach for strategies which enabled them to survive.

I was in school and this boy called me a ‘nigger’

We found in our study, just as Anderson and others (eg. Fordham, 1996) have, that the occasion for boys to come together in schools with hundreds of other youth creates "staging areas" for similar community norms and group dynamics as dominate street life (Anderson, 1999, p. 34). Changing classes, bathrooms, recess yards, coming and going to school—all such moments and school spaces placed boys at risk for encounters with violence, derision and a host of challenges that compete with the educational work of schooling for their attention. Brian, complaining about his difficulty staying out of trouble, described a common experience:

I might be somewhere and all these people come there, and they might do something real quick, so I don’t get a way out. Like, we all be in the bathroom, the 6th grade bathroom was real big, so that lunch break, before we go to lunch everybody be in there slap boxing and all that. Like fighting, play fighting, and then, like some people might slap somebody, then they get people started.

Juan told a story about riding the bus on the way home:

Just got in a fight - When I was on the bus, riding where I live, this guy just came up, gave me the middle finger - So I went outside, I was about to get home, then he said stuff about "Where’s my money?" and I don’t know what else - Then he just took a swing at me, so I slid back and then I hit him with a right.

The walk to and from school seemed particularly risky for many, as Terrence explained:

Interviewer: And how about the walk to school, what’s that like? Are you safe?

Terrence: Yeah, you’re safe if you walk with other people.

Interviewer: What if you’re walking alone?

Terrence: Just mind your own business, be cool.

Interviewer: And what if you didn’t mind your own business?

Terrence: You’d probably get jumped.

Though many of the boys privately expressed hopes for success as students, it was apparent, given what they described of life in the schools they attended, that their ability to stay focused on schoolwork was often compromised by stressful experiences with threat and violence. Juan, as an example, told of a 5th grade incident which illustrated what seemed a typical experience for these boys:

There was like 3 guys. First I fought this guy, like he kept picking on me. I let it slide for the first two days, but he still kept picking on me so at recess I knocked him down. I only got suspended for three days. I didn’t hurt him that bad—the only thing I gave him was a black eye and a bruised lip, and he was bleeding from the nose.

This story, and Juan’s expressed desire for upward mobility through educational achievement, reminded us of the barriers such boys experience in their efforts in schools. Exposure to school violence adversely affects a student’s ability to invest in his education, as a recent study suggested: "Disorderliness, noise and concerns about safety are correlates of violence that can serve as stressful distracters that can divide learners’ attention to the point that learning is inhibited" (Spencer, et al., 2003, p. 40).

Violence in school was not limited to fighting. Racial epithets were also quite common. Brian offered an insight into the peer life he negotiated outside of the classroom in his school:

I was in school and this boy called me a "nigger". I beat him up. I don’t play that stuff. You could talk about me, but if you call me a "nigger", or something like that, you got a problem. You can talk about me in different ways, it don't bother me. I like to take all that criticism and stuff, it just makes me a better man. But when you talk about my Mom or my aunt, someone in my family

Drew told a similar story:

This boy, he’s Mexican, he called me the "N" word, and then I called him a "fat Mexican". But nobody told them that he called me the "N" word, so I got in trouble, because that’s a racial slur. So I got in trouble and I got suspended for two days.

Nor was the culture of challenge, taunt and violence restricted to boys’ encounters with each other. Schools, it seemed, are also spaces in which students encounter conflicts with adult authority, even to the point of violence. Brian, who acknowledged problems getting along with school authorities, spoke painfully about a particular memory, the incident which led to his having to withdraw from the school and spend a period of time with his grandfather in Florida:

One day I was in school, I was in 9th grade, I’m walking through the halls and a fight breaks out. And I walked the other way going to class - So I’m walking to class and I just feel somebody lift me up on my neck. I turn around and it was a teacher. I hit him. Nobody, not even my Mom, don’t nobody touch me like that - I don’t like bringing it back up. Like, the teachers, they locked me in the room. My classmates saw them choke me - They started talking to me like I’m retarded. Like I’m slow. So I kicked the door open. I was going to hurt them, man - So they expelled me. They were going to arrest me, but my Grandpop came up and said I was moving to Florida for a year.

It’s fun to hang around with people that understand you

The young males in our sample fashioned lives in an interplay between their worlds—what was "offered" to them in the way of examples, rules and pressures—and their imaginations—what they dreamed they would like to do with their lives (Connell, 1996). The process was dynamic, fluid and highly contextual. There has been a tendency in developmental theory, particularly when studying children from highly stressed communities, to conceive of development as a linear process, deterministic, even fatalistic. What our findings from this small study suggested is the importance of attending to both parts of the developmental equation: context matters, as it can severely limit offers and pressure choices; and, at the same time, boys’ imaginations can draw endlessly and unpredictably from the material of their worlds, especially their relationships, for new adaptations. Relationships, for boys in our study, were key factors that enabled them to counter contextual pressures. Our findings validated the work of others who have found that, as boys sort their way through the competing priorities of adolescence, they strive to "preserve their relational ways of being by resisting and/or challenging pressures associated with their gender socialization" (Chu, 2004, p. 78).

Brian, for example, spoke about his mother and his father, in prison since before his birth, and the meaning he took from their lives for who he wanted to be:

Like, all my friends know what my Dad did - My Mom had this boyfriend he robbed a bank, too. Like, my Mom’s mistakes, they push me farther away from her. Like, when she chose a boyfriend I moved away from her, because I was, like, she was making her own mistakes.

He explained that he and a big brother had moved to live with his aunt and that "She there for me". In his story there was a sense of a young man fashioning a personal narrative about family, home and connection, using the relationships available to him.

My Mom’s still - she still come and check on me. She does tell me when I’m doing something wrong. She come to my basketball games and tell me - she point out everything I did wrong and stuff - My Mom there, too - it’s just that - My aunt - all my brothers is attached to my aunt. I love her.

At every turn, the boys we interviewed related stories of courageous choices, highly creative problem-solving and unpredictable endings. The hard realities of their schools and neighborhoods certainly set parameters for their range of choice. But within those parameters, they seemed to find sufficient material to draw from that most were able to chart a course that reflected their personal hopes and ambitions. Their ability to build sustaining, human choices from the resources they found, even in the midst of families and neighborhoods stricken with trauma and social stress, suggests the irrepressible nature of youth development and the correctness of a focus on assets rather than deficits (Benson, et al., 1999; Weissberg, et al., 2003).

Miguel, for example, coming into a new school aiming to impress a new group, adapted to fit in, compromising some on schoolwork and other issues. When asked why he had changed, he answered:

I guess I hung with the wrong crowd. I used to be the kind of person that didn’t hang around with a lot of people - And then I started hanging out with kids that were popular and, you know, there were drugs and stuff, so I got some of their habits - Like, they’re the kind that wouldn’t do their homework if they don’t feel like it - So those are habits I started getting.

Yet, conforming to the norms of the new group in some ways, he was less compromising on others, notably his unwillingness to fight:

Finding friends and others who can accept them as they are was a highly prized accomplishment, many boys said. Miguel put it best: "It's fun to hang around with people that understand you". Among the various human resources boys draw from for their lives, this asset — someone who "understands you" seemed particularly critical. Chu (2004) affirmed the importance of understanding relationships when she concluded: "Recent studies have shown that having access to a confiding relationship is the single best protector against psychological risks for adolescents (p. 85)". Cunningham and Meunier (2004) came to a similar conclusion from their study of African American males, suggesting that a key goal for prevention programs should be "helping males develop positive peer relationships" (p. 228).

Juan was one of the boys we interviewed who had created such relationships for himself. Relatively poor, from a Mexican immigrant family relocated from California and struggling with language and health issues, as well as with addiction issues among older siblings, Juan did his share of fighting, even as he aspired to be a poet, a lover and a computer "techie". The friends he prized seemed to help him in his aspirations to control his behavior and focus himself on his goals.

Interviewer: Juan, these friends that you have, Eddie and Tony, are they good friends?

Juan: Yeah, they’re good friends. We joke around like, you know how sometimes you say funny things, then you say, like, curses and stuff to each other. But we don’t take it seriously, we just like hanging around.

Interviewer: Are you able to talk with them in more serious ways about things that matter to you?

Juan: Yeah. Like every time I have an issue, like, usually I get hyper easily, right? Every time, at school, everybody thinks that I’m just this person that always likes to do things, do funny stuff. But that’s not my normal self. My normal self is like…doing my work, being serious. So basically, every time I’m hyper, with my friend Eddie sitting next to me and my friend Tony, he's like a couple of seats in front of me. He says, ‘Yo, you okay? And I say, ‘Yeah’.

Our research team was struck, as we reviewed our interviews with the sample of boys, at the complexity and fluidity of the developmental aspirations each boy had maintained. As we searched through their stories for explanation, we came upon this central fact: whether through their association with the Peaceful Posse group and their group leader, or in their families and churches, with key friends, or in all of these relationships, each boy had discovered the resource of connection to "people that understand you". Somehow, in the surge of their development, such relationships fortified their sense of how things might be, enabling them to assert the right to imagine their own independence from the strong, even dominating, forces around them.

To be, and for other people to see

Under the pressure of violence in neighborhoods and within schools, boys attending Peaceful Posse groups sometimes adapted with understandable street attitudes and public behavior. A group of researchers who studied "bravado" in African-American male development concluded that such a public behavioral style resulting from urban experience "is not only a normal part of identity development among some youth living in high-risk environments, but is also necessary for psychological survival." (Cunningham and Meunier, 2004, p. 221). From a parallel perspective, Stevenson (2004) saw the public pose of bravado as a result of a more subjective experience of feeling "hypervulnerable":

Hypervulnerability results from the psychological and physical exposure of one’s cognitions, feelings and actions to annihilation and dehumanization by one’s family, friends, neighborhood, society and the various images that these social institutions blatantly and unwittingly promulgate and manufacture. (p. 60)

Many of the boys in our interview sample certainly swaggered and told us stories of standing up to intimidation, exacting revenge or participating in life on the streets Juan, for example, talked casually about fights in which he had been beaten up badly, as if it had hardly daunted him. Yet, even as boys described their hyper-alert status when they were out on their neighborhood streets or in school, we were equally struck by the revealing vulnerability of their relationships with people they could tell cared for them. In stories that detailed their determination to carve out more room for their preferred identities, their struggles to escape imprisoning reenactments and rote identity performances, we were impressed by the anchoring effect of these boys’ human connections. To see themselves in a positive light, to "be someone", to imagine a positive future and to be supported in these dreams by the regard of important others were central elements in the strategies these boys employed to respond to the pressures and stresses of their lives.

In his interview, Terrence, for example, was asked how he would like to be viewed:

Interviewer: You’ve said to me that you’re not a fighter, that you’re not a thug. How would you describe yourself?

Terrence: A more respectful young man

Interviewer: That’s what you’d like to be?

Terrence: That’s who I am, sometimes.

Interviewer: That’s what you’re trying hard to be?

Terrence: To be, and for other people to see.

For Terrence, it was important that other people see him the way he saw himself. Cooley (1902) many years ago formulated a "looking glass" model for self-concept development — a description which continues to be useful in development theory and which captures the importance of the audience for children’s identity performances. To "be seen", at least by someone who can faithfully mirror the person they hope they reveal, offers youth their best hope for seeing themselves.

Running through all of the boys’ stories was their awareness of what "other people" — often family or community members — "see". Juan looked to see himself in relation to his family and spoke with ambition about the possibility that he might be the son who could improve his family’s lives.

I’m going to work hard in school and by the time I get out of school, I’m going to be the one working, not them. I’m going to buy them a house — a house that they want to live in — and they’re just going to be either in the house or going out shopping, not working - So I’m like trying to, like, hurry up on my school work, try to get good grades, make him happy. The, by the time I get out, have my own job, buy them a house, pay whatever I need for them.

Jacob, a relatively introverted boy who shied from the center of social life in favor of staying close to his mother and brother, described the effort he makes to be "nice":

I behave. I be nice to my teachers. I behave nice. I be nice to the students. And I give them, you know, choices, make good choices to them - I help the teachers. I try to help her whenever they need help.

For all the boys, behind whatever public face of bravado they erected to cover up their feelings of hypervulnerability, we also found evidence of a softer, more fluid, vulnerability. They sought feedback about and appreciation for the person they hoped they were. In our interview with Brian, who talked about how he tried to act in his relationship with a girlfriend, we heard of his struggle to manage himself in the face of various pressures and frustrations. He pointed to a tattoo on his arm, "My friends call me "Beat Up". It says my nickname right here. And it’s like, I try to act like Brian to her. The nice one, who do nothing bad."

For some of the boys, the reflection they experienced in their worlds created particular challenges for seeing themselves in a positive light. Calvin, who had been placed in a group home as a result of his other’s addiction and his father’s long-term incarceration, when asked about his reputation, answered, "Bad boy":

Calvin: Because my uncle was just locked up and I got the same name as him and they think I’m like him, but I'm not.

Interviewer: What did he get locked up for?

Calvin: Selling drugs.

Interviewer: Why aren't you like him?

Calvin: Because I’m not - I care about people, and just - stuff.

Terrence also reported some hurdles with his identity, as a result of his attendance at the alternative school.

Well, it’s an alternative school. I went to there because little things added up to big things - They never liked me from 6th grade. I guess I was hanging with the wrong people - I don’t really got a problem, but, like, I don’t want people to judge me because I go to an alternative school - Like, ‘Oh, you’re a bad kid’, and all

Or Brian, back to school after his near expulsion:

Brian: My teachers look at me different now. Like I’m a bad kid.

Interviewer: Does that make it harder to go there?

Brian: Yeah. I don’t want to talk to the teachers no more - I’m just going to class and when they ask me questions, I don’t answer them.

As they gave us a sense of how they viewed themselves — "To be" — and how they felt they were viewed — "To be seen by other people" — these boys reinforced our growing appreciation for the fact that their ability to adopt less violent identities depended, in important ways, on the self-concepts they were able to construct and maintain. The strength of their sense of possibility seemed to guide them through their exposure to chronic community violence, enabling them to reach for something beyond normative fighting and street ideals.

Discussion

As he mused about his long career in prevention psychology, Lorion (2000) concluded that, for most, life is more like a river than dry land: "If life occurs in the river, wellness is defined as responding to the ebbs and flows within that changing, unpredictable, and challenging environment" (p. 4). Youth who do well in life, he continued, are not necessarily those who are spared hardship. Wellness, or resilience, rather refers to a state of being "well enough" to handle whatever comes, drawing sufficiently upon resources, skills and strategies to "stay afloat".

The river of life described by the boys in our study contained adverse conditions of violence, threat and denigration. In the original design of the Peaceful Posse intervention, trauma theory drew attention to these conditions themselves and to boys’ presumed need to recover from their dis-ease, however conceived: traumatized, hypervulnerable, anxious, violent, antisocial. The data from this study, however, do not support a narrow focus on participants’ hurts. On the contrary, this study underscored the powerful ways these boys manage their relationships and personal identities to maintain their well-being, positive self-regard and optimistic sense of future. In particular, this study leads us to a finer-grained, contextual, more discerning understanding about these boys’ resilience when exposed to chronic urban violence: they cling to those they believe love and accept them as a means to keep their dreams alive. It is connections, in the sense meant by relational-cultural theorists (Miller & Stiver, 1997), that help buoy these boys through the troubled waters of their communities and schools.

Connections heal, relational theorists teach, as a function of the active, self-affirming processes they engender. They enable a "supported vulnerability" which encourages mutual interdependence and emotional sharing. For those whose fundamental assumptions about the goodness of the world are challenged by chronically stressful community conditions, a matrix of close connections—to family, friends and mentors— may be exactly what is needed to sustain their faith in themselves and their prospects in this world. Especially for trauma survivors, Jordan asserts, "Finding ways to reestablish the caring connection or the belief in the possibility of love as a response to vulnerability is essential" (2004, p. 38). Sharing mutual vulnerabilities, shoring up fundamentally important "assumptive realities" and being reminded that they matter were some of the resources for healing boys in our study drew from their connections. Perhaps most critically, their connections offered them a commodity scarce in communities dominated by a code of the street: respect. As Walker (2004) summarized, respect is the "fundamental quality" in "growth-fostering connections" (p. 9). With parents, friends and mentors, boys told us of the importance of being able to be themselves, of being met in relationships with an acknowledgement that they could decide who they wanted to be.

In these ways, young men in this study, from some of the poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods in and around Philadelphia, revealed an ability not merely to stay afloat but to hew to senses of self which seem principled, courageous and tenderly human. What the boys took from the program most prominently was the relationships it afforded and the support these offered for the ways they aspired to be different: "lovers, not fighters". Motivated by a concern about the impact of chronic community violence on adolescents’ ideas about themselves and their worlds, Peaceful Posse wisely offered the very stuff for recovery — relationships, positive role models, socio-emotional skill-building — called for in state of the art prevention programs (Weissberg, et al., 2003). In this sense, Peaceful Posse may more properly be considered a social support intervention, one that "facilitates the cultivation of supportive relationships and, ultimately, better adaptation" (Barrrera & Prelow, 2003, p. 311) for communities hit hardest by socially traumatizing stresses.

These discoveries about boys’ use of relationship to maintain resilient identities returns us to some of the concerns voiced earlier. The "ordinary magic" (Masten, 2001) of Peaceful Posse participants’ resilience in the face of stressful urban conditions can lend itself to a romantic fascination with qualities within each boy or with special resources provided to them by programs such as Peaceful Posse. But the discovery of these boys’ ability to recover from fears and hardening experiences with violence, of their resilience, should not discount the real dangers they revealed in the course of their interviews with us. Guns, rage, drug selling, school riots, mistreatment by school officials: these were just some of the behaviors this positively skewed sample of urban boys let us in on. We are cautioned by these stories to consider Kaplan’s reminder: "As the adversity experienced by the individual increases, the characteristics of the individual that are required to overcome the adversity must necessarily increase" (1999, p. 27). Taking from these data conclusions merely about boys’ ability to mobilize their resources to maintain healthy identities would be misleading. While many of the boys in our sample were inspiring and their stories reassuring, Glantz and Sloboda (1999) point us to a more important conclusion: "‘Resilience’ readily takes on a political meaning that may have as much to do with beliefs about societies and environments as it does about individuals; blaming those who do not demonstrate ‘resilience’ when some of their peers do is an example of this" (p. 117). Better schools, urban reinvestment strategies, gun control policies are just some examples of public policies which might truly diminish the level of threat confronting urban youth.

This research also points out the danger of assuming too much about what children need. The research on child development has been plagued by problems of cultural bias, creating discrepancies between dominant paradigms developed with groups of middle class, Caucasian children and applied to inner-city adolescents (Luthar & Burack, 2000). This point is especially important in terms of the program’s focus on fighting and aggressive behavior. Predictors of negative adolescent outcomes associate early adolescent fighting and aggressiveness in school with later delinquent identities. But, as our sample indicated and as theorists have begun to understand, "Beyond being just normative, aggression may also be adaptive for inner city youth, not only because of its value for sheer physical survival in dangerous territories, but also because it can have a positive valence among peers" (Luthar & Burack, 2003, p. 35). These boys struggled with their streets and the imperatives forced upon them. When pushed "into a corner", as Juan explained, most would fight. But what seemed to matter more for their own senses of self was that they also experience freedom to conceive of themselves as males who were not defined by their mean streets, who aspired to broader and more self-determined identities. They found a way to hold onto the choice, as Brian explained, to be the person they wished to be: to be "Brian".

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Appendix 1

Interview Questions

Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Who lives with you? Can you tell me about your relationships with those who live with you?

What is your neighborhood like? Where do you go? What do you like to do? Are there places in your neighborhood you do not feel comfortable going to?

What school do you attend? What grade are you in? What is school like for you?

Have you been in any trouble in school?

How long have you been attending Peaceful Posse? Why do you attend? What do you do in the group? What is your relationship with the other boys in the group? With the group's leader?

Have you seen or experienced violence? In your neighborhood? In school? What kinds of violence have you witnessed? Experienced?

What has your experience with fighting been?