Christopher Fleming is a professor of social work at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign and the first author of a recent study that explored gang involvement among youths from rural and small communities in the U.S. Fleming spoke with News Bureau research editor Sharita Forrest.
What sparked your interest in examining gangs in rural America?
I was a juvenile justice officer with the Guilford County Juvenile Detention Center in North Carolina for a couple of years. We were responsible for youths across several counties. While it was largely urban youths, we also got a lot of rural youths in who were gang involved.
Some years later when I was doing my doctoral work, I worked with Communities That Care and the Community Youth Development Study, focusing on changing risk factors for these youth behavioral problems at the community, family, peer and school levels.
They had collected a really good sample of rural youths from 24 communities in seven states, including Colorado, Illinois, Maine and Washington.
And I thought: “Can we prevent gang involvement using the study’s whole environment approach?” But first I had to answer the question, “What do we know about rural youth gang members?” There has been very little research done.
How prevalent is gang involvement in rural areas and small communities?
In our recent study, we examined gang involvement among kids in 12 communities from the fifth grade until they were age 19. The prevalence of gang-affiliated youths was substantial compared with prior single-year studies — nearly one-third of the respondents had some involvement during that time.
We identified three distinct groups: A large group of nonmembers (65% of males, 70% of females), gang members (11.4% of males, 10.4% of females) and a class of gang associates (23.6% of males, 19.4% of females).
Those classified as gang members had moderate to high probabilities of being in a gang across all years of the study and reported having two to three friends on average who were in a gang. The gang associates — who had some type of relationship with gangs — reported having less than one friend on average in a gang.
In the study, you indicated that research on gangs may be significantly underestimating the number of young people involved. Why is that happening?
Typically, research surveys use a single question: “Do you belong to a gang? Yes or no?” And while that does distinguish members from nonmembers, we also know that there are different levels of involvement and that there are many youths who are gang affiliated but do not always call themselves members. This group is not identified in the earlier research.
The methodological approach we used asked different questions across multiple years, such as “Have you ever belonged to a gang?” And, “In the past year, how many of your four best friends were members?” That way, we were able to identify youths with different patterns of involvement.
It was the proportion of those associated with gangs but who did not identify as members that was so surprising — over 20% of gang-involved youths were in this group. That is a large proportion of at-risk youths that we don’t tend to pick up in this kind of research.
What were the outcomes at age 19 for the various groups? And did these differ from what has been found with urban youths?
Gang members and gang associated males and females had significantly higher odds than nonaffiliated youths of smoking, drinking alcohol, using marijuana, engaging in violence and other crimes like selling drugs, and failing to complete high school. We controlled for early behaviors and demographic differences, and we found that the gang-associated youths still had elevated risk for these outcomes.
The male gang members were more than eight times and female members were four times as likely to have children at an early age.
Female gang members also were more likely than nonmembers to have seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.
What were some of the other characteristics of gang involvement among youths in this study?
We found the timing of involvement to be similar to urban samples. Both gang members and gang associates had more gang-involved friends in the eighth and ninth grades and were more likely to report membership then, but this dropped off quite a bit by the12th grade. Female participation with gangs was similar to urban samples, making up about one-third of gang members and half of gang associated youth.
Are the rural gangs chapters of the urban gangs or are they independent groups? Are there other differences with rural gangs?
What we know broadly about gang involvement is that there’s not really a single path to it. The little bit of research that exists suggests that many rural gangs are homegrown, and they tend to be relatively short-lived. And that likely has to do with having a steady supply of members in urban areas to replace those who leave, whereas in rural areas, there is just not the population for that.
